NCAA WOMEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP: REGIONAL SEMIFINAL - NORTH CAROLINA VS SOUTH CAROLINA

March 24, 2022

Dawn Staley

Greensboro Coliseum

South Carolina Gamecocks

Sweet 16 Media Conference

DAWN STALEY: Just super excited to be here in Greensboro to participate in the Sweet 16. Our players are looking forward to some great competition against UNC and we hope that it's a packed house.

You'll get Friday night two great games with four quality, quality teams to represent our tournament.

Q. I wanted to ask just starting off with some of the offensive struggles as of late. What in practice have you all been working on heading into the Sweet 16 and the Elite 8 just with shooting and everything going on offensively.

DAWN STALEY: We're getting a lot of shots up and we're breaking some of our offenses down, so our players feel comfortable, I think. Then we're just doing us. We're working our offenses. Five on O, just creating a rhythm.

But we're also just letting our players know you just got to put the ball in the hole. We don't want them gun shy. We want them to be able to shoot the shots that they naturally take and allow our rebounders to do their job.

Q. You've been number one all season long. What is it like, the feeling, the sense of pride for you and the players, and also just the weight and responsibility and the burden of being number one. As you get deeper in the tournament, does that weight get a little heavier?

DAWN STALEY: I think to be the number one team throughout the entire season is -- it's an awesome feat. Not very many teams do it, and the ones that do do it are well-respected in our game. I think for our players, I mean, they never put the cart before the horse. They're always in the moment.

And they're not thinking about being the number one team in the country or the overall number one seed. I think our players have had one goal, just one goal all season long, and that was to win a National Championship.

Whether we said it every day or whether we said it part of the season, that's their main focus. Throughout bad shooting nights and seeing the experts talk about our team in various ways, they're not even thinking about that.

They're just thinking about winning the next game, so I think it's really important for us to just stay in the moment and not let the moment get ahead of us. We've been the same team, approaching it the same way, and I like our team for it.

They have a short memory for good or bad, and they turn the page and they figure out ways to win and not feel the pressure of what being the number one team is and what being the number one overall number one seed. When it comes to pressure, our players are really focused on outcomes, and that's just to win the next game.

Q. Your defense has been great all year, but it's been really special these first two games of the tournament. Do you coach defense any differently? What do you demand out of players on detention? And when you look at -- when you're recruiting players, high school players, defense maybe a lot of times is an afterthought. Do you have to project, hey, this person has great feet so I can really turn them into a better defender than they really are?

DAWN STALEY: We don't necessarily just look at someone that can be a great defender. I think defense is a decision. You either are going to do it or not. It's not really a skill set. We've been very fortunate that for years -- I mean, we've been defending as long as I've been a coach, because we really didn't know offensively what that always looked like.

And I think with this particular group they call themselves the freshmen, Aliyah, Bree, Zia, Olivia, and LA. I think they came in with the attitude of I'm going to do anything that I can do to get on the floor and help us win.

And from the leadership of Kai (phonetic) and Kiki, they laid the foundation of playing defense a certain way, and everybody around them they've elevated.

I think when people come to the University of South Carolina, they know they're going to have to play defense or else the likelihood of them playing a whole lot is slim to none.

That's the way it has to be, because when we've shot the way we shot the last two games or the four out of five or however many of them, you never know, you know, but our defense is doing its job, and hopefully we'll continue to do that.

Q. Bree was speaking earlier this week about just trusting each other and how they played together so long, they really have that bond. How different is it coaching a team that has been together for a long time at this stage in the tournament compared to a team that has maybe never been here before?

DAWN STALEY: I think as a coach you look at the post of your team. You look at what you need to really concentrate on and zone in on. With the group of players that we have you cannot skip steps, but they can handle certain things. They can handle certain things in the locker room. They can handle certain things in their apartments, meaning emphasis.

We know that we have to play a certain way. Like if we're going to play ball screens a certain way, we want to work on how we're going to attack ball screens. They are doing their -- they are teaching our youngsters how that looks, and they're forcing them or encouraging them to know the information so we as coaches can work on something else.

We're not constantly talking about ball screen defense or offense. We can say in the overall picture, here's what this looks like, here's what we want to accomplish, and we know that the information is being received and executed.

Q. So after Kentucky's loss to St. Peters in the men's tournament, Coach Calipari said it was harder to play defense not only when shots weren't falling because not only because of transition, just because teams get frustrated and lose focus. Your team has not done that. Can you speak to their ability to remain focused on the defensive end even when the offense isn't rolling?

