11.21.2009 | by Cherry Crayton | Filed under Sports | Comments: No responses |
Sophomore forward Bonae Holston had a double-double with 21 points and 10 rebounds and three other NC State players scored in double figures as the Wolfpack women’s basketball team beat Davidson 79-54 Friday night at Reynolds, giving Coach Kellie Harper her 100th career win as a head coach.
“One-hundred wins is a milestone,” said Harper, who compiled a 97-65 record in five seasons at Western Carolina and is 3-1 at NC State. “I’m not sitting in my office calculating my wins; I’m worried about these girls getting wins for the season. But I’m proud of that. You can really put things in perspective very quickly, though, when you can look around at other coaches [across] the country and realize that it took me, . . . in my sixth year, to get a hundreds wins.
“So to get a thousand,” she added, referring to her former coach, Tennessee’s Pat Summitt, who is the all-time winningest coach with 1,005 career wins, “I’ve got to coach 60 more years. That put things in perspective very quickly.”
(Summitt, incidentally, picked up her 100th career victory on Jan. 13, 1979, in a 79-66 win over NC State in Reynolds.)
Coach Harper and junior forward Tia Bell, who had 15 points and 9 rebounds, talk about the win in the video below. Junior forward Brittany Strachan added 10 points and 8 rebounds, and freshman guard Marissa Kastanek scored 11.
For a full recap of the game and box score, visit GoPack.com.
11.20.2009 | by Cherry Crayton | Filed under Sports | Comments: One response |
Nikitta Gartrell, left, and Coach Kellie Harper, during a prayer before the Wolfpack women's basketball team's first game of the season on Nov. 13. (Photo by Peyton Williams)
Kellie Harper will go for her 100th career win as a coach Friday at 7 p.m. when the Wolfpack women’s basketball team faces Davidson in Reynolds. (Tonight’s promo: Bring two canned goods and get $3 off the ticket price.) As part of our continuing coverage of the team, we’ve got two features heading into tonight’s game: an interview with senior guard Nikitta Gartrell and the first entry from our guest blogger, Patrick Kinas. Patrick has been the play-by-play voice of the Wolfpack women’s basketball radio network for nearly a decade and has been around sports his entire life. He has a perspective and knowledge that very few people share. In his debut entry, he writes about what he’s learned about Coach Harper over the past several months:
Kellie Harper hates to lose. I’m convinced that her loathing-for-losing quotient is significantly higher than her affinity for winning. . . . Kellie doesn’t seem driven to win with the thought of growing her victory column. To me, Kellie seems driven to win simply to siphon the air out of the L column. But make no mistake. The wins will come. They’ll just come as a by-product of Kellie’s obsession to not to lose.
Read his entire, insightful debut entry after the jump, and look for weekly entries in the future.
First is our Q&A with Nikitta. The 5-foot-9 three-year starter averaged 10.9 points last year and is averaging 8.7 points during the first three games of this season. She talks with us about the season so far, her teammates, and her goals.
Q&A With Senior Guard Nikitta Gartrell
You’ve got three games under your belt, going 2-1. What’s your assessment of the season so far?
It seems like the season has jumped off fairly quick. I feel that things are going good. We’re still in the learning process, and we still have got a lot to learn, plays and stuff, that Coach Kellie has designed for us to use this season.
11.18.2009 | by Cherry Crayton | Filed under Sports | Comments: No responses |
Redshirt junior point guard Amber White had a career-high 25 points and freshman guard Marissa Kastanek added 20 points to lead the Wolfpack women’s basketball team past Florida Atlantic, 84-70, last night at Reynolds Coliseum. Get a full game recap and box score at GoPack. An after-the-game interview with Coach Kellie Harper is below. In it, Coach Harper, who is one game shy of 100 career victories, talks about how and why she can’t remember the first game she ever won as a head coach but why she remembers the first one she lost (it came against Clemson).
