NC State Women’s Basketball Head Coach Wes Moore at the ACC Tipoff: BULLETED

NC State Women’s Basketball Head Coach Wes Moore met with the media today at the ACC Tipoff. You can watch what he had to say above, or you can check out a BULLETED breakdown below.

• We lost a lot of great talent and a lot of great experience, players that have been in our program for 5 years, 4 years, things like that.
  • Now, it’s a fresh start. That’s what college sports are about. They graduate. They move on, and now you’ve got to start all over.
• Luckily, we have some veterans with some great experience.
  • Jakia Brown-Turner has been an All-ACC player.
  • Diamond Johnson has been Sixth Player of the Year in the ACC.
  • We also have Jada Boyd and Camille Hobby.
  • We’ve got a nucleus of experience that have been there and been through the battle and know what it’s about, know our culture, know our system.
• Then, we added a few out of the portal.
  • Some people complain about the portal. Right now, I kind of like the portal. You got to flow with it, y’all. You got to flow with it.
  • Now, we’ve got to get all that talent to mesh together and become a great team, so that’s what we’ll be working on the next few months.
  • They’ll be saying, “Practice? Practice? We’re talking about practice?” Yeah, we’ve got to practice if we’re going to get better. So that’s what we’re doing.
• We had some holes to fill.
  • We’re very fortunate these young ladies worked out.
  • Mimi Collins is someone we recruited out of high school and knew very well.
    • Obviously coming from Maryland most recently, we had actually played against them.
    • We’re very familiar with her game.
  • River Baldwin is someone that committed pretty early out of high school, so we didn’t get real deep into recruiting with her, but she was playing in the ACC, so we had a chance to watch her game grow as well.
  • Saniya Rivers was someone we recruited really hard out of Wilmington, North Carolina: Gatorade, USA Today, National Player of the Year, great talent.
  • So we added some really good players. But like I said, now you’ve got to become a team.
  • These players are going to have to step up and maybe take on roles that they haven’t had in the past as far as leadership.
  • I want them to be like assistant coaches on the court, and sometimes they probably want to be the head coach on the court, but I’d just settle for assistant coach would be nice.
  • Then, we’ve got to make all that mesh together, and it’s a challenge, but it’s what we do.
  • It’s what keeps me so young looking, you know, is getting a fresh start every year.
• Ashley [Williams] is someone who was a real overachiever [new assistant coach this year]. When I took the job at NC State, she had already agreed to walk on.
  • She had some Division I offers, but she really wanted to go to NC State.
  • She walked on at NC State, and by her junior year, she’s starting.
  • Her senior year, she was like top I think fourth in the ACC in 3-point shooting at 44 percent, and she just made herself a really good player.
  • Then, I had the opportunity to see her at Indiana University, a program that I have a lot of respect for, a head coach that I have respect for, and I was able to see the job she did there, hear the reports.
    • She was a grad assistant there for 2 years, left for a year to go to another school in Furman, and then Indiana hired her right back as a full-time assistant. That’s saying a lot.
  • I think Ashley’s got a chance to be a really good head coach someday, but she also loves NC State.
    • She also can tell our story. She’s been in our program. She’s played at NC State. She played for me.
    • So I think that really helps in recruiting when she’s kind of able to relate to these players and tell them, hey, this is what he expects. This is what we expect at NC State.
    • So definitely been a great addition having her around.
  • She does a really good job working with our guards. And she’ll work. She will work. She had a 3.9 in engineering at NC State, so she’s also really smart. So, you know, it’s a win-win.
• Nikki West has been with me 20 years.
  • She’s been offered a lot more money at times and turned them down without even telling me, and then I go to my AD and say, okay, we need to match what she was offered. I just love her.
• Then Brittany Morris was a grad assistant for us, and, again, somebody that’s just a great person, knows the game.
• I couldn’t be prouder of Diamond [Johnson].
  • She had a phenomenal freshman year, and then she came here where we kind of had everyone back from a pretty good team, and she accepted a role coming in.
    • I said, we have 6 starters, you know.
    • But Diamond, people said, she gives you a spark. And I said, no, she gives us a bonfire when she comes in.
    • Well, now she’s going to have to do that from the tip.
  • But it just says a lot about her. People wondered how she’d fit in in that situation.
    • Diamond made it easy because she put the team 1st, and she said, hey, I’ll adjust, and I’ll be great.
    • We knew she was going to play a lot anyway. So really proud of her and how she handled that as well.