Northwestern University Athletics
McKeown Addresses the Media
10/20/2009 12:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
Oct. 20, 2009
Women's Basketball First Practice Photo Gallery
EVANSTON, Ill. -- With the hoops season fully underway, head coach Joe McKeown sat down with the media to talk about this year's talented freshmen class, junior All-America candidate Amy Jaeschke and legendary UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian. Below is the transcript from Monday's (Oct. 19) press conference.
Opening Reflections...
It's year two, it feels like I was just getting hired at a press conference as the head coach of Northwestern. Everything has kind of flown by. Last year I feel like we laid a foundation, trying to re-build a program and get a lot of things in place. A lot of things showed up and I feel like we were successful in that area. They were things that don't show up on the court or things that don't show up statistically. We are trying to get our players to understand what it takes to develop a national recruiting program, to get our staff out and to understand what Northwestern's all about in recruiting. I really felt we had a great year even though our record didn't reflect that. I think the way we played and the way we made progress helped us get a lot of things done. The best part about that is moving on and seeing the first of our recruiting efforts. We have four freshmen this year and a transfer from the University of Florida. She's left handed like Tim Tebow, but doesn't run as well. We're going to have to work on those things. We have a unique player in Dannielle Diamant, a 6' 5" freshman who played in the Macabee Games in Israel this summer, whose grandfather is Jerry Tarkanian. Even though she's 6' 5", she shoots threes from way beyond the men's line, so she's going to be our premiere outside shooter until we tell her to play inside. We are trying to work all those things out before we start. But again, in college basketball it's exciting just to get started, just to get back on the court with your players, and we're looking for a much better season this year. Just having the continuity of having the same coaching staff and having the same system in place for the first time in a long time should be fun. I'm not good at making predictions but I feel that we are going to be a much better basketball program going into this year. I'm happy to answer any questions.
Q: Coach, do you feel like you got everything you could out of your team last year?
A: You know, I think we left some things on the table. I was disappointed in myself. When you've won a lot of games as a coach and you're coming from a top-10 team or from a Sweet Sixteen team in the NCAA tournament, we feel like we gave away some games in November that we wish we had back. But I do feel like one of our goals, whether you ask coach Carmody, or myself, or any basketball coach is to play your best ball at the end of the season. And we did feel like we played our best basketball at the end of the season. The last week of the season we beat Minnesota, who was in the NCAA tournament. We beat Michigan in February. We took Iowa--another NCAA tournament team--down to the wire in the last game of the season. So from that standpoint, I feel like we made a lot of progress.
Q: Coach, how do you feel about your depth this year? With more freshmen coming off the bench this year, do you feel like you have more people who can regularly contribute?
A: Yeah, we reinvented the 5' 9" power forward last year. I didn't realize there were so many of them, and they were all on my team. So I think the thing that we addressed more than anything else was to add some size. With Dannielle [Diamant] coming in at 6' 5" and Kendall Hackney, who was the high school player of the year in Ohio at 6' 3", we got taller. Kendall had originally signed with USC but now is at Northwestern. What transpired in between is not that big of a deal, but she's here. I think they will add some size and depth that will allow us to compete. The teams at the top of our league were so big, those teams played so well in the NCAA tournament because of their size--Ohio State, Michigan State, Purdue, they all had great front lines.
Q: Is that going to help take away some double, triple, and quadruple teams from Jaeschke?
A:Yeah, at least the double teams. She's going to have a great year. And, just to elaborate on her, Amy Jaeschke is an All-America candidate for us, which I'm really excited about. She's a local product from New Trier High School who was brought out by USA Basketball to compete on the national team. They brought her back out and she was the last player they let go, which was disappointing. But what I think it said to her was that she could play with the best players in the country so with her confidence level, her conditioning level, I think she's ready to have a great year.
Q: Talk a little bit about having this year's Miss Ohio Basketball (Kendall Hackney) and returning starter sophomore Brittany Orban, who was a standout in the state of Ohio.
A:What has happened in our sport, all those players who were great players were going to Duke, they were going to Stanford, Vanderbilt; all those Midwest kids who would fit that profile of a great student-athlete were not looking at us [Northwestern] as an option. I think now, we are trying to recruit the same level kid who is going to go to those programs. We've got some catching up to do. Obviously, you have to win in March. Ohio is an area where if you're a student-athlete and a great basketball player, Northwestern should be an option. The same thing goes in Illinois and Minnesota, Michigan and those areas. Our staff has done a great job in Ohio, trying to get in and let people know what we're trying to do.
