Everything South Carolina women's basketball coach Dawn Staley said ahead of the Clemson game
South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley met with the media ahead of Wednesday’s in-state rivalry game with Clemson. Here’s what she had to say.
Q: You’re obviously familiar with playing Clemson, but they’ve got a new coach, new system. What have you seen from them so far?
Staley: They spread you out. They’ve got nine transfers. Loyal McQueen, who’s a South Carolina favorite. Just a lead guard that does a lot for them, but they do what they do well. They stay within. If you can shoot the three ball, you shoot it. If you’re a downhill driver …. They’re going to put us back on our heels, and we’ve just got to play our defense.
[Win two tickets to the South Carolina-Duke WBB game]
Q: South Carolina’s post defense
Staley: We just have to get better. I mean, it’s no different. I think we are all making adjustments. We’re not small by any means, but we’re smaller, so we’re going to call us small ball. There are ways in which we’ve got to just defend. It is a lot more exhausting, but we’ve got a lot more players that we can enter the game and just have fresh bodies. We’re going to have to do it by committee, and we don’t mind doing that.
Q: Tessa Johnson’s status for tomorrow?
Staley: Tessa, what’s your status for tomorrow? (Tessa says she’s going to play). There you go.
Q: Tomorrow, this team has a chance to break your program’s winning streak with 43 straight games, a record that was set by the Freshies not too long ago. How cool is that for this group to be able to break something from a special group?
Staley: I didn’t know that, but we just take one game at a time. We’ll take any win, and to be able to do something that the Freshies have done means that you can do it in a different way. … It’s been much different than the Freshies had done it, but we look forward to being in the company of royalty.
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Q; It’s a rivalry game tomorrow. What’s that like? It’s always fun if you can get the bragging rights and get a Palmetto point.
Staley: It’s always great. When I first came here, I said, we’ll take a UConn win over a Clemson win any day, right? People started going crazy, right? I’ll take a win against Clemson, obviously for the rivalry, for the Palmetto point, for hopefully opening the winning ways for men’s basketball as well as football.
Q: It’s the start of a tough stretch. A road game, then at UCLA, then come back and go to Florida. I know you like to challenge the team, but that many road games in a row, is that a good thing?
Staley: It’s where the schedule had to be. It’s not preferable, but again, people switched up on us. We got to take games that we don’t normally take, meaning there’s four in a row away from home. We just got to play the schedule that we had to play. Hopefully, the NCAA committee, when it comes down to wherever we sit, they’ll take a look at that. It wasn’t by design, but it was by default. We’ll take it.
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