Dawn Staley led South Carolina women’s basketball to a national championship this season for the second time in three years and third time overall.
The Gamecocks finished 38-0, the first team to go undefeated since UConn in 2015-16. Staley’s team was incredibly talented, and the Hall of Famer has established herself as the top coach in the sport, but even she knows you need something extra–and intangible–to have such a dream season.
Appearing on 670 The Score Wednesday, Staley said South Carolina was fortunate to coalesce so quickly following all of its offseason departures.
“You know, when you’ve been around the game as long as I’ve been around the game, it doesn’t happen very often like this or it probably never happens to a lot of people,” Staley said, via On3. “We just really got lucky. We got lucky.”
“We lost all of our starters. We returned some talent – no doubt about it. Talent doesn’t always say you’re going to win the last game of the season. What our talent was able to do is create some chemistry,” Staley continued. “Like, it wasn’t easy. I think our players decided that they wanted to win for each other. We didn’t do any, like, team bonding or life skills or anything like that. We did some life skill stuff but it was more of just them. We wanted them to spend some time with each other.”
Staley also mentioned the Gamecocks’ SEC Tournament win over Tennessee on Kamilla Cardoso’s first three-pointer of the season as a sign that luck shined upon them.
However, she also included that her team “prepared to be lucky,” which enabled them to take advantage in key moments.