bleedCrimson.net Weekly Coach Spence Interview

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie women's basketball head coach Darin Spence throughout the 2008/2009 season as the Aggies take aim at a conference championship. This week we spoke with Coach Spence about their season opening games against UC-Irvine and Cal-Poly, this week's games against UTEP and Kent State and what improvements he's looking for from his young team.

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on the first two games.
Darin Spence: We're far from where we need to be. Far from where I thought we would even be. At the same time we just have a disconnect between inside outside and I guess that's to be expected with as many new faces as we're trying to throw in there. And our so called experienced players are sophomores now. When I look out on the floor I see two freshmen and two sophomores of our five players at one time. At one aspect I'm kind of disappointed where we're at right now but at the same time I understand our learning curve and where we're at and where we need to go to. I think our guards are turning out to be the ones who we have to play through. I think we've got a good group of perimeter people that can play different spots and can make baskets and can drive it so we've got to tweak some things around to kind of let them go a little bit. At the same time I've just been disappointed in the play of our post players. Just for the lack of aggression and wanting the ball. They're skilled and they're good players but they're just not working hard enough to be good Division I players right now. So we have that imbalance and we're just disconnected right now.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie women's basketball head coach Darin Spence throughout the 2008/2009 season as the Aggies take aim at a conference championship. This week we spoke with Coach Spence about their exhibition game against Melbourne this past week and talked about the start of the regular season with games against UC-Irvine and Cal-Poly.

bleedCrimson.net: What are your thoughts on the exhibition game with Melbourne?
Darin Spence: I thought we were much improved from game one and that's what you should be. Basketball teams always take their biggest step, especially early in the year, from game one to game two. In this case it's our exhibition games. I thought we played a good first 16 minutes. Defensively we were pretty solid. Offensively we got up and down and took some good shots. After that we started tinkering around with some lineups and I think we kind of lost our intensity there after we had built up a pretty good lead. That first 16 minutes was pretty solid.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie women's basketball head coach Darin Spence throughout the 2008/2009 season as the Aggies take aim at a conference championship. This week we spoke with Coach Spence about the first exhibition game this past Sunday and talked about the youth movement on his team.

bleedCrimson.net: What are your thoughts on Sunday's exhibition win?
Darin Spence: It was a great opportunity to get out and kick the season off. I didn't realize how inexperienced and how young we were until I saw us out on the floor. Especially when you consider our experience comes from Tyshae Walton who started a bunch of games for us and is a senior and Madison [Spence] who's a sophomore. I think with Danisha Corbett, "Day Day" playing a lot of minutes, I don't know of any game last year that she played over 20 minutes. So it just hit me like a ton of bricks. We are just really young and green and we're gonna have to figure it out as we go. But I was really pleased with how we kept trying to find ways to make plays and for the most part defensively we were pretty solid. Offensively we were horrible but it's the first time out and we'll get better as we move on.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie women's basketball head coach Darin Spence throughout the 2008/2009 season as the Aggies take aim at a conference championship. We spoke with Coach Spence about the 2008/2009 schedule which was released on Monday.

bleedCrimson.net: Talk a little bit about your schedule. The biggest thing that jumps out is your stretch from the middle of December to the end of January you play 10 of 13 games on the road.
Darin Spence: I think we've got a good balance to the schedule but we're in such a strange situation, the better we get the harder it is to schedule. Just trying to get bigger name teams to come play us and it's just really a difficult situation for us. I think our location plays against us and I really wanted to try to get some more name teams on our schedule to help out with our RPI and strength of schedule. I didn't anticipate us playing on the road the first couple games of conference either. But we get to go to a tournament in San Diego and that'll be good for the California kids on our roster. I think we've got a good balance of some name teams, some strong teams and some teams that are trying to get better.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie women's basketball head coach Darin Spence throughout the 2008/2009 season as the Aggies take aim at a conference championship. We spoke with Coach Spence last week as part of our review of the Best Wins of '07/'08 and we also got his thoughts his two new signees Ashley Scroggins and Crystal Boyd, Niki Holt and her visit to post player camp and a little bit about the schedule for next season.

bleedCrimson.net: Talk a little bit about the junior college player you signed Ashley Scroggins.
Darin Spence: Ashley is from Mineral Springs, AR, she played two years at Pratt Junior College in Kansas. She's 6'2", a good athlete a banger type player, physical. She likes to work inside and she's going to give us some good depth in there. Obviously a good defender, good rebounder. She's a 72% free throw shooter in her two years at junior college. That's a good thing. When you get post players fouled and if they have the ability to step up and make free throws that really wears on your opponents. She's got a great attitude. I think she was underrecruited so she's going to come in with a lot to prove and a lot of enthusiasm and she's just a neat person and I'm really looking forward to having Ashley with us.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie women's basketball head coach Darin Spence throughout the 2008/2009 season as the Aggies take aim at a conference championship. In this offseason check-in, Coach Spence talks about his contract extension, his incoming freshman class and the offseason schedule for his kids.

bleedCrimson.net: Talk a little bit about your contract extension? Obviously it enables you to continue to build the program.
Darin Spence: Yeah! And it keeps us from moving too, that's kinda the good thing. We, in my opinion, have really climbed the mountain in five years here. I keep saying this but the people have no idea where this program was. When you're on the outside, you think you know but you have no idea where it was at and things that we had to do and all the issues we had to address everywhere from our fundraising in our Fast Break booster club, our camps, our staff, just recruiting budgets, equipment, everything. I really think it took a good two to three years just to get that all squared away and then we've been able to win a few more games. Actually, we won a few more games each year after that first year. But there was just so much to do and now we have a really good group of young kids in the program that I think can reap the benefits of all those years and can really take us in a positive direction. Our coaching staff has been a lot more stable, we've been together for a few years. I think that helps out and I'm just really excited that we're gonna keep building on what we're doing. And it was never of course it was never a question in my mind, it [extension] was just a matter of going through the process of getting renewed.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie women's basketball head coach Darin Spence throughout the 2007/2008 season as the Aggies aim for the WAC Championship and Beyond. In today's interview Coach Spence talks about their quarterfinal game, returning to the identity as a team and looks ahead at today's semifinal matchup against Boise State.

Click the play button to listen to the audio.