South Carolina women’s basketball suffered just their second loss in the last two years, which seems like a crazy statement to make. The Gamecocks were on a program-record 43-game win streak before falling to No. 5, now No. 1 UCLA, 62-77 on Sunday.
Head coach Dawn Staley has certainly made a name for herself as one of the greatest coaches of all time with her dominance over women’s college basketball in the last decade or so. So, as a coach of that caliber, she can admit when it just wasn’t her team’s day, and that is exactly what she did after the Gamecocks lost to the Bruins.
“They wanted it,” Staley said in her postgame press conference. “I thought our kids fought, but we ran into a buzzsaw today.”
That is the best way Staley could have described the game against UCLA. The Bruins played a great game against the Gamecocks and came in ready for anything they had to throw at them. South Carolina did a great job handling Lauren Betts, one of UCLA’s top scorers, but the Bruins were good enough to beat them with everyone else on the court.
UCLA set the tone early against South Carolina, and with even just a seven-point lead in the second quarter, one missed shot for South Carolina just set it off for UCLA where they went down and scored and turned a nine-point lead into a 21-point deficit at halftime.
Even though South Carolina lost, Staley can recognize the game, and UCLA brought it against the Gamecocks, and when a team plays that well, you can’t deny what they did on the court.
“That was beautiful basketball by UCLA – beautiful on both sides,” Staley said. “I’m on the opposite side of it, but you can’t help but to love up on it because it was fluid on both sides of the ball.”
The Gamecocks are also struggling with scoring in the paint as they transition from having their best player head to the WNBA last season. Kamilla Cardoso was the backbone in a lot of ways for this South Carolina team, so not having that this season forces the Gamecocks to either change some things up or continue to struggle.
“I mean, we’re in transition from having a dominant big to not having a dominant big and figuring out how we can incorporate our bigs more with the basketball a little bit, so we’ll figure it out,” Staley said.
Staley and her squad don’t have a lot of time to focus on this loss and need to move on quickly as they have to prepare for yet another ranked matchup this season, their third so far. The Gamecocks are set to head to Fort Meyers to play in the Fort Meyers Tipoff, where they start out playing No. 15 Iowa State on Thanksgiving day.
