In ‘Coach Staley Boot Camp’ before NCAAs, Gamecocks raise intensity to new levels
On Selection Monday, South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley repeated several times that when her team took the floor for the first round of the NCAA Tournament, it would look far different than the one that crashed out of the SEC tourney in stunning fashion, losing to underdog Arkansas 95-89.
On Thursday, a day before the fourth-seeded Gamecocks face off against No. 13 seed Belmont, she and her players detailed just how that will happen.
In the two weeks between the Arkansas loss and the Belmont game, USC has had its “most intense” practices of the season, several players said. Staley confirmed that she did indeed “up the ante,” so much so that junior guard Tyasha Harris compared the preparation to what she experienced in USA Basketball camps.
“We’ve been practicing for a long time and keeping up the pace at it, too,” Harris said. “Like, say our first segment is transition defensive stuff — we’ll do that really really hard, nonstop, and (Staley will) challenge some of us to stay on the floor the entire time instead of coming off.
“And so then we might to get to where we shoot our free throws, and then we have our little snack break, and then it’s third quarter, and we gotta keep it up, keep the pace up. And then it’s fourth quarter, and we might scrimmage 10 minutes, and another 10 minutes.”
Staley was blunt in assessing why there was a need for practices to be so intense.
“I don’t like losing, I don’t like being OK with losing, and obviously you gotta change some things up, you gotta figure out why you lost the game,” Staley said.
The main thing Staley took from that loss, and the point she and her players repeated Thursday ahead of Belmont, was the team’s need for better defensive pressure — Arkansas scored the most points of any SEC opponent in the Dawn Staley era, and Belmont will likely challenge the Gamecock defense with one of the most efficient scoring offenses in the country, per Her Hoop Stats.
“One of the main focuses (in practice) was more pressure, putting pressure on the ball,” junior forward Mikiah Herbert Harrigan said. “We have to be engaged on the defensive end because, as everyone knows, they shoot a lot of outside shots.”
Staley wants her players to be “dictators” on defense — instead of letting offenses attack them, the emphasis has been on disrupting plays before they even begin, Harris said.
“After that last game, we got two days off, but we got right into it. It was just as soon as we got into the gym, ‘I want more pressure,’ immediately,” senior guard Doniyah Cliney said of Staley’s approach in practices.
And Belmont coach Bart Brooks isn’t expecting the upset loss or intense practices to rattle South Carolina’s confidence in the slightest. Instead, he thinks it will make them all the more angry and ready to attack the Bruins on Friday.
“I think we’re angry at (Arkansas) for sending South Carolina to ‘Coach Staley Boot Camp’ for two weeks ... because their program has gotten to a place where they’re expecting to play for a championship when they get in the SEC tournament,” Brooks said.
HOW TO WATCH
Who: No. 4 seed South Carolina (21-9) vs. No. 13 seed Belmont (26-6)
When: 1:45 p.m. Friday
Where: Halton Arena, Charlotte, North Carolina
Watch: ESPN2
Listen: 107.5 FM in Columbia area
