Completed Event: Women's Basketball versus UCLA on March 29, 2026 , Loss , 58, to, 70
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Final
Women's Basketball
58
vs UCLA
70
Florida State Quotes: Duke 75, Florida State 57
3/7/2009 12:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
ACC Championship
Game 10; Florida State 57; Duke 75
FLORIDA STATE QUOTES
THE MODERATOR: Joined up here on the podium by Florida State head coach Sue Semrau, student athletes Mara Freshour and Tanae Davis‑Cain.
COACH SUE SEMRAU: We'll, I wish we could have given you guys a better basketball game to watch. I know it wasn't the most exciting game. Maybe for the first half of the second half. When we miss shots in the first half and I thought we got great looks, it dictated what we did on the defensive end. You cannot win big basketball games when your mentality isn't strong enough to be who you are, and I really felt like this was a game where we just didn't defend well. I thought Duke came out and shot the lights out. When is the last time ‑‑ they were 58 percent from the 3 point line. That would give me a lot of confidence, and we didn't do a whole lot to shut that down. They are a great basketball team. They were very balanced tonight as you can see, or this afternoon. And I wish them all the best.
THE MODERATOR: Questions?
Q. Coach, things seem to really become unraveled when Jacinta Monroe picked up her second foul, why do you think that was and what was it about your team wasn't doing when she left?
COACH SUE SEMRAU: Well, we didn't pick up the scoring slack. I thought when she is in the game, you have that inside threat. Cierra Bravard was under the weather today, she is a freshman, and I didn't think she handled that well. As a result our inside scoring threat was diminished very early in the game. It really put a lot of pressure I thought on other people.
Q. Mara, did you get injured in the second half. If so did it affect your game?
MARA FRESHOUR: I mean I got a little banged around here and there, but that's normal from a typical game.
COACH SUE SEMRAU: I thought Mara played one of her best games. I think she got hit every which way, she boxed out, she went to the board, she really, I thought, was a tremendous warrior for us this afternoon.
Q. Duke had 24 points in the paint in the first half, was it something that they were doing or was it something that you guys weren't doing?
COACH SUE SEMRAU: I think a little bit of both. Obviously our game plan was not to let them have those touches inside. I didn't think we did a great job of putting a lot of pressure on the perimeter, so they couldn't get those touches. When they did, I thought they did a tremendous job. A lot of it was offensive rebounding, we didn't do a good job of blocking out, and it hurt us.
Q. Can you talk about the beginning of the second half, and just why were you guys able to get yourself slightly back into it and then what happened thereafter from your point of view?
TANAE DAVIS‑CAIN: I feel like we went in half time, we needed to step it up, we weren't playing like ourselves. I tried to come out second half, step it up, knock down a couple of 3's, and Duke came down the court and scored and that put us in the grind a little bit to a point that everybody gave up. Duke is a good team.
Q. For the seniors, fortunately this isn't the end, so it's the NCAA now; tell us about your mindset.
MARA FRESHOUR: You know, our mindset is exactly what you just said, next game. We are going to be disappointed right now with the fact we didn't play the way we should have played tonight. We got to put that behind us. We got to learn from what we did wrong tonight. And this time last year we didn't know what we were going to do. We were all on the edge. But this year we know. And so we're in. That's a sure thing, so we have a week and a half to touch up on what we want to do and execute on and when that Monday night comes, and we find out where we are going and who we are going to play, it's the next game at that point.
TANAE DAVIS‑CAIN: The same as Mara was saying. Yes we lost this game, but it's not the end of our season. NCAA is a new season, we come out and we're going to take each Game 1 game at a time.
Q. Coach, how satisfying has this been for you to crack the upper echelon of the league and get the No. 2 seed and play in the semifinals.
COACH SUE SEMRAU: I don't know that we cracked it. I think we finished on top. Win a regular season in the ACC that's a very difficult thing to do. Anything can happen in a three day tournament. We didn't set our sights on, this is the thing we want to do. We were able to do something that we had always set our sights on as a program and now the NCAA is even more important to us than what we do in the ACC tournament.
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