Update: Coach Harper will go for win No. 100 Friday night when the Wolfpack takes on Davidson at 7 p.m. in Reynolds. An interesting sidenote is that Coach Harper’s former coach at Tennessee, the legendary Pat Head Summitt, picked up her 100th career victory against . . . NC State. The Lady Vols beat the Wolfpack 79-66 in Reynolds on Jan. 13, 1979. It took Summitt about four years to hit the century mark.
WUNC, North Carolina’s public radio station, also aired a story this morning that gave a good overview of the team and looked into what it’s like for Coach Harper to work with her husband, assistant coach Jon Harper. Listen to the 5-minute broadcast here: Wolfpack WBB Team on WUNC
About working under his wife, Jon Harper told WUNC:
11.15.2009 | by Cherry Crayton | Filed under Sports | Comments: No responses |
The Wolfpack women’s basketball team struggled against Vermont’s zone defense and lost 52-47 Saturday night in the finals of the Sheraton Raleigh Wolfpack Invitational at Reynolds Coliseum. Junior point guard Amber White talks about the loss in the video above. The result gives Coach Kellie Harper her first career loss at NC State.
“Well, I’m quite disappointed. I don’t take losing very well,” said Harper, who picked up her first career victory, in her first game, at NC State Friday night when her team beat Florida International 87-71. “Vermont is a very, very good basketball team. . . . It [was] a tough matchup for us right now.”
11.14.2009 | by Cherry Crayton | Filed under Sports | Comments: No responses |
The Wolfpack women’s basketball team opened its season Friday night with an 87-71 victory over Florida International (FIU), giving Coach Kellie Harper her first victory at NC State. “I think I just had my first great Reynolds atmosphere experience at NC State,” Harper said after the game. “That was an exciting basketball game. It was a lot of fun.”
What made it exciting? After the jump we’ve got quotes and notes from the game, from the pre-game to the post-game, to help answer that question. At the bottom of the entry, we’ve also got a narrative of the locker room scene before the game and observations from the Wolfpack Women’s Basketball radio crew. In the video above is one of the members of the crew, Patrick Kinas, interviewing Coach Harper immediately after the game. If you want the traditional game recap and box score, go to GoPack.com. For photos, check out The N&O’s photo gallery. We hope to add our own photos soon. It’s all part of NC State magazine’s latest installment of “A Coach’s First Season.”
11.13.2009 | by Cherry Crayton | Filed under Sports | Comments: No responses |
The Wolfpack women’s basketball team opens its season tonight at 8 p.m. against Florida International in the Sheraton Raleigh Wolfpack Invitational at Reynolds Coliseum. It’ll also mark the first official game of Kellie Harper’s tenure as head coach of the team. Is she nervous? She told Wolfpack Sports Radio yesterday pretty much the same thing she told us after the Nov. 2 exhibition game against North Greenville (which NC State won 87-44):
I rarely get nervous before games. I might have [some butterflies] at first, but once we tip off, it’ll be gone because I’m very task-oriented and focused on what’s happening on the court.
And here’s what she said last week about the first game during a press conference:
There will be that “Whoa!” feeling before I walk out on the court. I had a little bit of it at the exhibition, standing in the tunnel waiting to walk out. I cracked myself up a few times thinking about what I was doing and where I was. “This is pretty cool.” And I’m sure I’ll have that moment again several times this year.
We’ll have interviews, notes and a photo gallery after the opening game, so be sure to check that out. We’ll also have notes and interviews following the Wolfpack’s second game of the season, which will be Saturday either 4 p.m. (if they’re in the invitational’s consolation game) or 6 p.m. (if they’re in the invitational’s championship game). Go to GoPack.com for a full game preview and for a story on freshman guard Marissa Kastanek. (Update at 9:34 a.m.: The Wolfpack will play Saturday at 6 p.m. regardless of what they do tonight. So if you’re heading to the football game against Clemson, stop by Reynolds afterward.)
Before the game tonight, though, we’ve got a short Q&A with senior forward Lucy Ellison and a highlight from yesterday’s two-hour practice. It’s our latest installment in “A Coach’s First Season,” in which we’re following Coach Harper and her team for the season for a feature that will appear in the spring issue of NC State magazine.
