2019 First Round – March 22, 2019
Game 1 – No. 5 Gonzaga vs. No. 12 Little Rock - Arkansas
Media Day Press Conference – Gonzaga
 
THE MODERATOR: We'll begin with an opening statement from Head Coach Lisa Fortier.
 
Lisa: I would just that we are happy to be here. We are really happy for our team. We've done a great job. Everyone has had a long season, it starts in September and now here we are in March. We are happy to be playing in March and our team is doing a lot of things pretty well right now. We are playing very well together. These three up here are playing good basketball, they are a bunch of players that play together. Team offense, team defense is what has gotten us this far. We are happy to be here in Corvallis, we have had a good time here before this time of year. We are hoping to repeat that in a different way, of course, then we did the first time. Looking forward to the games tomorrow and hopefully going forward.
 
Q: Have you heard from any players from that 2015 team and the success that they had here and any advice that they have given you?
 
Chandler SMITH: I have heard from Emma Wolfram. She had an amazing game here at Oregon State and she just said enjoy every moment. It is kind of do or die right now, but stick with the team and good things should happen, we have a history here.
 
ZYKERA RICE: I have heard from Shaniqua Nilles. Making sure that we live in the moment. Like Chandler was saying we are in the one and done stage now in the post-season, so making sure that we give it our all.
 
Q: How has practice gone for you guys? Personnel has changed a bit, but still got to play to play five.
 
JESSIE LOERA: "It's different right now. We are down two players, but we are still working just as hard in practice and we had a great week of practice getting ourselves ready for this weekend.
 
LISA: (Laughing) They get a heavy dose of Coach Craig, Coach Stacey and Coach Jordan since Laura and Jill are out.
 
Q: For Zykera and Chandler, senior year and now it's one and done. This is it. What does this season mean to you as far as the success and now here we are in March. As coach mentioned this is a six-month process.
 
ZYKERA: I think that when you come to college everyone wants to be a part of something special, part of a special team. Everyone wants to be a part of a legacy and I feel like this year's team has done a good job of staying focused and playing and overcoming adversity and trying to do everything we can to keep the ball rolling as a far as how great this program has been over the past years. I think it has been really cool.
 
CHANDLER: It is hard to go right after Z. I second that. It has been an awesome year and for it to be our senior year it has been incredibly special. As Z said, we just want to keep it rolling and keeping Gonzaga's legacy and leave our mark here and have the same for future teams coming through. It has been an amazing year.
 
Q: Coach, can you talk a little bit about that trip four years ago. Your first year and you guys weren't an automatic qualifier and you had to sweat that out a little bit. You get an 11-seed. When that bracket was revealed, what were your thoughts about that?
 
LISA: You know, the first thing was more about our seed and what seed we were going to get, not winning the championship. The next thought goes to the team that you are going to play, the draw, the match ups. We don't have a ton of familiarity with Little Rock, just because our paths haven't crossed too often. We started to think about the time that we had down here before. Everyone says we have had success here before. We have been plenty of places where we have had success, it's obviously not a given. The people in Corvallis have been very supportive, we have a relationship with the Oregon State coaching staff and the Boise State coaching staff, so that part is nice. There are a lot of Gonzaga alums down here. Overall, I have fond memories of that year, I will always remember it. Those players played extremely hard for us that year, harder than they played in the years prior for whatever reason…I don't know if it was just because they were pulling for us or they wanted it for us or what it was. I think that it's that different, but there are some similarities to this team and the senior class. We have been a cohesive group and we have overcome stuff the beginning of the season to the end and we have been trying to harp on what you can control and these guys can come down here and rewrite the story book a little bit and create their own memories. Certainly not a thing when I come down and think oh gosh remember the last time we were down here…you know what I mean. Very different scenarios, very different situation, different match ups, there are so many things that are different. But, I do feel that these guys are pulling for each other and pulling for us as a staff and as a group in the same way that first team did. It's kind of the Gonzaga way. Eerily similar in ways.
 
Q: Can you talk about building this program? You helped recruit those players, that was nice. It was your first year taking over the program from Kelly Graves. With these players in 2015. Can you talk about building the program in your own way after taking over?
 
