COLOMBIA – It is not that everyone is indisputable.
Some are blocked. Some are climbing up four or six enemy arms. Some, like basketball can be a game of millimeters, take too much of the glass or too much of the rim and bounce in, around, out and anywhere but through.
“We are focused, but sometimes, honestly, we are too focused. Just to make a tray, ”said South Carolina veteran Lele Grissett. “Once you’re stuck with something, we just …”
Grissett sighed and lowered his head.
“It happens,” she finished.
The USC women’s basketball team, ranked seventh in the country, has been surprisingly inconsistent when it comes to making layups. It is a major cause of frustration and it is costing the team a lot.
The lost layups are to blame for two recent defeats that cost the USC the SEC regular season championship and downgraded it to second place in this week’s tournament. No one is saying that layups are the only reason for these defeats, and two more at the beginning of this season, but the problem has occurred throughout the season, and a pattern tends to take the blame when things are not going well.
The December loss to No. 3 NC State should have shown everyone that this year’s USC team, while still incredibly talented, is not last year’s team. This team was unique, maybe once in a lifetime.
That’s why it’s so intriguing to see some of the players on that team, including central Aliyah Boston and reserve Laeticia Amihere, fighting so hard. It is a daily job in practice.
“We make a mix of them. Some of them are simply not high-speed defense. Some of them are, especially our post-players, some of them are in the crowd, ”said coach Dawn Staley, describing Gamecocks’ approach to layups. “You can do a million exercises. The game is very different when the lights go on. It is very different than being in the gloom of the (Carolina Coliseum practice center). “
In the early days of Staley’s tenure, she had a technical assistant named Darius Taylor. Taylor, who played in Michigan from 1996-2000, was 6-4 and weighed 200 pounds.
It was common to go into the gym and see Taylor training with the rest of the male training team, relentlessly punishing the big guys in the Gamecocks. Aleighsa Welch, Elem Ibiam, Ashley Bruner, Alaina Coates and A’ja Wilson had to be bumped, pushed, elbowed and elbowed by Taylor, who was under strict orders from the head coach not to show mercy.
Taylor left after the 2014-15 Final Four season to get married and start a family with Georgia coach Joni Taylor. And it is not his absence that caused the problems: Gamecocks had no problems with hitting layups until this year.
However, maybe finding a bully on campus who can join the training squad and emulate what Taylor did when the Gamecocks enter the postseason can help. Then again, perhaps telling the great ones to adopt the Coates principle – 1. Raise your arms. 2. Catch the ball. 3. Turn around. 4. Kick – would also do it, instead of dribbling in the paint and allowing the defense to adjust or throw the ball loose.
“There is a rebound exercise that we do where each shot is a missed shot. So everyone passes out with the ball and we really make it difficult for our powder players, we put them in those situations, ”said Staley. “It is focus and completion.”
The Gamecocks lost three in the final seconds of the regulation in their defeat at No. 1 UConn. The lost layups spread over the seven goalless minutes against No. 2 Texas A&M, which left them far behind to fight for the championship.
Staley said that when the Gamecocks take the field at Greenville’s Bon Secours Wellness Arena for the opening of the SEC tournament, the USC will look like a different offensive team. You have no choice but to.
As of March 5, there is only one more tomorrow to settle.
Follow David Cloninger on Twitter @DCPandC.