It's Game Time For USA Women's National Team

	USA head coach Geno Auriemma gets smiles from his team during the National team's practice in Ekaterinburg, Russia. The USA will open play Friday in the Ekaterinburg International Invitational, and will also play games on Saturday and Sunday in the four-team, round-robin tournament.
	Daily Factoid: USA Basketball women's teams in Olympic action have not only won the past four Olympic gold medals, but the U.S. women have compiled an amazing overall record of 50 wins and just three losses, and won six gold, one silver and one bronze medal in the eight Olympic Games they have competed in.

GENO AURIEMMA, USA Head Coach

You obviously haven't had the chance to scout your Friday opponent, USK Praha, so what things do you want your U.S. team to focus on?
You're right, we don't have the opportunity to see USK Praha play before we play them, but they haven't seen us play either so it's going to be interesting going into the game.

We know what we've worked on the six or seven days we practiced so I want to make sure we do a pretty good job on the things that we've practice and the other stuff we'll just have to adjust as we go along. We have some players who played against the Prague team so we'll get some information from them. It's good sometimes to go into a game where you just have to adjust on the fly.

They'll be some constants for the team, what kind of things are you emphasizing to your team?
Well for this team I don't envision scoring being a problem so we'll have to make sure that we do a good job playing solid defense and rebounding the basketball and not thinking that we're just going to go out there and outscore people. We've got 13 players that can put the ball in the basket, now we want to identify those that really want to play defense and we've got to establish an identity of ourselves as a team and I think the identity starts on the defensive end and carries over to the offense.

You've got 13 players, you don't really have combinations set, chemistry set, will you be looking at that?
What we're going to try and do over the three day period is put as many combinations together as we can and see what works best. Someone may play and not look as good and you change the people they're playing with and they look a lot better. Playing 13 players is difficult but they're all here for a reason and I want to give them all an opportunity to see what they can do. It may not happen the first day, but over a three day period we'll experiment as much as we can and leave here with a pretty good understanding of who can do what.

You've spoken to the team about USA teams always having a target on their back whenever they play. You've got experienced players, you've got players who have played professionally and for USA Basketball , do you think this team fully understands that?
We have four Olympians (Sue Bird, Swin Cash, Sylvia Fowles and Candace Parker) with us right now so they've experienced first hand what it's like to take the court internationally and know that the U.S. is the one team everybody wants to beat. Certainly our approach is that's the way it should be. We go into every game as the favorite, we go into every game expecting to win. Every other team comes in knowing if they beat us it's the highlight of their year, maybe of the history of their country to beat the United States in basketball. So it's a tough thing to live up to but you know what, that's better than the alternative which is you win some, you lose some. The U.S. is the U.S. because we win ‘em all, all the time.