THE MODERATOR: We're now joined by the head coach of the Lehigh Mountain Hawks, Addie Micir.
ADDIE MICIR: Thank you everybody for being here. I know you got to hear from our student-athletes. This is a really, really special team. We've had an incredible year led by five seniors and a fifth year.
As we prepped for this, we're prepping the same way the entire time, to win games and compete. It's a team that's played with joy and effort. So, yeah, we're happy to be here, but we're also looking to win a game, which is great.
Everybody here in Durham has been fantastic. The hospitality has been spectacular, and we're looking forward to what's to come.
Q. Coach, I was just wondering, you played for Courtney Banghart. I was wondering if you've gotten a chance to catch up with her at all since you've been here, getting a little scouting report from her on a team she knows pretty well?
ADDIE MICIR: I actually did. I went over to Chapel Hill this morning. Obviously played for Coach but also have a former player on that staff, our athletic trainer there. So it was a little bit of a homecoming.
Yeah, she just talked about she watches a lot of our games and has talked about we've done what we do all year, and she's really excited to see that matchup there too.
Q. Can you speak on getting your team ready and preparing them to keep up with the momentum of postseason basketball?
ADDIE MICIR: Yeah, joy and effort, that's been our focus. We see that every day that that is a choice, and this is a team that has actively chosen that throughout Patriot League play, throughout the playoffs. We talk about this just being bonus, and they have continued to choose that every day.
When you have those six seniors who lead with that way, with empathy, with competitiveness, it really hasn't been something that our staff has had to do. They don't have to get ready because they're just staying ready.
Q. The players were talking about having such a veteran team of seniors and that they're allowed to call huddles and to kind of call some shots themselves a little bit, like you trust them with the level of leadership. How did that develop, and how do you think that helps the team?
ADDIE MICIR: It developed over time. When you watch us play, we run a motion style offense. Our staff jokes that we're more like soccer coaches than we are basketball coaches.
We do a lot of teaching at practice, and then when it's game time -- we have to teach reads at practice and do all of that, but game time they get to play, and they get to make mistakes.
One thing that we say is that mistakes of aggression are always welcome in our program. You have to go out there and play hard, and basketball is a game of mistakes.
This group and this veteran group, they're unafraid to go make plays, and they're unafraid to make mistakes. As a coach, that's what you want because you need some guts to win in March.
Q. My question to you is were there any changes that you made coming into this postseason with your team? Duke is known to have some really great shooters. Have you made any changes to your team post scouting report?
ADDIE MICIR: Yeah, we do us for the most part. That's what got us here. Obviously you have to look at the scouting report, and you see that they're really fast. They can turn defense to offense very quickly. So we need to amplify what we do even better, right? Those mistakes of aggression cannot lead to live ball turnovers that turn into 2.
On the defensive end as well, they're going to be fast and faster than what we've seen for the most part within our league, but we've seen glimpses of it in our league. Our league is really strong, and we have some kids that can get downhill, we have some really active kids on the glass in our league. But we're just going to see more of them on the court at one time.
More so it's making certain tweaks, making sure we're there to help each other, and we've also been preparing to hit the glass harder.
Q. You're the Number 1 free-throw shooting team in the nation, 81 percent or something like that. Is that an identity you've kind of leaned into? How did that -- I know a lot of teams practice free throws a lot and they never really get any better at them. How did that sort of manifest itself with you all?
ADDIE MICIR: This is a really funny question because we've been up there in free-throw percentage for a long time, and we actually do not practice free throws at practice. This is a team that shoots, and we shoot a lot, and we shoot a lot of 3s at practice. We probably shoot more than I think most teams would be in the country.
I think that's also too, one, you need confidence to shoot free throws, and you do need reps, and our players get a lot of reps outside of time at practice.
The other thing too you'll learn about this team, they play with joy, they play with effort, and they're a bunch of gamers. When the lights are on, I would probably imagine they make more free throws in games than they do other times just because they want to win and they want to compete.
Q. Your answer to Lindsey's question, I was thinking back to when I covered you back in the day at Princeton, and it sounds a lot like what Courtney would say back in the day about empowering you guys to make plays and such. Is that where you get the philosophy from?
ADDIE MICIR: Yeah, I was told as a freshman, shoot till you're hot; once you're hot, keep shooting. That was Courtney in her very first year as a head coach. That's something I loved playing in that system. I loved the care we had for our teammates.
It's one of the reasons I got into coaching is I wanted to make sure another generation of student-athletes had that same experience that I had.
So getting here at Lehigh, I was able to work for Sue Troyan, who had that same mindset. Let's empower young women. Let's make it a really fun system to play in. That's what we want to do here at Lehigh, and that's what we're continuing to do.
Q. Speaking on women empowerment in sports, you have three teams hosting right here within a 30-minute radius of each other. Can you speak on coming down here with your ladies, how important it is to play in these games with these teams, and just the magnitude of it all.
ADDIE MICIR: It's really special for women's basketball to have three marquee, premier programs that have been carrying the torch for a long time with basketball to be hosting down here. We don't take that lightly.
Our team is just excited to be a part of it and have earned the right to be a part of it.
Q. What does it mean to you to be at the first tournament with units and you're bringing money back home? Is that something you address with your players and kind of try and educate them about?
ADDIE MICIR: We haven't addressed it yet with our players. We want them to kind of stay in the moment. Some of them that want to get into coaching and get into women's sports understand the magnitude of it. We've talked about it as a staff too.
It's about time. It's about time. Women's basketball has been on the rise for a really long time, and we know that we stand on the shoulders of some women that really fought for us to get here. So I think it's an exciting time to make an NCAA Tournament, to be able to help out our league, our school, and everything like that, and we know more's coming.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports