Staley says team is playing ‘best basketball’ now
After being asked to throw the ceremonial first pitch for the today’s game against Wofford, South Carolina coach Dawn Staley felt nervous — she’s never thrown a first pitch before.
“The mound is far away,” Staley said. “Throwing that thing over home plate, I just don’t want to throw any balls in the dirt.”
Staley vowed to practice the pitch, as she knows firsthand that hard work pays dividends. After falling short in her first three seasons as coach of the Gamecocks, Staley is in the Sweet 16 for the first time in her coaching career. She finds herself thinking about if the two-time national champion baseball team can rub off on her squad, as it’s “a week away from maybe doing the unthinkable.”
But as the members of the USC baseball team know all too well, with success comes celebrity status in Columbia. Staley’s players find themselves experiencing that with a growing fan base clamoring for a team to get excited about after men’s basketball’s dismal season.
Senior guard La’Keisha Sutton said before the tournament professors and deans would stop her around campus to congratulate her, while forward Charenee Stephens experiences something similar whenever she goes somewhere with her Gamecock gear on.
Now that the team has won its first two games of the NCAA tournament, local stores are selling T-shirts to commemorate its achievements. For a team that hasn’t experienced the celebrity before, staying focused on the game ahead can be challenging, but Staley prepared her squad for this moment a while ago.
“They don’t get too high with the highs and too low with the lows,” Staley said. “They do a tremendous job at just maintaining. They’ve been doing it all season long. I think it is just a part of what we’ve ingrained in them from the very beginning because we knew sooner or later that we were going to have this type of success, so we surrounded ourselves with people who could understand and who could buy into it.”
The seniors are the first to admit it took them several years to buy into Staley’s vision, but now that everyone is on the same page, Staley thinks the team is playing its best basketball of the season. She attributes that to the belief the team has in one another, which comes out in a pressing time like the NCAA Tournament.
The Gamecocks will need to be at their best in preparation for top-seeded Stanford in Fresno, Calif., on Saturday. When USC was seeded in the Fresno region, the coaches looked at Stanford to prepare for the bracket. The Gamecocks lost to Stanford early last season, and “they’re pretty much the same team.”
Sutton and Stephens said that in preparation for Eastern Michigan, Staley might have been more intense than usual. Though she’ll undoubtedly resume that intensity in preparation for the Cardinal, Staley wants the team to really enjoy the moment and “smell the roses,” because “it could be over in 40 minutes, so to speak.”
Staley said the Gamecocks have short memories and have instituted a 24-hour rule for victories they have maintained throughout the season, but there’s a balance between relishing the journey and losing focus.
“It’s a pretty cool deal,” Staley said. “Considering what we’ve been through in the past two years, I think we’ve been in the news for some good and some bad things. Now, pretty much it’s all good because our players have a tremendous commitment to each other and tremendous belief in one another. Once you add all of those things, success is just waiting for you.”
Though Staley has stressed to her team to enjoy every second of the experience, she ironically found herself hoping the clock would speed up on Monday night. She hopes to be doing the same on Saturday.
“What was going through my mind was, ‘Clock, hurry up. Hurry up and wind down,’” Staley said. “I just thought we played so well that I didn’t want anything to slow the momentum, so I just tried to speed that clock up.”