South Carolina women's basketball: Everything Dawn Staley said to preview Penn State

On Friday, Dawn Staley spoke to the media after practice to preview Sunday’s game against Penn State. Here’s everything she had to say.

Is everybody healthy and ready to go?

Uh, for the most part. 

Anybody gonna miss the game tomorrow? 

Tomorrow? Yeah, everybody’s gonna miss the game tomorrow. (Sunday.) I don’t know. It’s we’ll see. Every day is an adventure. But I’ll tell you this, whoever we have, we’re gonna play to the best of our ability. 

What does Penn State do on film that you guys look out for? 

They’ve got a big (Gracie Merkle) that creates a lot of space, very efficient in the paint. They’ve got a dynamic point guard who can really fill up a stat sheet and put some points on the scoreboard. They’ve got everybody else that can actually space the floor, shoe some threes. Not balance when it comes to their top two, but balance as far as scoring, where everybody’s a scoring threat. They just play to their strength, which is a great quality. 

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You don’t typically carry the full 15 that you can on a roster. When you have a year like this, do you ever consider it? Or just more?
15? (shakes head) 12, 13 at the most. And if it’s 13, then somebody’s gonna have to go ask our AD for a little bit more money, you know, to fill that roster. For right now, I really think for this particular year, it’s probably what we have as far as rev share and NIL. So we’ve got to go pan-handle a little bit for some more to increase our roster.

Do you happen to remember when you started the little birdie flew into the nest thing? Is there a deep history behind that?
Ooh, that’s your job. I don’t remember. I need you to tell me

The first tweet I saw was in 2020.
Raven (Johnson) was Big Birdie. Raven proclaimed herself as Big Birdie. And that might have been it. 2020.

Is it kind of a way to talk about recruits that haven’t signed yet? Is it kind of a cheeky way to connect with fans with recruiting? 
No, it’s when we’ve got a commitment. We haven’t said it enough. We haven’t said it enough this year. 

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Penn State was one of the schools that recruited you and you said that when you visited you didn’t like the dorms –
The dorms didn’t compare to the dorms at Virginia.

Do you ever think about the butterfly effect of where your career might have gone if you had gone to Penn State? 
No. I think I made the right choice for where I was in my life and it worked out. Even when I was at Virginia, I didn’t think I made the wrong choice. Even through the good, the bad… I know every freshman or transfer, at some point during their stop, really regrets. And that’s part of it, that’s normal to regret or to say, what if? I never regret it. I still have really strong relationships with, particularly, Dan Durkin, who actually put a lot of time in recruiting me as an assistant coach at Penn State. So I didn’t lose a friend in him.

Agot Makeer was back at practice so I assume she has been cleared. How is she doing after the (concussion protocol) layoff?
Better. Better. Better, better. With Agot, you just have to be careful. We don’t want a second (concussion), so we’re very, very careful about how we’re going to use her. So it’s good to have her in practice doing a little bit of things, but not all things. 

Ayla McDowell has taken a step for recently How important is it to get the rest of the bench up to that level over the next month?
It’s really important. Really important to get them minutes, just experience, just familiarity. Our practice guys, our Highlighters, do a really good job of giving them some experience, but there’s nothing compared to game experience. Nothing compared to playing in Colonial Life Arena, playing on the road, and hearing everything that comes with that. We’re gonna be a lot more intentional about getting them in the game, so they can help us down the stretch.

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