The day after her first loss in more than a year, Whitney Boddie speaks

By Andrew Gribble
Auburn University Beat Reporter
Published: January 30, 2009

Need a good quote? Need some insight into a game you didn’t see? Need a student-athlete who will at least pretend that she enjoys talking to you?

Meet Whitney Boddie. The Auburn women’s senior point guard.

Boddie took some time out of her afternoon today to talk with the blog about last night’s 67-58 loss at Georgia. If you haven’t been paying attention, it was Auburn’s first of the season, as the Tigers sit at 20-1 heading into Sunday’s game at LSU.

The loss marked Auburn’s first in nearly a year and Boddie’s first in well over 365 days. Boddie missed the bulk of her junior year, as she was academically ineligible. Auburn is 30-2 with Boddie in the lineup since the start of the 2007-08 season.

Here’s what Boddie had to tell us.

So, how does it feel 24 hours later?
It was tough. You’re undefeated then all of a sudden losing is not easy at all. It was one of those things where we sucked it up, it happened, and now it’s just time to move on and get better. That’s all we can do.

Did the undefeated start make the loss that much tougher?
It was tough just because we wanted to beat them because they’re Georgia. It was another SEC game. I don’t think it would have made a difference if it was Georgia or Appalachian State—I’m just throwing a team out there. It’s a loss and we’re all competitive and we don’t like losing. It’s hard either way.

How about you personally?
I don’t really take them, honestly. Yesterday I think I handled it probably as best as I ever have since I’ve been in college. I hate losing so much. It was just the way we lost. It wasn’t really like they played harder than us…I don’t know, we just didn’t make shots. The stuff that we were accustomed to doing just didn’t work for us.

We all know it sucks, but did Auburn need a loss?
I don’t know because I’d rather lose now than get to the NCAA tournament and lose in the first round. In a sense, it put things in perspective for us. Wins tend to cover up some of the things you don’t do so well. When you lose it’s like ‘we did this wrong, we did that wrong.‘ Where as when we were outscoring people, that’s what it was. Against Georgia, we couldn’t outscore them and when we needed to turn on our defense to get stops we couldn’t do it. We were just so used to beating teams by putting more points on the board instead of getting stops the way other teams win. It really showed us what we need to improve on.

Seems like every team’s bringing their best when Auburn comes up on their schedule. Is that the case?
It seems like everyone brings their A game against us. I honestly don’t know.

(Photo credit: Todd Van Emst)