TAMPA, Fla. — On Friday night, the Texas women’s basketball team and South Carolina will meet at Amalie Arena as the Final Four round of the NCAA Tournament gets underway.
This is the fourth meeting between the two schools this season. Each school protected its home court during the regular season, and then South Carolina beat Texas in the Southeastern Conference championship game.
Friday’s winner moves on to play either UCLA or UConn in the national championship game.
Here is everything that South Carolina said Thursday about Texas during pregame news conferences for head coach Dawn Staley, senior guard Te-Hina Paopao and junior guard Raven Johnson.
On what will decide who wins this fourth Texas-South Carolina game
Paopao: “It’s going to come down to heart, effort and controlling the things that we can control, which is attitude and effort. Obviously, we can’t control how the officials do the game. We can’t control everything that’s outside of that. But we can control our effort and attitude. Whoever is going to win tomorrow is going to determine who wants it more and who just wants to pay attention to the details and be there for your team and who’s going to compete and just compete for a 40-minute battle.”
On preparing for Texas again and if there was much of a difference in the first three games
Staley: “Not much difference, besides you probably have to put a little bit more emphasis on being able to stay organized when they take your first and second option away. Most of the time, it’s what you call broken plays. So we need to stay more organized in broken plays, because they do a really good job of making you go a little bit deeper into your offense. You’ve got to make sure that you know what we’re doing and it’s not just, you know, happenstance or chaotic. It’s more about that.
“But we’re not going to stray too far left or right from the things that we’ve done that were positive that would help us. And, knock on wood, we can identify the things that we did when we did get beat in Texas, what those were that put us in a bad position.”
On why Dawn Staley has had success coaching against Vic Schaefer
Staley: “We’re both defensive-minded. So it’s probably that we’ve had a bigger offensive spurt throughout those games that we’ve played that were at a higher stake, and I do think it’s going to take that. I mean, we’re not going to rely on our success against them to say, hey, we beat them. I’m looking at the loss, you know, from this year and how we can prevent that. One, we’ve got to stay out of foul trouble and not have to adjust to — the times that they beat us, it was foul trouble for us, like early foul trouble, where we had to change up how we just substitute. And that throws our cadence off. So I think it’s just about our bigger offensive runs at any given time within the game.”
On what problems Madison Booker causes defenses
Staley: “She’s a bona fide scorer. Not even a bona fide scorer, she’s a playmaker. She can score the basketball with the best of them. She can play multiple positions. So she’s versatile. She can facilitate. You know, she’s a really good rebounder. She’s a difficult match-up. Like, you have to — you know, you have to play her one and a half players. You can’t just straight up play her because she has so much of a skill set that if you don’t show whoever is guarding her and then show — close her space off, because she’s able to rise above. She’s a big guard that can pretty much get her shot off at any given time. Then you’ve got to make her play defense. She’s a willing defender, but with how much she needs to score for them, you have got to make her play on that other side of the basketball so that pretty jump shot isn’t as pretty in minute 30 as it is in minute five.”
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This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: March Madness preview: What did South Carolina say about Texas basketball Thursday?
Reporting by Danny Davis, Austin American-Statesman / Austin American-Statesman
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