DAWN STALEY: That's who we are. I think when you have an identity, and we created a defensive identity, and that is to make it really hard. I think our players are super competitive in that they don't want to be that one that has a defensive lapse, and they hold each other to that standard of giving everything that they have, and it becomes contagious, and you don't want to be the one.

And I think we've done that over the course of the season, and we'll continue to do that as we play each and every game. It's not when you have built up some endurance to do it all the time, and it's a detail thing for us. We detail what we need to do on both sides of the ball. We're just much better doing it on the defensive side of the ball.

Q. Dawn, between the last two seasons with COVID complications, this team hasn't had to travel for a true regional appearance in the NCAA Tournament. So I'm just curious, with so many players that haven't been in a regional kind of atmosphere, was there anything you did this week to get them prepared for that, or is that something that you felt like maybe didn't need to be addressed?

DAWN STALEY: We never really talked about that. I think our players are familiar with being in this type of setting because the SEC tournament creates a very similar setting. We have an older group. They really don't care who they're playing, where they're playing.

They know they have a job to do, and they take that very, very seriously. So the location is -- location just isn't anything that we spend a whole lot of time talking about.

Q. Coach, this is a little bit of an off-court question. There's been a lot of changes this year. Among them, name, image, and likeness. I'm wondering, as someone who has worked with brands before and been a spokesperson, have you given any advice to your players? How have you kind of guided them through this new year, and what has it felt like to you as a coach? Have things felt different?

DAWN STALEY: My guidance came in the fall. I addressed our team. I asked them if they wanted me to help them identify some agents that they -- some potential agents that could represent them. Some of them said yes; others decided to do their own thing. I met with them, the potential agents and their parents on Zoom.

We did that. It was an exhausting week of doing that with each player that wanted to go through that process so they could secure some representation and we could get on with our season, because I didn't want it to be a distraction as we play games as we got into our season.

So I think they picked great agents. It hasn't been a distraction. We're in a good place with them. I do think some of our players are making pretty good money while still performing at a high level.

Q. You referenced in your opening remarks a packed house. You guys have led the nation in attendance for a while now. It's got to be more than just winning. What do you attribute that to? And ticket sales here have been robust. What does that crowd do for you?

DAWN STALEY: We've been in a really long marriage with our fans. It's been great. It's been great because I think it organically happened.

Our program started winning. We are very fortunate that we had some of the best talent in our state, and we made sure we cornered our state to make it real difficult for them to tell us no.

So South Carolina is a state in which they love their own and they're going to show up to support their own, and when you have the best talent in the state representing our program, they come, and they keep coming. And it was winning. It was word of mouth.

It was kind of bandwagonish, but it happened organically, and we've created an environment in which people want to come see us play.

People want to come downtown and have dinner and come to a game. It's investing in women. It's investing in women on our campus from the president to the AD. Everybody at South Carolina want our women's programs to win.

I'm not just saying women's basketball because women's soccer team has been in the Final Fours. Our softball team goes to the NCAA Tournament. Tennis just beat, I think, Tennessee. Were they number one? We've been doing this for years, and you get a glimpse of what it looks like when our women's basketball team plays.

Q. You mentioned investing in women, and behind you there's a big banner that reads March Madness. Y'all are on the road for the first in the tournament. What have you noticed that's different about the women's tournament this season compared to the previous season and the issues that came up last year?

DAWN STALEY: What I noticed is what you don't know, you don't know.

Last year we were in San Antonio, and obviously Sedona Prince did a TikTok video that showed the inequities, and then you really just start looking. Like you look at games in San Antonio and other sites, and you just don't recognize that it's an NCAA Tournament game.

Now, you fast forward to this year. Even when we hosted the first and second rounds it looked like a neutral site. It felt like a neutral site. When you walked through the doors and you walked through the hallways you see the signage.

Then you look at the participants. I looked at Howard. I looked at Miami, South Florida, Incarnate Word, they all felt like they were in the NCAA Tournament because of all the hooplah, all the signage.

That's what you want to make everybody that participates in a tournament feel like. They're something special. You don't want it to feel like it's a home game for South Carolina because we got to host.

I think it's a great start. It's a really great start, but I'm eager to see what five years and ten years down the line, what that looks like, and I hope it looks like what when they started investing in the men's tournament what that looked like.

I'm almost certain that our tournament can generate a lot of money, and I hope in return we can create the same kind of pecking order, the units like the men's basketball team. They get money coming back to their universities depending on how far they go, and we can get there. We can surely get there when the investment is done in the right way.

Thank you.