Dawn Staley and the Gamecocks are moving on from last year — even if no one else will

If there’s one thing Dawn Staley, A’ja Wilson and South Carolina women’s basketball team wanted people to take away from the SEC media day on Thursday, it was this: The national champions are, for all intents and purposes, gone.

In their place, the Gamecocks have a widely respected coach, one of the best players in the country — and a lot of unknowns.

“A majority of the people who were actually at the (national championship) are gone, so it’s not really a lot of us, we’re outnumbered,” Wilson said. “The new girls, they haven’t really been through that national championship run, so they don’t know what that is, they can’t talk about it because they technically haven’t won it.”

Staley echoed that point, saying that “we established that very early on, the first day of practice: We weren’t going to dwell on last year’s team and last year’s success. We’re just going to try to figure out what our identity can be for this year’s team.”

And that captures the biggest contradiction about this year’s Gamecocks: Everyone outside of the program wants to talk about last season’s title. Everyone inside of it wants to just move on to the next challenge.

From last year’s squad, the Gamecocks return just six players. Filling out the roster is a combination of three freshmen and three transfers, and at the moment, Staley said her team brings certain things to the table last year’s team didn’t, but also has plenty of work to do.

“This team is really good at whatever we’re working at one particular time, they’re good at, they’re locked in on it. It’s how you get them to connect that to the next drill or to the next day,” Staley said. “That’s pretty hard for them and we’re implementing so many new things that there’s a connection to all of those things and we just got to figure out how to connect those things together.”

Still, Staley knows that she can’t change certain facts, like the one that other teams will likely bring an extra edge when facing the defending national champions, despite the mostly new roster.

“We talk (with young players) about having the targets on our backs, which is something that really they have nothing to do with (but) they have the targets,” Staley said.

As a result, “we have to make our team extremely competitive by making every drill competitive,” Staley said.

Staley’s coaching peers in the SEC expressed confidence that South Carolina was up to the challenge of handling that pressure.

“Dawn and that staff, they don’t rebuild, they reload,” Florida coach Cam Newbauer said. “When you compete for a national championship ... they’ve got that system running now and players know who they are, so I don’t think it really matters much who they lost.”

That being said, the chemistry of the team has changed in some fundamental ways since three star players left for the WNBA after last season, resulting in players like guard Tyasha Harris going from being afraid to “step on people’s toes” to becoming more assertive and a vocal leader for the team, a process she says she’s still working on — like so much regarding this year’s squad.

And even if the Gamecocks could somehow recreate last year’s team, Wilson has told the younger players, that wouldn’t make things easy by any stretch of the imagination

“My biggest thing is telling the girls that didn’t get the chance to go through it with us is that, it wasn’t easy. It was tough. We lost games, it wasn’t the perfect season,” Wilson said.

This story was originally published October 19, 2017 at 6:38 PM with the headline "Dawn Staley and the Gamecocks are moving on from last year — even if no one else will."