The No. 3 South Carolina women's basketball team won 65-43 against Georgia, despite shooting the ball inefficiently, by playing good defense and rebounding the ball well.
Head coach Dawn Staley shared her thoughts on how she felt about the offense in the first half, after the team made one 3-pointer out of twelve attempts in the first half.
“I thought we just played sped up … I just thought we took rushed shots,” Staley said. “I don’t even think the defense was really impacting it. We just were out of sync.”
The Gamecocks utilized a 1-3-1 zone and denied Georgia's shooters on ball screens to hold the Bulldogs to single-digits scored in the first and second quarters. This forced 11 turnovers and allowed South Carolina to score 11 points off turnovers in the first half.
“I thought we did a good job at changing our defense up and playing a little bit of zone,” Staley said. “I thought we executed that extremely well.”
Coming into the game, Georgia sophomore guard Dani Carnegie was averaging 23.7 points per game in conference play. The Gamecocks held Georgia's leading scorer to zero points in the first half on hive attempts from the field by changing up the defense and denying Carnegie the ball.
Entering the break with 14 total points as a team, no Bulldog player recorded more than 5 points in the first half.
South Carolina's defense stayed solid in the second half, forcing eight turnovers and scoring six points off those takeaways. South Carolina’s defense struggled to contain Georgia’s offense as well as it did in the first half and was out-scored 19 to 18 in the third quarter.
Carnegie got on the board and scored her only 5 points, while junior guard Rylie Theuerkauf led the team with 8 points in the third quarter. Theuerkauf made both threes she attempted in the quarter against a defense that defended the perimeter well until then.
In the fourth quarter, Georgia was held to 3 out of 16 from the field and didn't have a player make more than one shot.
South Carolina recorded 52 rebounds as a team, with 16 of those being offensive rebounds. Everyone that played in Sunday’s game finished with at least one rebound.
Senior center Madina Okot led the team with 10 rebounds, with four of those being offensive, along with two blocks and a steal on defense. Freshman guard Agot Makeer had ten rebounds of her own, including two offensive rebounds, a career-high three blocks and a steal off the bench.
“I feel like I was adjusted before I started,” Makeer said. “You have to bring some energy … So that’s what I brought.”
Senior guard Raven Johnson recorded eight rebounds, with all of them being defensive. She also had a great fourth quarter where she recorded a block and scored 6 points.
Sophomore forward Joyce Edwards finished below her scoring average of 20.7 points with 14 points and had seven rebounds, a block and a steal. Staley praised Edwards' overall performance after the game.
“I thought (Edwards) did a good job at just being truly aggressive and going after the rebounds,” Staley said. “We’ve built our program on rebounding the basketball, and we found really good success with rebounding.”
This game was also the annual "We Back Pat" game to honor the former Tennessee Volunteer women's basketball coach Pat Summitt, and the good rebounding performance reminded Staley of a quote from Summitt.
"On 'We Back Pat' day, Pat says 'Offense sells, and rebounding wins championships,'" Staley said.