South Carolina holds off Clemson for ninth consecutive time despite sloppy play
In the bitter rivalry between South Carolina and Clemson, women’s basketball has been a constant for nearly a decade now — Dawn Staley’s Gamecocks consistently overwhelm the Tigers.
On Thursday night, USC continued that dominance, claiming its ninth consecutive win in the series, 69-57. But the mood afterward for the Gamecocks (2-0) was hardly celebratory, as sloppy play and poor shooting made it the closest game in that nine-year run.
Clemson (2-1) and new coach Amanda Butler entered the game planning to make things ugly, and they succeeded with a stifling zone defense that South Carolina struggled to figure out. While Staley tried to make adjustments to break the zone, the Gamecocks time and time again threw the ball into traffic where it was easily picked off.
“They were forcing us to one side, and we didn’t utilize our ball fakes or our snake in the middle, or having someone put in the middle,” said redshirt junior guard Te’a Cooper, who led the team with 15 points. “We just had to recognize it, and we didn’t.”
But on the other side of the ball, the Tigers had problems of their own taking advantage of USC’s struggles — Clemson forced 27 turnovers but scored just 20 points off them and turned it over 28 times on its own.
“We would get a turnover, and we’d come back down and cough it up, and obviously we can’t exchange a turnover for a turnover. That’s one of the areas that we’re really gonna want to kick ourselves when we review the film,” Butler said. “And then, we came down on the other end and just missed some shots.”
In one of the bright spots on the night for South Carolina, the Gamecocks tied a Staley-era record with 16 blocks, led by five from freshman Victaria Saxton. But Staley was loathe to claim many positives from the result, as South Carolina prepares to host No. 9 Maryland on Sunday.
“No, no,” Staley said when asked if it was good to play a competitive battle so early in the year. “I thought our defense was decent ... I just thought they disrupted us and we couldn’t get in a flow, from an offensive standpoint. We got enough possessions, just when you throw the ball away 27 times, that’s pretty uncharacteristic.”
Two players with starting experience, junior guard Tyasha Harris and sophomore guard Bianca Jackson, led USC turnovers with six each, while also combining to shoot below 30 percent from the floor.
“A lot of those (turnovers) came from our experienced players, and we have to do better in that instance,” Staley said.
The low point for Carolina came in the third quarter — after Jackson sparked a 19-2 run in the second quarter with a buzzer-beating 3 to end the first, USC led 41-25 at the break and seemed poised to turn the game into another annual blowout. Harris had nine points and three assists, all in the second quarter, and seemed to be heating up.
But Clemson came out of halftime and reeled off a 14-3 run to close within three points. The Tigers’ charge was led by graduate student guard Simone Westbrook, a seventh-year player, who contributed 14 points on the night. Meanwhile, USC turned the ball over 10 times in the period.
“Turnovers and our inability to execute offensively,” Staley said of the main problems in that quarter. “When you have that, you get disrupted, and you can’t get into the flow of the game.”
Clemson also outscored the Gamecocks 46-28 in the paint for the game, utilizing its posts’ size advantage for most of the night.
In the fourth quarter, however, USC redshirt senior forward Alexis Jennings, playing in her first game of the year and limited in minutes by injury, contributed five of her eight points on the night on two timely buckets. The first snapped a nearly four-minute scoreless stretch, and the second was a tough and-1 layup where she converted the free throw to restore a double-digit lead with 2:25 to play.
With 1:51 left, Jackson buried a 3-pointer to further cement the lead and essentially guarantee a win for the 11,539 fans in attendance.
South Carolina will get its first ranked test of the season next, facing No. 9 Maryland at Colonial Life Arena on Sunday at 5:30 p.m. Before then, Staley made it clear her team will have a lot to clean up.
“Our ball-screen defense, we’ll see a lot of that. Maryland is going to get up and down the floor, so our transition defense and our ability to slow them down ... and then taking care of the ball. That’s three things we’ll certainly have to work on,” Staley said.
This story was originally published November 15, 2018 at 8:40 PM.