Q: Are we going to see Tark [former UNLV head coach Jerry Tarkanian] at any basketball games?
A: He may make an appearance every now and again. I don't have any towels I can chew on. But I was the head coach at New Mexico State in the 80's when he had those teams. They were in our league, so I saw UNLV first-hand and saw the run they had. My old coach was on that staff. I have great respect for Tark and his family. Dannielle [Diamant] is a great kid and we're really excited to have her in our program. If I could sneak Stacey Augmon in and people thought Stacey was a girl, I'd be okay.
Q: Did he [Jerry Tarkanian] have any influence on her in going to Northwestern?
A: He did. And his daughter, her mother, they had a strong sense of balance. I think what helped us was that we had a strong academic school but they also wanted her to be coached at a high level and to play in a high level conference, and felt like she could handle both. I'll let her speak for herself. But, we recruited her really hard at George Washington and she was really interested there and I think our staff, our associate head coach Ali Jaques, especially, did a good job of carrying that over when we took the job here. She was going to go to Harvard. But Cal, Stanford and Duke all those guys recruited her, but she really wanted to go to Harvard. While I was at GW, I learned from legendary mentor Red Auerbach. He taught me that I should explain to people what it would cost to go to Harvard, and what it would cost to go to college for free, and explain the difference. There is nothing wrong with Harvard obviously, and we are just really fortunate to have Dannielle here.
Q: How many of the newcomers were you recruiting at George Washington?
A: Kendall, who originally went to USC, we had tried to recruit; like everybody else in the country. Tailor, was obviously already at the University of Florida. Leah Henry is a walk-on from Holy Cross High School is [Washington] D.C., so we were very familiar with her. Inesha Hale is a point guard/shooting guard from Kansas City, and our coaching staff recruited later in the process so we didn't really see her there [at GW]. There were a lot of players we tried to recruit at both schools and elsewhere, too.
Q: What kind of immediate impact can you expect freshmen to have? How long does it take them to get acclimated and learn your style of play?
A: I think because we are the Big Ten and the way our schedule works--we play eighteen conference games--so you get thrown into the fire a lot earlier. For example, in the ACC, SEC, they play fourteen, so they don't even start a conference schedule until mid-January whereas here, we're playing Purdue on Dec. 6th and Ohio State and Michigan right after Christmas. You have to be patient as a coach and live with some things, but they are going to have some rough nights when you have got to just throw them out there. I think we're ready for that, and we've got a tough nonconference schedule, too, with DePaul, Arkansas, Clemson and other nonconference [opponents]. I think it depends on the player, also, and how ready they are for college basketball. Kendall, in our practices so far, seems to handle everything we can throw at her; Danielle, too. Everybody else I think is catching up a little bit. It's a big adjustment, and I was just listening to the guys here at the football press conference, and I couldn't have said it any better. A college game, when you've been in it a while, just slows down. When you first jump in, you feel like you're on a treadmill and things are just flying by. And I don't think there is any magic pill to slow the game down. To me, it is just an experience thing.
Q: Have you seen much of an improvement in Amy's game with the addition of all these freshmen?
A: I think she's excited that she's not the only one out there over six feet now, and more importantly, she's never gotten her shot blocked in practice before and now that's happening all of the time. I think the competition really helps in that aspect. So she's really excited. We put a rule in last year that she couldn't take a shot from outside the lane until Dec. 1, so now we've kind of taken off the restrictions for her too. All our post players are our best shooters. We're kind of inverted, we're a backwards team, inside out, but you could see 5'5" inside and 6'5 outside.
Q: When you took the job and started mapping out how you could get this program back to where it used to be, is this where you thought the program would be at this point in the process? What have been the setbacks?
A: We had some set backs last year. I was disappointed that we weren't further along last year, [for example] with beating NCAA tournament teams, we did, we beat Minnesota, we lost to Purdue in overtime, and they were in the Final Eight. I just felt like we'd be a little further along. You learn. And I think right now practice is better, competition is better, but how much that translates on the floor, I guess we will find out. Our recruiting, the interest we're getting from really good players nationwide has been really good also. But obviously, it takes a two-, three-, four-year cycle to really see the rewards of that.
The team opens the season on Nov. 13 at Toledo in a 6 p.m. contest.