LISA: We have done stuff similarly. As far as Xs and Os go. Coach Graves and I have different leadership styles, but we try to love them hard. We make sure we let them know when they are not doing what we have asked them to do or not do, what we need them to do or expect them to do. We still try to be tough on them. We continue to bring up leaders, develop a cohesive team mentality. It's been a process to try and transform the things that we do. I can't even pin point, we have done a lot of great stuff and I had a heavy hand in that and we have talked about that of the years that me, Kelly, Jody or Michele or whoever the assistant was at the time that we worked well together. But with Jordan, Stacy and Craig we approach it a little differently. We work just as hard, but the personalities maybe have been different but we have the same outcome. We attract great student-athletes. A lot of these players on this team we wish we recruited back in the day, just the same as it was when we recruited them as our staff. Trying to coach them to play for each other and care more about team success. We are talking about friendship right now in our leadership model and that my success is your success and that your success is my success, we are going to do this together if we do anything.
 
Q: What have you learned about Little Rock?
 
ZYKERA: They have a pretty athletic team; they are definitely going to give us a fight. They have been to the tournament multiple times and they are a really good team.
 
CHANDLER: Super scrappy. I mean we are going to have to be aggressive, but composed when we play them and we are going to have to play our best, they are really good.
 
JESSIE: They are team that we haven't really played recently, they are different than any other team in the conference. They are athletic like Zykera said and they are going to give us a fight.
 
Q: You have two common opponents and you won to both of them and they lost to both of them, does that play at all in your minds?
 
JESSIE: No. I think what's in our mind now is getting ready for tomorrow and getting ourselves focused and ready to play.
 
LISA: We played those teams a long time ago.
 
Q: What are your thoughts on Little Rock? Obviously great defense and they don't take too many threes on the other end.
 
LISA: They have one player who shoots a nice percentage. They are disciplined in that way, that's apparently not a strength I'm guessing and some people have a hard time staying disciplined to their strengths. For these guys, it's not an issue for them, they do what they are good at. The twins and Collier, they don't play very many players, they have a tight rotation. Extremely athletic, the defense has great closing speed. There are areas that we can be strong against them. I do think we will give them problems eventually inside or on the perimeter. I am not sure if their defensive cohesion and closing speed or if their aggressiveness or ability to seek out early shots, I don't know which one is better. They are tough, it's a different draw. Jessie mentioned it but we have athletic players in our conference, but their athleticism is something that we haven't seen in the conference slate. We have seen it with some of the teams but not as a collective effort. If you let them get on the glass they are a problem, we are going to have to keep them off of the glass. Our focus right now on areas that we can be strong on and what things we do. All year long, we have done this collectively. There are sometimes a leading scorer, there is always someone that can be a leading scorer and someone that can make a variety of baskets, there a variety of people that can get stops we are going to have to avoid them going one-on-one, that is going to be a thing. We like to play team defense and have someone loaded up in the hole so you are not solo out there so you are not one-on-one against some of the best players that we have seen. We are very excited about the team. Again, watching it there are some trouble spots but there are some areas that we can be strong.
 
Q: I can't remember the last time that you were a bonafide favorite in an NCAA Tournament game, in at least the recent seeding, what does that feel like?
 
LISA: Yeah, it has been a while…Definitely thing that it is a positive as far as that goes. In some ways, it doesn't feel like that. Our body of work shows that we should be what we are seeded and the recent circumstances have created something that is a little unknown to us. I still think that it is the case, we still have more than enough to prove that we are the correct seed that we should be here, but it has to be proven. I still think that we maybe have a little bit of that, at least in my opinion, I don't know if the players necessarily feel that but as a coaching staff we feel that we have a little bit of that chip because life has thrown us some stuff this past week or so. I don't think that they're thinking…our players sometimes don't even know. There are somethings that we don't tell them or don't emphasize like we didn't play too much up the Missouri State or Western Kentucky thing because those games were a long time ago for us and it has been a while for these guys as well, but they are just trying to figure out how to play for their lives and their basketball lives and for this season it is dependent on how we show up tomorrow. That is kind of the simplified task at hand.