#B1G Media Day: Teri Moren Transcript

COACH MOREN: Well, good morning. This is an exciting time for us in Bloomington, and I'm excited to be here today with a couple of our student-athletes. We're really looking forward to the season. We have some new pieces, new faces. I think our chemistry has been tremendous. We're about eight practices in. We've seen some different people from different times lead our team throughout practice.

And we're just excited about what's ahead of us. We're just really focused on our day-to-day progress. This is a group that really enjoys being around one another. They have been a lot of fun to coach up until this point. And, like I said, we're just looking forward to getting better each day in hopes of succeeding later.

Q. Now in your second year. A couple of things. Define what is that chemistry that you're looking for. And also define your style of play, because this is supposedly moving into more of what you're looking for in terms of developing your style of team.

COACH MOREN: Right. Well, there's no question that we feel a lot different today than we did a year ago with some of our new faces that we have.
Certainly our chemistry, we just have spent intentional time together, and that's one of the things that we didn't have when we took the job August 10th of last year. We didn't have the summer access to get to know our players.

And the relationship part of it is extremely important. So we've spent time together off the floor, as well as on the floor, just getting to know our players, getting to know what each of us value and what's important to us. And we just, like I said, enjoyed getting to know more about each other.

Style of play is going to change just a little bit. Obviously, we're going to have -- Tyra Buss is going to be at the point for us, and she's a dynamic point guard. She played that in high school. She's played off the ball last year, so we're moving her to the point position. I know that's something that she's looking forward to. She's going to have the ball in her hands even more so.

And we are trying right now to play at a higher tempo, faster pace. We're working with the 24-second shot clock right now in all of our practices, really trying to go downhill and attack as much as we can.

Defensively, the philosophy is still in place. We want to pressure the ball, and we want to be as disruptive in the half court as we can be. We don't have the depth right now to probably pick up and press the way that we would like. That will be moving forward.

But, you know, we'll always lean on the fact that we are a defensive team, defense and rebounding. And we continue to emphasize that daily in our practices.

Q. Coach, you spoke of intentional time with the team. Can you explain or expound on exactly what those team-building activities were during that time?

COACH MOREN: Sure. Well, a lot of it, you know, we were entertaining recruits. And so a lot of that had to do that they were coming over to my house, just spending time away from Cook Hall, and, you know, doing different team activities. A lot of that was fun in nature, you know, just to get them to just be themselves.

And then we've looked from the outside to bring people in and spend some time with our players in terms of chemistry building. We've really tried to focus in on getting to know our players and their families.

And, you know, we just do -- seems like every week we do something different that's not basketball-related so our players have an opportunity to learn more about each other. And our kids have really, really responded well to that, and they like that.

Q. What is your take on the rule changes this season for women's basketball?

COACH MOREN: Sure. You know, the four quarters, I think that, you know, it's supposed to help the flow of our game. Obviously we're going to -- we will lose a couple timeouts during that, but I think there will be some additional rest time that our players will enjoy having.

I think the biggest rule change certainly will be in the last minute of the game when we can advance the ball, whether or not you choose to do that. I think that that will present some exciting finishes for our fan base. We're trying to do a lot like the WNBA right now.

And so from a coach's standpoint, though, that's something that we're going to have to spend time on in practice, because you're going to have to have a sideline package of -- you know, there's going to be certain -- different times on the shot clock.

And so for us, we're going to have to spend some extra time that we probably hadn't done in the past on all those scenarios that might happen. Obviously, your kids are going to have to be very disciplined in how we use our timeouts. Now if they're going to get trapped in the corner, using a timeout may not be beneficial to us because we're going to lose that.

And so we got to go back and really practice that in the course of a lot of our practices right now, because some of the rule change could affect us if we're not on our toes and we don't understand, you know, how those could impact us throughout the course of the game.

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