Dawn Staley on South Carolina's 2023-24 season: 'We just really got lucky'

It’s fair to say that title teams need a little luck along the way to eventually cut down the nets. That may not have seemed to apply to South Carolina during their 38-0 finish this year but, according to Dawn Staley, it very much did.

Staley evaluated the Gamecocks’ latest, title-winning season in an interview on ‘Bernstein & Holmes Show’ on 670 The Score on Wednesday. She said they were, in fact, lucky because of how rare their kind of success usually is, especially considering how far they had to come chemistry-wise during the offseason after several departures.

“You know, when you’ve been around the game as long as I’ve been around the game, it doesn’t happen very often like this or it probably never happens to a lot of people,” Staley said. “We just really got lucky. We got lucky.”

“We lost all of our starters. We returned some talent – no doubt about it. Talent doesn’t always say you’re going to win the last game of the season. What our talent was able to do is create some chemistry,” said Staley. “Like, it wasn’t easy. I think our players decided that they wanted to win for each other. We didn’t do any, like, team bonding or life skills or anything like that. We did some life skill stuff but it was more of just them. We wanted them to spend some time with each other.”

After all that work with one another, though, South Carolina realized what they could be from the very start. From then on, it was about keeping that alive for one another for the rest of the year.

“When the season started, I do think our game in Paris against Notre Dame really gave our players some confidence to know that they’re really good,” Staley said. “It was all on their doing too. Like, once they saw that they were good, they didn’t want to be anything but good, but great.”

However, it wasn’t always as easy as it looked in becoming the 10th undefeated team in their sport’s history. They may have won by nearly 30 points per game but they had to create their own luck sometimes. That included the best example of that which Staley recalled from earlier in their postseason run.

“There were some games in which it took some heroics by your now No. 3 pick in the WNBA Draft, Kamilla Cardoso, to hit a three in the SEC semifinals of the tournament. The claws of defeat were grabbing around our team. Somehow we got lucky enough to hit a miracle shot,” Staley noted. “From there, it continued to give us the boost to just take that confidence throughout the rest of the season knowing that we were going to be up against some great competition.”

Again, there’s nothing that surprising about South Carolina, the bracket’s No. 1 overall seed and the top team for the duration of the year, winning it all, even if, in her postgame comments, Staley described them as “the unlikeliest group to do it”. It’s just that even they needed some fortunate things to go their way from start to finish in order to eventually accomplish their historic feat in Cleveland.

“I think, you know, when you’ve been around the game as long as I’ve been around the game, it just doesn’t happen this way. You put the hard work in to it and we did,” said Staley. “We really got lucky. We got lucky. We got lucky throughout the season but we prepared to be lucky. You can just be lucky but you can also prepare to be lucky.”