Free throws were giving the Gamecocks trouble. Now they’re hitting them at record pace
It was Thursday night. South Carolina women’s basketball had just gone on the road and defeated its biggest SEC rival, Mississippi State, by 23 points. Coach Dawn Staley led her team back to the locker room after the game. And the young Gamecocks squad immediately jumped on something in the score sheet.
“Oh, my goodness, that’s the first thing that our players said once we got in the locker room — ‘We only missed 3 free throws,’ ” Staley said with a laugh. “So that was cool, the smiles on their faces is something that we want to see that continued throughout the rest of the season.”
Specifically, the Gamecocks went 19 of 22 from the charity stripe, an 86.4% mark that far outstripped the team’s 62.1% rate entering the game. It had been a bit of a bugaboo all year long — USC ranked outside the top 300 nationally, and senior LeLe Grissett and sophomore Brea Beal, both competent shooters everywhere else, were below 50%.
So how did USC follow that up when it took on Alabama this Sunday?
With the program’s best free-throw shooting performance by percentage in at least 15 years — and ever under Staley. It’s also the best two-game stretch in Staley’s tenure.
At 19 of 20, the Gamecocks shot 95% on their free-throw attempts. Sophomore guard Zia Cooke was responsible for the one miss, but she also led the team with five makes. And Grissett and Beal were both a perfect 2-for-2.
“Happy for LeLe, happy for Brea, happy for our team. We’re hopefully hitting our stride at a great time at which the season is coming ... to the meat of it,” Staley said.
This two-game stretch of 38-of-42 shooting has improved South Carolina’s free-throw percentage by a full 3.3 percentage points. And while it may not seem like much, free throws have been an area Staley has emphasized.
In the Gamecocks’ lone loss of the season thus far, they were a miserable 4 of 11 on free throws against N.C. State. Making them all wouldn’t have completely erased the 54-46 deficit, but it could have easily changed the complexion of the game late.
And in a number of single-digit victories, such as a 69-65 contest with LSU, 75-70 over Kentucky and 79-72 against Gonzaga, the Gamecocks left plenty of points at the charity stripe — shooting below 62% in all three, missing at least eight attempts each. Again, better free-throw shooting would likely have changed the complexion of the game, giving South Carolina valuable breathing room.
By contrast, in the five games where USC has shot above 70% on free throws, it has won by at least 16 points every time. And as Staley hinted at, good free-throw shooting is often crucial for success in March Madness.
The key to South Carolina’s turnaround at the line, Staley said, has been to ... not change things up.
“Here’s the big thing. You see what the free-throw percentage is from game to game, and were we concerned? Absolutely,” Staley said. “When you’re concerned with something, you can skin a cat so many different ways. If we chose to ... get into their heads and change what we’ve been doing, maybe it would have gone the other way. But I think we just took it as one thing that we needed to work on.”
Free-throw shooting hasn’t typically been a particular strength of South Carolina’s — the 2018-19 team set a program record shooting 73% from the free-throw line, and that mark didn’t even crack the top 80 nationally. That was the one season in the past half-decade where the Gamecocks were even in the top 100.
But it’s still something Staley makes a point of working on. And that hasn’t changed in those most recent run of success.
“I mean, we do a ton of free-throw shooting drills. We put them under pressure, we actually, when we’re competing up and down, we’ll stop and actually treat it as a game,” Staley said. “So there are so many different things we’re doing. (Associate head coach Lisa Boyer) is probably one that comes up with a lot of different free-throw shooting competitions that will force our players to concentrate and get into their routine.”
NEXT USC BASKETBALL GAME
Who: No. 2 South Carolina (14-1, 9-0 SEC) vs. Auburn (5-11, 0-8 SEC)
When: 7 p.m. Thursday
Where: Auburn Arena, Auburn, Alabama
Watch: Streaming online on SEC Network Plus via WatchESPN
This story was originally published February 1, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
