Comments from Head Coach Gillispie at Weekly Press Conference

February 15, 1999

LUBBOCK, Texas - Comments made by Head Coach Rene Gillispie from weekly Monday press conference:

"This past weekend was a turning point for our program. We struggled at New Mexico, ending up 1-2 in that tournament. We went to UTA's tournament this past weekend and really struggled the first half of the tournament. In pool play, we had two losses and one win. We struggled on getting two hits together in any one of our games. The girls were hitting sporatically had a hard go the first part of the weekend. I thought that if this continues, it's going to be a very long year. In the pool play, we got seeded the three slot in the pool and we started Saturday's games in the consolation game. We lost that game. Seven games in three days is a lot of games. Our girls were real tired after our first two games. We finally came up against Arkansas in an elimination game on Sunday - that was the turning point in our season. We had storm clouds over our heads. When the storm stopped and the sun started breaking through, we knew we would have the chance to play in the games we needed to play in. We beat Arkansas, 6-5, and did it in the sixth inning from behind. We now knew that we could at least come back. That was our biggest struggle all year. When we realized that we could hit and our top hitters were actually doing their job and making the critical hits that we needed, everything turned around and everyone started to hit at that point. We went into the OSU game and the girls hit the dog out of that ball. I could not believe that everybody - 1 through 9 - was hitting. We ended up winning that game, 12-3. We were pumped up and ready to go and ended up playing the final game in the consolation bracket, playing Northwestern which received votes from the coaches' poll. Went in and played them - same thing - they got the first run against us and I'm thinking - here we go again - Second inning - we had 11 runs. 11 runs in one inning - just unbelievable. We knew right then that we had our team back."

"We're looking forward to this weekend. We're coming up against a lot of tough competition in California in the San Diego State tournament. They're bringing in a lot of great teams from California. We lead off with Stanford, which in the top-25 right now. We owe them from last year. They took two games from us. We're looking forward to gettting there this weekend and playing good ball."