Tourney pushes coaches into overdrive
ABOUT THE ONLY detail overlooked in South Carolina’s preparation for Sunday night’s NCAA tournament game against Syracuse is sleep deprivation for the Gamecocks’ coaching staff.
Since the women’s basketball tournament pairings were announced Monday evening, USC coaches have operated on 24-hour alert as they work gameplans and scouting reports.
Typical is the schedule of Lisa Boyer, USC’s associate head coach, who spent two days recruiting this past week in Salina, Kan., at the National Junior College Athletic Association tournament and also was responsible for the scouting report on Syracuse. USC faces the Orange in Sunday’s second round.
Following Friday night’s opening-round victory against Savannah State and Syracuse’s win against Nebraska, Boyer and the USC staff went to work late into the night. She retired at 2:30 a.m. and was awake at 7 to prepare for Saturday morning’s 10:30 team video session and noon practice.
“This is what you’ve got to do,” Boyer said. “You’ve got to push through. What in God’s creation could stop us from what we’ve got to do right now?”
Once USC learned Monday evening that Savannah State, Syracuse and Nebraska were headed to Columbia for the tournament’s opening two rounds, team video coordinator Hudson Jacobs began gathering video of all three teams.
USC, like most programs, works through Synergy Sports Technology, which provides video to subscribers of every NCAA game played, regular-season and tournament. USC could have downloaded all 30 or so games played by each of the Columbia tournament teams.
Having played Savannah State and Syracuse earlier in the season helped simplify USC’s video and note-gathering process. While Hudson was breaking down those two games and gathering video from select other games, assistant coaches called friends and associates in the profession for tips on possible opponents.
The coaching staff holed up in their offices Monday evening, ordered food in and doled out assignments. Assistant coach Darius Taylor was assigned a scouting report on Savannah State, Nikki McCray-Penson the same on Nebraska. Boyer got Syracuse.
By Tuesday morning, scouting reports were prepared on all three teams, and the staff began charting what it wanted to accomplish in Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday practices. By Tuesday morning, Hudson had prepared video packages on each of the four teams playing in Chapel Hill, N.C., since USC’s third-round opponent would advance from there if the Gamecocks win Sunday.
According to McCray-Penson, the scouting report presented to players includes a look at an opponent’s personnel as well as keys to USC winning that game. The personnel report includes tendencies, such as whether an opposing player likes to score on the block with her right hand or prefers to go to her left off the dribble. Keys to winning might include transition defense or boxing out for rebounds.
Following Friday’s win against Savannah State, USC players were presented scouting reports on Syracuse and Nebraska as they departed the locker room and returned to Colonial Life Arena to watch the second game.
“At this point, you have less time to prepare, so your scouting report has to be tight,” McCray-Penson. “You can’t be all over the place because you only have one day to prepare. You can’t put in 100 plays. They may run 100 plays, but you can’t get them all in.”
On Saturday morning, the coaching staff broke down and studied video of Syracuse’s win against Nebraska, then tweaked the scouting report, mostly to incorporate what the Orange did differently in Friday’s game than in the early season game against USC.
After the morning video session, USC conducted a two-hour practice geared almost entirely to working on the high-frequency plays and sets used by Syracuse. A shoot-around Sunday morning will be geared to USC’s shooting and running, mostly to keep players from lounging around all day.
Then, by Sunday night’s tip-off, Dawn Staley and her staff will be confident that the Gamecocks are well-prepared to play Syracuse. Catching up on sleep can come sometime in April.
This story was originally published March 21, 2015 at 10:17 PM with the headline "Tourney pushes coaches into overdrive."