What Vanderbilt women's basketball must learn from loss to South Carolina – tennessean.com

For a team that was undefeated going into its matchup with South Carolina, just about everything went wrong for Vanderbilt women’s basketball on Jan. 25 at Colonial Life Arena.
On offense, the No. 4 Commodores committed 20 turnovers. On defense, they allowed South Carolina to shoot 62% from the field (40-for-65).
During one sequence at the beginning of the third quarter, they cut their deficit to seven, but they missed a few layups and from there, the No. 2 Gamecocks took control.
“As crappy as we played today for a lot of that game, especially in the second quarter, in the beginning of the third we were in it,” Vanderbilt coach Shea Ralph said. “We can never let the wind go out of our sails. We can never lay down and die. And I think for me, that was what was most disappointing and embarrassing. We just didn’t play like ourselves, and at points in the game, it was like we quit.”
Ralph did compliment Mikayla Blakes on her hustle, as the star sophomore put up 23 points, seven rebounds, five assists and three steals.
The most disappointing element to Ralph, though, was Vanderbilt’s defense. Though some of the issue was the Commodores (20-1, 6-1 SEC) allowing 32 points off their 20 turnovers, the Gamecocks (20-2, 6-1) had 10 made 3’s, shooting 59%.
“Our defense, was bad today, awful,” Ralph said. “We can score, we’ll be fine. We scored 74 points. We turned the ball over 20 times, even if we turned it over 10 times and scored on the other 10 possessions, we would’ve scored 100 points almost. We can’t just give people the ball, but we were still able to score. They didn’t hold us scoreless. We just couldn’t defend them. So you can’t do both, you can’t give them the ball and then not guard them. That is a recipe for absolute disaster.”
Vanderbilt must bounce back fast before its matchup at Ole Miss on Jan. 29 (6:30 p.m. CT, SECN+). Ralph said that it’s unlikely the Commodores will return to Nashville before heading to Oxford, Mississippi. Both locations were hit hard by the winter storm that has swept through nearly half the nation, bringing ice damage and power outages.
Ultimately, Ralph believes that playing in the hostile environment of Colonial Life Arena will be beneficial.
“This is a really tough environment to prepare for,” she said. “This is why I beg and plead for people to show up to our games, because we want to have a home environment like South Carolina has for our kids . . . The only way you prepare for it, I think, is by having one or continuing to have experience playing in one. A lot of my kids that played a lot of big minutes today haven’t done that in this kind of environment.
” . . . I’m looking at myself even more than I’m looking at our players. How do we prepare them better? How do we help them more so that they can execute better in a game like this, when a team is firing on all cylinders at home? Absolutely, we’ve got to figure that out as a coaching staff. And then sometimes I know, as a player, you’ve just got to go through it to learn this. This was a really hard lesson to learn today. This was not fun. But I know my team, I know my staff, I know we are just fine.”
Aria Gerson covers Vanderbilt athletics for The Tennessean. Contact her at [email protected] or on X, formerly Twitter, @aria_gerson.

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