South Carolina assistant was the ‘difference maker’ in championship, Dawn Staley says
South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley took a moment postgame to shout out one of the behind-the-scenes heroes of USC’s national championship win Sunday.
After the No. 1 Gamecocks beat No. 1 Iowa, 87-75, to complete an undefeated season and win their third national championship, Staley heaped praise on first-year assistant coach Winston Gandy for the scouting report he did on the Hawkeyes and star guard Caitlin Clark leading into the game.
“I’m gonna tell you, Winston Gandy did a hell of a job on this scout,” Staley said in a postgame interview with ESPN’s Holly Rowe minutes after South Carolina’s win. “A hell of a job. He lost a lot of sleep. We had very little prep time. He explained it in a way that our kids could lock in and execute. And they weren’t going to be denied.”
Staley went on to shout out Gandy a second time during a sit-down interview on the ESPN studio set at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland later that afternoon.
Asked by analyst Carolyn Peck how South Carolina altered its game plan to beat Iowa after losing to the Hawkeyes in last year’s Final Four, Staley said Gandy deserved “a lot of credit” and has been working with USC’s perimeter players “every single day.”
“Sometimes I wanna say, ‘Hey buddy, give them a break. It’s too much. It’s too much,’ right?” Staley said. “And then he had the Iowa scout and, trust me, he was the difference maker. He watched them and watched them and watched them. It was so much information overload that I just kinda let him talk.”
“We couldn’t make as many adjustments as he was seeing, so we just tried to make the big adjustments. We tried to create a game plan that we felt like could get us to win.”
Slowing down Caitlin Clark
The Gamecocks did an excellent job containing Clark, the NCAA’s all-time leading scorer, after she torched them in the first quarter. Clark had 18 points, three 3-pointers and six free throws in the opening frame alone. But she finished the game with 30 points on 10-of-28 shooting, 5-of-13 3-point shooting and no more free-throw attempts.
After the first quarter, the national player of the year only had 12 points on 5-of-20 shooting and 2-of-11 3-point shooting while being guarded by an array of USC players, most notably starting point guard Raven Johnson.
Staley, in her postgame comments to ESPN, emphasized that Gandy had very little rest while assembling his scout on Iowa. Friday’s Final Four game between Iowa and UConn (which followed USC’s win over NC State) didn’t tip off until 9:32 p.m. and concluded at 11:36 p.m with a Hawkeyes win.
From there, Gandy had roughly 36 hours to watch film and assemble a scouting report on Iowa, a No. 1 overall seed itself, to help inform Staley and the rest of the staff and players in their preparation for Sunday.
Gandy is in his first year as an assistant coach at South Carolina. A Maryland alumnus who got his start as a practice player for the Terrapins women’s basketball team, Gandy most recently coached at Duke before Staley hired him last summer to replace longtime assistant Fred Chmiel, who’d accepted the head coaching job at Bowling Green.
“We did start to work Iowa scout the Tuesday, Wednesday before we got here,” Staley said. “We didn’t tell our players that, but that’s exactly the rotations we needed to guard her. They didn’t know. Thank goodness they don’t really (notice), they just think you’re working on NC State. But I’m super proud.”
Staley’s insistence on shouting out an assistant coach whose contributions might have otherwise gone unseen drew widespread praise on social media from fans and coaches at various levels.
LSU assistant coach Gary Redus II (who won a championship last year as a member of Kim Mulkey’s staff) was among those to shout out Staley on Sunday afternoon.
“The Winston Gandy shoutout almost got me,” Redus wrote on the platform X (formerly Twitter), attaching a happy crying face emoji.
This story was originally published April 7, 2024 at 9:30 PM.
