LSU women’s basketball acting head coach Pokey Chatman addressed the media Thursday afternoon.
LSU Sports Interactive
BATON ROUGE — LSU women’s basketball acting head coach Dana “Pokey” Chatman addressed the media Thursday afternoon before the No. 4 seed LSU Lady Tigers face the No. 1 seed Tennessee Lady Volunteers in the 2004 NCAA Women’s Final Four in New Orleans. Below is the transcript of that press conference.
“The success that we’ve experienced, not just this year, is all about leadership. I’ll make a longer stop and talk about Skip (Bertman). He spoke about certain kids stepping it up, and I’m going to talk about a certain administrator that stepped it up, not just this year, but last year. Skip has a vision, and not just for women’s basketball, but the entire program. He stepped up. A lot of times those things are measured in terms of how big your budget is. Obviously, stepping things up with money, that’s always good, but it’s just the support of the administration from Skip, and I can go down the line to everyone in terms of their support with a telephone call after a big win, their support of coming to the arena after a second-round victory when you’ve been visiting with the president because your football team has accomplished great things. Those are the things that won’t ever make the media. That brings me to where we are now. I think a lot of people expected last year’s team to be the team that put the staple on the program. In many ways I think that team did in terms of experience, in terms of the hunger and the taste for a championship. There are so many storylines. You know, we were talking as a staff earlier that we weren’t ranked very high to start the season, your projected two post players are hurt, you go out to the West Coast you get beat, you go to the East Coast you get drummed. What are they going to do now? They’re projected to finish second in the SEC. Can they compete? We looked awful against Vanderbilt. Will they bounce back? Here we are 27-7 and 62 miles away from the venue where we will compete for the national championship. I welcome the concerns about our post play early on this season, but the bottom line is they got it done. The second part of that is we’ve got to finish. They understand the task at hand. They have respect for the opponents. What you see is what you get in terms of their demeanor, their approach, their outlook on things. And I talked about storylines, the pioneer, our legend, our mentor, Sue Gunter. At the time when she’s feeling healthy, she steps away. People outside of the program have no idea how much that means to these kids, how much it means to this staff in terms of confidence. I’ve probably said it about 25 or 30 times