NCAA Regional Post Match Quotes
Post-Match Quotes
NCAA Women’s Volleyball Championships
Honolulu Regional
Semifinal #1
Pepperdine head coach Nina Matthies
My team executed very well. I thought we played well and that Kansas State is a great team and has had a couple great matches. So we were very prepared for them and I think the kids executed on what we’ve been working on this last week extremely well. I’m proud of my team were and pretty happy to be in the Elite Eight. It’s been a while. We’re just excited and were going to take it all in. It’s awesome.
Our preconference schedule was amazing. We played at Hawai‘i, we played at Dayton, we played at a couple of places with packed houses, it was a great atmosphere. We’d been here (earlier this year) and I think we felt…we weren’t panicking. We knew what we were in for here and I know that we prepared them for (that). At this level you are playing fantastic teams, we’re playing teams that are all well coached, everyone has been winning to get here, so we all know that. It’s really helped us.
Pepperdine setter Kellie Wooliver
I think we experienced a very terrible loss here (at Hawaii earlier in the year). We have a chance to redeem ourselves and not losing focus. We’re just trying to come back here and redeem ourselves here.
Pepperdine Outside Hitter Kim Hill
(We have) a new-found confidence in ourselves. We had great conference play and even with our one loss in conference we learned a lot from that. Our confidence had been built. In this postseason we haven’t pressure on us at all. We’re gong to play our game, have fun with it and whatever happens, happens. We just want to be proud with how we played and that’s been successful for us.
Kansas State head coach Suzie Fritz
I’m extremely proud of my team for the season we had. That was not our best effort and unfortunately when you get to this point of the season you simply, simply need to play well. And up to that point we had gotten better and better and better with each opportunity.
I don’t mean to discredit Pepperdine, but I do thing there were a number of things we could have done better on our side of the net. I think they put a tremendous amount of pressure on us early and I don’t think we responded to it is as favorably as we would have liked. We’ve worked with the team a lot about adversity and how we would want to respond to it and one of the goals going into the match was to be who we are, let’s be who we are. It took us too long to get to that point. We kind of found ourselves in the middle of Game 3 but it was too little, too late.
One of our team mantras is “work hard, stay together.” I didn’t feel as though I liked the temperament (of our team). We have been a team to some degree that has been blue collar, we have outworked people. We are not as physical or as big as other teams. We’ve won games by outworking other teams and I didn’t feel that was our temperament (tonight). I feel we were waiting for something to happen instead of creating situations ourselves. We talk about little things and I think in the end we needed to do those little things a little better.
Kansas State setter Caitlyn Donahue
When we were at Nebraska it seemed like we were able to string points together and to side out real quick and to put a lot of pressure on there. Here it was Pepperdine that was putting a lot of pressure on us and I don’t think we responded as well as we would like. They were putting pressure on us and we weren’t returning that. We were making a lot of errors on our size. We weren’t played K-State volleyball, we weren’t being us and ultimately that’s what kind of hurt us.
Kansas State libero Kuulei Kabalis
Our attitude coming into Nebraska (last week) was a little different. We were more calm and composed. Here we were confident…we were just too tight and we weren’t playing the way we usually play and that took away from our game.
