Everything Dawn Staley said following the USF game

South Carolina women’s basketball defeated USF, 78-62, on Sunday. Following the game, Gamecocks head coach Dawn Staley spoke with the media. Here’s everything she had to say.

Question: It seemed like you came out for the start of quarters, start of halves really well, and then maybe some, I don’t want to call it lag time, but kind of slowed down. What was your view from the bench?

Staley: I think sometimes when we get out to a quick start, we think it’s going to be a lopsided win. So we really just focus on offense. And then we get really careless and undisciplined defensively. And then teams will show you who they are and they capture the momentum of the game and they make you pay.

(USF) coach Fernandez talked about how he wanted to come out and control the third quarter and said he’s pretty sure the halftime speech to your team fired them up a bit. How did that conversation at halftime go between you and your team?

You know, no lighting of any fires. I think it’s, I mean, I get straight to the point. We were undisciplined. We started reaching. We started gambling. But once we got back to just being our disciplined style of play, we can create our own momentum. And I thought we did that.

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I know it sounds really simple, but you’ve talked a lot about layups this year, just you need to hit those. You had your season-high today in layup percentage. How much easier is it to design on offense when just the simple stuff’s going down like that?

It makes life easier. It surely does. I think if we didn’t make as many layups today at a pretty efficient clip, they could have made it interesting, because they did a really good job at intentionally – and that’s the way they play – they take the air out of the ball, so to speak. They’re moving. They make you play for 20, 25 seconds in the shot clock. So they take possessions away.

If we were not as efficient as we were, they could have made it interesting. So we try to pick our spots and speed the game up. Pressing a little bit, just keeping them off balance a little bit. I thought we did a really good job with that.

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Going off of that and just kind of in-the-paint production and the half-court offense, what did you see, what did you like in, not just that Sania, Joyce were hitting layups, but just kind of how Chloe was seeing them, how things like that, just the whole units as a whole?

There were times when we just really played connected basketball and really found the best shot on the floor, and we need to continue to do that in longer stretches. That’s what it was. I think one of the first plays of the game, Feagin catches the ball outside the paint. Like, why? The play is set for you to get two feet in the paint, seal your man, give you the ball. You have nothing else to think about besides putting the ball in the hole. Once we got to giving them the ball in the paint with two feet in the paint, they were really efficient, and if we can steal some moments like that throughout the game, it just helps decrease the amount of pressure that our offense has to perform at a high clip.

Is some of what you’re seeing out of your team, is it distressing to you at this point that you can look as good as maybe you did against TCU and then, you know, come in and have some issues?

Yeah, you get greedy, you know? You think they have it. Like, this is it. Like, this is our norm now, our standard, and then you backslide a little bit, and it’s just that fight. You just got to continue to fight for the way that we need to play, no matter who we’re playing, and it’s impactful basketball.

They’re young, though. They don’t, you know, they fall victim to just the crowd, pleasing the crowd. Just offensively, they get really up for making baskets. They forget about how we build our lead and we build our lead on what we’re able to do defensively.

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Your post players combined for over 50 points. You talked about it earlier before the season started. You know, it’s hard to replace Kamilla. How much confidence does it give the coaches to have to see what they did today come all together with the production they had?

Well, we’ve been really intentional about giving them the ball. I mean, really, really intentional. I think early in the season, we were pretty guard heavy in what we were doing and the amount of shots that we were taking, and we weren’t giving them as many looks as we needed to give them.

So we’ve been working on being intentional about giving them the ball, and they’ve done a great job of just moving the chain when it comes to their production from a rebounding, from a defensive standpoint, and now offensively, it’s starting to click for some of them.

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One thing Coach Fernandez credited you all for is your depth. Can you talk about the benefit of having that depth, but also the challenge of making sure everyone does get quality time?

We just talked about that in the locker room after the game. We play consistently 10, which is hard, right? We got 13, so the three other players that don’t play, they’re sitting, they just sat for 38 minutes, and then we put them in, and our expectation is, you don’t give them any points, and you push the lead forward. That’s our expectation. It’s hard, though, to sit there for that long and not get any run.

But I say for the 10 players, it’s hard as well, because if someone’s got it going on, more times than not, we’re going to play them till the cows come home, right? That means somebody’s minutes are shrinking. I looked at the stat sheet at halftime and Chloe played six minutes. I’m like, I got to get her minutes back. So she played a little bit longer in the third period than she normally does. Joyce played a little bit less, but Joyce got 13 minutes in the first half.

So you really have to explain to young people that that’s how it is or else they’ll think I’m not doing what I’m supposed to do, I’m playing bad. And that’s the furthest from it. I have to catch myself and say, hey, I got to explain this. You know, Breezy wasn’t playing, Breezy was playing about 15, 16 minutes, and I had to ask her how you feeling? She’s like, I’m fine. It’s Breezy, she’s always going to have a positive. I’m like, how do you feel about your minutes? And she was like, well, you know, I’m not playing as much. I said, you’re not, but they’re lean minutes. You’re not doing anything that that’s forcing me to sit you.

It’s just other players – (MiLaysia) was playing better. Lay, the more she plays like she plays, sometimes it leads to less minutes for Breezy or Tessa (Johnson) or (Paopao). So, it’s not anything wrong with what they’re doing. It’s more about what their competitors are doing. It’s a healthy competition. It’s a healthy thing that’s happening on our team because it’s a moving target. It’s not like one person, it’s multiple people that are playing well.

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