The Memphis Tigers women’s basketball is heading into their final seven conference games before the American Athletic Conference Tournament in March. Ahead of its home game against Cincinnati 2 p.m. Saturday, Memphis coach Melissa McFerrin sat down with The Daily Helmsman to discuss the season so far, and her team’s postseason aspirations.
DH: Your team is 12-10 this season, what are your reflections on the team to this point?
MF: “If we could rewind the clock and take care of that win at home, but was a loss, against George Washington where we had a significant lead in the second half. Maybe the loss at Arkansas-Little Rock. Those are probably the games you look back upon and you could have 15 wins. You have those games every season, now we’re trying to look forward.”
“The only really bad loss we’ve had in conference was home against Tulsa, nothing we can do about it. We still have a chance to determine what happens in this season. We still have an opportunity to get a top five seed in the conference tournament and that’s dependent on us. We don't have to depend on anyone else. We have a chance to be a postseason team. That’s our goal.”
DH: How has senior guard Ariel Hearn, who was named all-conference last season, improved her game from her freshman year to now?
MF: “Well she walked into a really talented team, so she got to come in and be the freshman that didn’t have to carry the load but had the great mentality late in a game to know how to hit a tough shot late. She really benefitted from being around four other starters who had played here for many years. And as a sophomore, she had to bear the brunt of the load.”
“We were starting at least three sophomores, sometimes four sophomores and a freshman. We were very young in a new conference. And I think maybe that year was the most difficult year for her, because she had to really figure it out. It was probably harder than she anticipated it would be. I think as a junior she had a really good year, locked down defensively. She became one of the best guards in the conference and has carried that into this year.”
DH: Where does the team need to improve upon in the final seven conference games?
MF: “We need to continue to be a better rebounding team. That has been something that we haven’t been great at all season long. We can be when we focus on it. We’ve got to continue to do that. We’ve got to be a team that gets stops at critical times during a game. And I think we have to continue to be a team when we get those stops, we get easy buckets, in transition it takes a little pressure off of our half-court offense. We’ve executed really well, we’ve got to continue to have that balance scoring and not rely too much on one player.”
DH: What's the team's mentally ahead of the final stretch and what would a return to the postseason for you, personally?
MF: “This is kind of our off week right now, so this is a time where we tidy our execution. So we’ll have two off days, but we’ll also have two really good days of practice to try to take care of our conditioning. We’ll try to work on our shooting this week, because we’ve shot the ball really well recently and we want to continue to do that. We will have some position work to up our execution, because we’ve not had a lot of breakdown days recently.”
“Returning to the postseason is critical for us it’s our goal. It will continue to be the goal. We’ve got four seniors at Memphis that understand that. If the season were to end today, we’d be in the postseason but we still have seven games left. We’re trying to approach every game like it’s a tournament game. Making sure we don’t have any slip ups. We’ve got an opportunity at USF; it will be a difficult challenge, that’ll be major RPI game for us. We’ve got Temple at home. Those are two big RPI games down the stretch, we play ECU twice so that is a little bit of a wash would they help us our hurt us with RPI. We need to beat UCF on the road; we need to beat Houston on the road. Those are games that will hurt us with a loss on the road and late.”
DH: What is the ultimate goal of the women’s basketball program long-term?
MF: “I still think we’re one of those teams where we’ve got to set our sights on being a postseason team every year. On occasion, I think we can be an NCAA Tournament team, but our challenges are the same as they have been. We’ve got to continue to improve our facilities, we have wonderful training facilities now, but we’ve got to get better gameday facilities that recruits look at. We’ve got to keep recruiting very well and very hard, because that’s going to determine how much success we’re going to have in this conference.”
“I think we’ve shown we are on the up. Coming into this conference as a very young team, we didn't drop to the bottom of the conference. We may have dropped further than we would have liked, but we’ve never bottomed out at eight, nine, 10 or 11. And so I think that speaks a lot for our program that we’ve been able to sustain competitiveness as well as anybody has coming from Conference USA. Tulane has probably taken the lead on that, but everyone else besides Memphis has dropped to the bottom of the conference and we have not done that.”
Melissa McFerrin has coached the team since the 2008-09 season.
