Dawn Staley on South Carolina's chemistry: 'They've created a bond'

South Carolina is two wins away from completing an undefeated, national championship-winning season one season after losing seven players to graduation.

Gamecocks head coach Dawn Staley had to assemble an entirely new team — which entered the offseason seeing the “majority” of the team being “out of shape.” However, her team used that as a driving force heading into the season. They helped one another and held each other to the standard that’s been put on display down the stretch this season.

“They’ve created a bond that happened just — it wasn’t forced by the coaching staff,” Staley said ahead of the Final Four. “Obviously we like it to be a lot more disciplined and we like to adhere to the standards that we’ve had throughout the years that we’ve been successful and we found success in that correlation.

“And then this team pretty much blows up all of that like in one summer. And then they figure out a way to work together. I think a lot of that had to do with our performance coach, Molly Binetti, because she had the tall task, the very tall task — she said this was probably the most out-of-shape, really not-very-competitive team that she’s ever had to work with.”

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Staley chalks this up to her team being so young. These players, who were individual stars on their high school and AAU team, were big fish in a small pond. Staley said they were used to working on their time. In turn, Staley had to whip them into shape and creating habits on and off the court.

Something as simple as eating a good breakfast every morning would qualify as a good habit under Staley’s book. If her players can remember to eat every morning, they can be on time for meetings, they can respond to text messages, etc. But it starts with Staley getting up and saying “that’s not how we do things.”

“But you can’t expect that from the jump because they haven’t been that way,” Staley continued. “So we have to create the habits. They created really good habits and they started holding each other accountable for their actions, both on and off the court, because when one person acts out, we pretty much use it as a team learning lesson. So, pretty cool evolution of how this team has created an identity that helps them perform at a high level.”

Those habits paved a road to the Final Four for the Gamecocks, and will continue their journey against NC State on Friday. Tip-off is scheduled for 7 p.m. ET live on ESPN.