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 ...
