COLUMBIA — There. That little hesitation by Gabbie Marshall when an opponent tried her left side. Bree could use that as a screen and launch a shot.
Kate Martin doesn’t need much room, so got to chase her off the 3-point line. But driving on her, she won’t have the speed to counter, so Raven and Pao. Nobody from Iowa has the speed to challenge MiLaysia, let her attack.
The thoughts ran constantly, first-year South Carolina assistant Winston Gandy furiously jotting notes on his legal pad as he nearly cramped his finger hitting “pause” on the video displayed on his laptop. As the late hours turned to wee on the night of April 5, Gandy knew he wouldn’t sleep much.
He had known since South Carolina finished Oregon State in the Elite Eight that Iowa would be his team, the one he’d scout if the Gamecocks were to match up with them. Much of the heavy lifting had already been worked in, USC preparing for Iowa in practice without calling it “Iowa prep,” so the players wouldn’t get the idea to look past their current opponent.
But as Iowa topped Connecticut late on April 5, a few hours after the Gamecocks had smacked NC State, the matchup was set.
Gamecocks vs. Iowa, in a rematch of a 2023 Final Four game, but this time for the national championship. USC against the only team that beat it last year, the unguardable Caitlin Clark leading a talented if not terribly deep Hawkeyes squad that again wanted to give USC its only loss of the season.
Gandy wasn’t on staff for the Dallas disappointment of 2023. Plucked from Duke in the offseason to replace Fred Chmiel, who left for the head-coaching spot at Bowling Green, Gandy wouldn’t have been hired if Dawn Staley didn’t trust that he was the right person for the job.
But this … this was a situation where he could not fail. Every detail, every wrinkle, anything he saw that USC could exploit and Iowa couldn’t handle, had to be in that scouting report.
Her
“I’m one of those, my greatest fear as an assistant is where you see something where your kids are surprised. If they’re surprised, you didn’t do your job,” Gandy said. “For me, it was trying to figure out, ‘We do this, they can do that. They do this, we can do that.’ You play cat and mouse.”
Nobody stops Clark. But could the Gamecocks make her expend enough energy to leave her tired and inefficient by the fourth quarter? Iowa had not seen Fulwiley yet, nor had it handled a full game of Kamilla Cardoso or faced even a minute’s worth of Ashlyn Watkins.
The film(s) rolled and Gandy ignored the sleep tugging at his eyelids. Goodness, the Hawkeyes were fast. If they got in transition and USC couldn’t knock them out of it, it’s a bang-bang 7-0 run and there goes the ballgame. And man, when they hit those 3-pointers, especially a Clark “logo 3,” that’s when their crowd goes bananas. Got to keep them in their seats.
Clark … Clark, Clark, Clark. The Gamecocks couldn’t pick one player to guard her, that was obvious. It would have to be a rotation, people who could move side-to-side, body her up and try to disrupt her shooting and passing vision. Raven Johnson would certainly want that assignment, but who else?
“The one thing I thought we could do a really good job of was shrinking the floor on her. You can’t expect one person to do it,” Gandy said. “I also thought we could win the rebounding and control the speed of the game, since you can’t run if you don’t have the ball."
“I was also really not worrying about if (Clark) attacks downhill. She’s expending energy, going right into Kamilla, Ashlyn and (Sania) Feagin, our forwards. They don’t want to shoot floaters or pull-up jumpers against our bigs, they want layups or open 3s.”
'Defense like ours'
It was 3 or 3:30 a.m. when he finally surrendered to sleep. He was up at 6:30 queueing up another game, “just to try to see different teams, what leads to runs and what doesn’t.”
He presented at the staff meeting and then went to practice on April 6, knowing it wouldn’t be live. It was more of a walk-through, fitting Staley’s wish to keep it light. USC had only done walk-throughs in 2017 and 2022 as well, when the Gamecocks were also about to play (and win) national championship games.
The team, defined all year by playing much better than it practiced, was attentive and dialed-in, one of its best sessions of the season. Gandy spoke, they listened; Gandy and the others put them in their positions, they responded how they were supposed to.
“Coach reminded our team, ‘We’re pretty good, too. They haven’t seen a defense like ours,’” Gandy said. “There’s been nobody this year that we couldn’t guard. People got hot at times, but our overall team defense was really good.”
With the plan installed, USC felt ready.
Down 10-0, then 20-9, Staley didn’t call a timeout. She hardly ever does, trusting her players to find themselves on the court and adjust. She would never want to relay to her team that she doesn’t believe they can get their way out of a self-imposed mess so she sat, nearly eerily calm, as Iowa built an advantage.
Gandy, who had carefully selected a royal-blue suit for the game — but with a T-shirt under his jacket, no button-down and definitely no tie (“I get a little uptight in a necktie,” he says) — wasn’t happy with how the game started, but he noticed two things.
One, it wasn’t anything making a few shots couldn’t fix. Two, if Staley wasn’t showing signs of worry, he wasn’t about to.
“We didn’t go live. It’s hard when there’s no live game reps, no scout team,” Gandy said. “It took our team a bit to kind of get adjusted to the speed of the game. We missed a few, they ran on a few, they fouled on us a little bit. It isn’t that it wasn’t working; we just had to settle in, and get used to the speed.
“And it gives your team confidence when the captain is cool.”
It started clicking. Fulwiley knifed through Iowa’s defense. Cardoso began dominating in the paint. Johnson and Hall gave up a few points to Clark, but as they were defending her, they always had an outstretched hand, fingers splayed, in her face to get her looking at anything beside the basket or a teammate.
The Gamecocks eked ahead. Then leaped ahead. They held off an Iowa charge in the fourth quarter …
And then Gandy, who started his coaching journey by being a practice-squad player at Maryland, was a national champion. And one who authored the scouting report to beat one of the game’s greatest players and finish an undefeated season.
“I’m going to tell you, Winston Gandy did a hell of a job on this scout,” Staley told ESPN in a post-game interview. “A hell of a job. He lost a lot of sleep. We had very little prep time. He explained it in a way that our kids could lock in and execute.”
Also responsible for helping the Gamecocks’ outside shooters improve, Gandy’s work yielded a team that finished third in the country in 3-point percentage (Te-Hina Paopao finished first among individuals). His work ethic, to keep striving to find that one particular that might mean a victory, stood out during the hiring process and was evident throughout the year.
It was that level and then some for Iowa.
“Trust me, he was the difference-maker. He watched them and watched them and watched them and watched them,” Staley said. “It was so much information overload that I kind of just let him talk because we couldn’t make as many adjustments as he was seeing, so we just tried to make the big adjustments.”
The mission was completed. Iowa was vanquished. Gandy will participate in Sunday’s championship parade and take a few days off, but after that, he’s right back to work.
NC State on Nov. 10 looms.
