The undefeated South Carolina Gamecocks that won a championship last year earned the nickname “Dawn’s Day Care.” They put together an overwhelming display of dominance. They were also a major test for their coach, a bundle of rambunctious energy, constant talking and youthful slips. The group is now a year older. But that spirit has not changed a bit. Gamecocks coach Dawn Staley emphasized that at the start of the season, and she has kept doing so all year, right on through to the NCAA tournament.
“It's just a day care,” Staley said on Sunday. “It's not like a board meeting where there's one person talking at a time. It is chaos.”
But this group knows how to work through all of that chaos. There is nearly always a signal hiding somewhere in that noise. “They've probably conditioned themselves to be able to compartmentalize and just hear everything and know the gist of what the chaos is,” Staley went on. The No. 1-seeded Gamecocks fought through one of their ugliest games of the year against the No. 9 Indiana Hoosiers. The defending champs managed to come out comfortably on top nonetheless.
South Carolina stumbled through a hideous first quarter. It scored just nine points on 4-of-17 shooting. Staley later ran down a list of what had gone wrong in her press conference. The Gamecocks’ defense was sputtering, and they were taking bad shots, and they were missing the few good shots they were taking, which is to say: Everything had gone wrong. Indiana is the same program that pushed South Carolina to its limit in the Sweet 16 last year. (That four-point win was the narrowest margin of victory in its championship run.) Early on, this felt like a possible repeat—only with a potentially worse outcome for the Gamecocks.
They hit the locker room at halftime down by one. And if the day care in there offered its usual chaos, the loudest message came from graduate student guard Te-Hina Paopao, who told her teammates: “Let's keep it simple. I think we were second-guessing ourselves. When we play team basketball, we play great basketball, and it's really fun to play great basketball.” They proceeded to score more points in the third quarter than they had in the first two combined.
It ultimately led to a 64–53 win. This was a reminder of how quickly this group can turn a game around when it has to. It was also an example of just how much room South Carolina has to play ugly if it must.
There is no group in the bracket quite so balanced as the Gamecocks. An oft-repeated statistic about this roster is that its two leading scorers come off the bench. (That pairing is highly touted freshman Joyce Edwards and sophomore guard MiLaysia Fulwiley.) It’s a matter of depth, of course, but it’s also a statement about breadth. There is a remarkably even spread of talent here. South Carolina has one of the best offenses in the country—80.8 points a game and the No. 2 offensive rating overall, per Her Hoops Stats—but does not require anyone to score as much as 15. (Edwards leads the program by averaging 13.2 points per game.) This group wins by committee and loses by committee.
Against Indiana, South Carolina did not get big numbers from its biggest regular contributors. Edwards and Fulwiley both had relatively quiet games. And it didn’t matter: 11 points for veteran guard Bree Hall and 10 points apiece from bigs Chloe Kitts and Sania Feagin were more than enough to cover that gap. The game was a bit of a warning for South Carolina, a reminder that as good as this group is, there still is nothing to be taken for granted in March. But it was a warning for the rest of the field, too. South Carolina can have everything go wrong for a quarter or two. And there’s still enough talent in this day care for it to somehow go right.
“It wasn’t pretty,” Staley said. “But at this time, it doesn’t have to be. You've just got to score more points than the other team and work the kinks out as we advance into the tournament.”
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as South Carolina Knows How to Win Ugly.