11.07.2009 | by Cherry Crayton | Filed under Sports | Comments: No responses |
Amber White (Photo by Peyton Williams)
As part of our ongoing series “A Coach’s First Season,” in which we’re following Coach Kellie Harper and the Wolfpack women’s basketball team throughout the season, we plan to sit down with each member of the team for extended interviews. Up first is point guard Amber White, who had 10 points, six assists and three steals in NC State’s 87-44 exhibition win over North Greenville Monday night. The 5-foot-6 redshirt junior missed all of last season due to an Achilles injury. Below is the interview we conducted with Amber Thursday afternoon following a press conference with Coach Harper. Read an edited transcript of that press conference here.
On making the most of the injury
Sometimes you would get frustrated by not being able to play. But when I was sitting on the bench, I looked at everything going on and tried to learn from what the point guard was doing and how to handle different situations. (more…)
11.04.2009 | by Cherry Crayton | Filed under Sports | Comments: 2 responses |
Check out the above photos that Peyton Williams took during the Wolfpack women’s 87-44 win over North Greenville in an exhibition basketball game at Reynolds Monday night. We’ve added extended captions that include information from the game and quotes from Coach Kellie Harper and players Amber White and Bonae Holston, who had 19 points and 11 rebounds in the scrimmage. For a complete game recap and box score, go to GoPack.com. Wolf-TV, NC State’s student-run TV station, also has video highlights below.
After the jump, we’ve got a few notes from the scrimmage, some random notes, and a preview of an upcoming Q&A with Coach Harper. It’s our fourth installment in our ongoing series, “A Coach’s First Season,” in which NC State magazine is following Coach Harper during her first season as the head coach of the women’s basketball team.
Harper’s quick evaluation of exhibition
It went a little better [than I thought it might]. These first few games, you have no idea what to expect. But we were poised. I was proud of our poise to begin the game. The kids definitely had fun out there, and that was important to me.
10.29.2009 | by Cherry Crayton | Filed under Sports | Comments: No responses |
Check out the above photos that Tim O’Brien, a photographer with NC State Student Media, took during the Wolfpack women’s basketball practice yesterday at Reynolds. And if you’ve ever wondered what a college basketball team does during a practice, we’ve got a complete, almost minute-by-minute breakdown of one here. After the jump, we’ve also compiled a list of some highlights from practice and things Coach Kellie Harper said to the team during it. But first, we’ve got excerpts from a quick interview we did with her after practice. It’s all part of our third installment of “A Coach’s First Season,” NC State magazine’s ongoing coverage of Coach Harper and her team throughout the season.
On what she does after practice
After every practice I write down what we did not do well and we’ll focus in on it tomorrow. If we didn’t have a good practice, I’ll figure out why and how I can make it a better practice. I’ll knit-pick little things. Whether it’s reasonable or not, that’s how I do things. I’m always trying to find a way to do things better.
10.23.2009 | by Cherry Crayton | Filed under Sports | Comments: No responses |
GoPack.com has posted a good story written by A.J. Carr about Kellie Harper and the Wolfpack women’s basketball team. One snippet:
[Harper] can be vocal, yell if I have to, but is never profane. When really upset, she’s apt to vent Dad Gum it! More often players will hear Jeepers Creepers! with a country twang.
A.J. has been covering sports in North Carolina for more than 50 years and is among the state’s most respected and knowledgeable sportswriters. He took the time to speak with us today about Harper and the team. It’s another installment in NC State magazine’s coverage of the team. Read what he told us and then check out his story.
On first impressions
I was very impressed with her. She seems to know precisely what she wants to do. She has a great background and brings outstanding credentials as a player and as a coach — as both as an assistant and as a head coach at Western Carolina. And her personality. I see her as a likable coach and one that players will truly respond to. The players spoke a lot about her energy level. She’s certainly also a person with strong values and is a strong Christian, just as Kay Yow was. I sense that she’ll be very caring to players and an excellent motivator.
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