Great quote from Matt:
"We're recruiting a PG right now to come in next year and what excited me more than anything about her... I was on the phone with her last night [before dead period starts]... The one thing that excited me the most was, she said, 'Coach Matt, if I come to Middle Tennessee, can you and I do an individual workout every morning before I have to go to class?' I said, 'Yes, 100%. Let's go ahead and put that down, let's put the time down, let's go ahead and do it.'
That tells me that she wants to work to get better and be smart about being better. When you do an individual workout, if I'm gonna do an individual workout with a player at 8am in the morning before her 9am class, we're not just getting in there to work just to say we got in there to work. We're gonna get in there and, if it's shooting, if it's one-or-two dribble pullups, if it's ballhandling... whatever it is, if it's finishes at the rim, we're gonna work on those things.
Tom Hodges and Nina Davis do an incredible job with our post players and doing things with them, and then Kim and myself work with the guards - I also work with the posts when need be as well - but when we get in with our players, we're going in to work at it and not just say we're gonna work for an hour. We may work for 25 minutes and get everything done that we needed to get done and, hey, go to class. That's the type of players we want in our program, that want that.
If this recruit I was talking to, if she tells me, 'Well, coach, I have to do this or I have to do that...' you know, if you're gonna play the PG, you're gonna have to watch film... you're gonna have to know every little thing about our team and the other team. We used to say this about Dor Saar - Rick used to get on Dor about this a lot - she would try to go through the whole playbook in the first quarter, our whole playbook. And we're running things and it's working and she's calling something on the floor that's totally different.
And so they come to the bench and he's raising a little Cain with her about it and she said, 'Coach, I'm just trying to figure out how they're guarding everything we do.' Well, let's not do that when we've scored 7 straight times in this offense, you know. But that's the kind of mentality she had as a PG, 'I wanna know if we go to a certain play, how they're gonna guard that in the 4th quarter. So lemme figure it out right here in the 1st quarter in the game.' That's the thing you want from our PGs and how they think."