South Carolina women's basketball: Why Dawn Staley called Sunday's win "disheartening"
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#1 South Carolina is 14-0 and has won its two SEC games by an average of 21 points. The Gamecocks are one of three remaining undefeated teams, are the only team in the top ten in the country in scoring offense and defense, and sit comfortably atop every ranking. But Dawn Staley is ticked off.
South Carolina comfortably beat Mississippi State on Sunday. The Gamecocks led by double digits for the entire second half and nearly 30 at one point.
But they were far from perfect. The Gamecocks missed 20 layups and despite the comfortable lead they never completely put the Bulldogs away. They allowed Jerkaila Jordan to torch them for 25 points just days after watching Leilani Correa go off for 28.
But still, how upset could you be with consecutive 20-point wins?
Waiting in the media room after the game, it slowly became apparent that you could be very upset. The Gamecocks normally meet with the media some 20-25 minutes after the game ends. On Sunday it took nearly 45 minutes, a clear sign that somebody was getting chewed out.
Bree Hall, who had just gone 3-4 from three and scored a team-high 15 points, finally entered the media workroom. The first question was a softball about the easy win. Hall ignored it.
“I think we didn’t go out there and execute the way that we should,” she said. We have really high standards and I feel like we didn’t meet them today.”
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Hall is one of the more experienced players on an otherwise inexperienced team. She was there for the national championship in 2022 and the heartbreak last season. She understands the narrow difference in focus between the two.
“We definitely were saying we did not meet the standards today and we’ll meet them the next game. Immediately,” Hall said, later adding that having five new players is not an excuse. “We all came in with high expectations and we all should be meeting them.”
It was clear that Staley’s message got through to Hall, if nobody else. But what was the message?
“You have to point things out,” Staley said. “What I said, you need to turn your camera off to really get the full gist of it. It’s just getting young people to recognize certain things. Sometimes you do it in different ways. You do it in this tone, where it just is conversational, and then you do it in a demanding tone. It was more of a demanding tone. I don’t really think they know. They’re so young and they’re so out of it. They are so into their worlds they don’t really understand what’s happening. That’s why we’re here as coaches, to help them figure it out. School’s out so their priorities change. They have a lot of time on their hands and probably none of it is dedicated to basketball outside of practice and games. We’ve got to get back in the flow. School starts tomorrow so hopefully the academic portion of it will take up a lot of space and the rest of it is hopefully us and basketball.”
That harkens back to something Staley has said a number of times this season, essentially that winning has come too easy for this team. She has repeatedly criticized their practice performance and stated that she sees a lot of flaws that the public hasn’t seen yet.
Early in the season, Staley shrugged it off with a laugh, calling the Gamecocks “gamers.” But now she isn’t amused.
It’s probably not a coincidence that South Carolina’s next game is on Thursday at Missouri. Mizzou Arena has been something of a house of horrors for South Carolina, with the Tigers holding a 4-2 record at home against the Gamecocks.
That includes an inexplicable upset two years ago when the Tigers were decimated by covid and a game where Staley was ejected for arguing fouls. Weird things happen to the Gamecocks at Mizzou when they aren’t completely focused.
“We did enough to win this basketball game but probably not enough to win this league,” Staley said. “I think we just played undisciplined and uncharacteristically on both sides of the basketball. That’s disheartening because we’ve worked really hard to have those instances not appear as much in the game, or we’re able to cover it up a little bit better. We weren’t able to do that today. Maybe Mississippi State had a little bit to do with that because they never stopped. They kept putting us back on our heels and they kept pushing the ball at us, and they kept staying in plays. I thought we just… I don’t know. It seemed like it was fun time out there. Obviously, we’ve got to get our team back to playing disciplined basketball.”
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Staley also said she wasn’t just unhappy with the game Sunday. South Carolina had fairly lackluster performances against Bowling Green, East Carolina, and Florida.
There were built-in excuses. Bowling Green was the last game before Christmas and ECU was the first game back, so some distractions could be expected. Florida was the first conference game, so a new experience. But Staley saw those one-game excuses becoming normalized and wanted to put a stop to it.
“They’ll get back because it’s our job to make sure they get back,” she said. “It’s how quickly. They usually do a good job of responding. It wasn’t our normal postgame talk. It was a little bit deeper than normal because it was somewhat of a buildup to this. We tried various ways to get them back, but you’ve got to jolt them back at this point. We’ll take (Monday) off and get back on Tuesday and Wednesday to get going and see where it takes us to Mizzou.”
