Dawn Staley Explains How This Year's Gamecock WBB Team Has Evolved
Whenever sports fans see a team go undefeated throughout their regular season, winning their conference in the process, then making it to the second-to-last round of their postseason, they'd probably imagine it's been smooth sailing for that team. However, as the head coach of South Carolina's women's basketball team, Dawn Staley, has made it abundantly clear over the past couple of months, the Gamecocks have had their share of choppy waters to navigate, most of which were self-inflicted.
The Philadelphia native hadn't done a full-fledged deep-dive into the issues Carolina faced this past offseason and early on in the regular season until earlier this afternoon when she met with the media here in Cleveland for her pre-Final Four press conference.
"We're just more disciplined or a more focused group," Dawn began. "Obviously, we like to be a lot more disciplined, and we like to adhere to the standards that we've had throughout the years that we've been successful with -- And then this team pretty much blows up all of that like in one summer and then they figure out a way to work together," Staley continued. "I think part of that is just we were so young, like when you're having multiple players [come] from high school, they're used to working on their time. They're the biggest fish in a small pond in their high school, and they can run the roost. You bring those habits into our setting, and you don't think things are important like breakfast is important to us. So you got to get up and come to breakfast. Someone will miss breakfast. Someone [would] just miss meetings. Some of them just didn't respond to text messages like, 'Where did they do that?' the head coach recalled thinking. "Then you know you have to insert yourself as a coach and a coaching staff to say that's not how we do things. But you can't expect that from the jump because they haven't been that way. So we had to create the habits. They created really good habits, and they started holding each other accountable for their actions both on and off the court. When one person acts out, we pretty much use it as a team learning lesson."
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