On verge of SEC title, USC isn’t interested in sharing crown: ‘We just want it all’
As the South Carolina women’s basketball team recovered from a dogfight of a win Thursday, senior guard Tyasha Harris was asked about the Gamecocks’ chance to clinch a share of the SEC regular season title with just one more victory, starting Sunday against Kentucky.
“Sunday, we win the championship? We win it outright?” Harris asked, looking genuinely surprised.
When informed that a win would only guarantee a share of the title, she smirked.
“Oh, we’re not worried about that. We’re just worried about winning and winning the next game and we’ll see what happens then,” she said.
USC’s only competition for the championship, Mississippi State, came close to handing the Gamecocks the title a little early Thursday, needing overtime to defeat Auburn and stay within two games of Carolina. As it stands, a win Sunday would mean South Carolina could finish no worse than 14-2 in SEC play, tied for the very best Mississippi State can do.
And thanks to the head-to-head tiebreaker the Gamecocks hold over the Bulldogs, it would also guarantee them the No. 1 seed in the conference tournament.
But when it comes to regular season titles, the league doesn’t break ties — if two teams finish with the same record, they both are declared champions, regardless of head-to-head results. And Harris and South Carolina aren’t shy about the fact that they don’t want anyone else to be able to call themselves SEC champs.
“Nobody really likes to share. We’re going to treat it as an only child, where we just want it all,” coach Dawn Staley said. “And in order for us to do that, we have to play well. We can’t just say we want it all without putting in the work that we need to do to make sure that happens. But for us, if we take care of what we need to take care of, those things will come to us. If we don’t, they won’t.”
Right now, taking care of what they need to take care of means beating No. 14 Kentucky, a squad the Gamecocks already thrashed this season, 99-72. The Wildcats are in a tie for third place in the SEC and feature one of the conference’s best players in sophomore guard-forward Rhyne Howard, who had 28 points in the teams’ first meeting but couldn’t single-handedly keep her squad close.
“We hopped on them fairly quick,” Staley said of that Jan. 2 matchup. “We didn’t really give them time to adjust. By the time they adjusted to how we were playing, the game was out of hand. Then they they broke us down at some point, like in the third quarter, when they made a dent into our lead.
“We know that it’s going to be a hostile environment. We know that it’s probably not going to be as lopsided as it was. They’ll be ready to play. Everybody’s gotten better — Kentucky’s gotten better. ... I think in a lot of regards, we’ve gotten better and we just got to stay at a high level and approach it at a high level.”
That theme of consistent, high-level play was one Staley was preaching throughout practice after the Gamecocks looked out of sorts and had trouble putting away a feisty LSU squad that outscored them in two of four quarters on Thursday. After nearly a month straight of easy victories and superior play, USC obviously struggled, and Staley took it as an opportunity for her team to experience working through a frustrating situation.
“It just shows that we need to fight, day in and day out,” Harris said. “Anybody can come up and get us. We just have to play how we know how to play, 110% at all times.”
WHEN DO THE GAMECOCKS PLAY NEXT?
Who: No. 1 South Carolina (26-1, 13-0 SEC) at No. 14 Kentucky (20-5, 9-4 SEC)
When: 2 p.m. Sunday
Where: Memorial Coliseum, Lexington, Kentucky
Watch: ESPN2
Listen: 98.5 FM in Columbia area
