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No. 6 South Carolina might have delivered a major 82-54 loss to Vanderbilt in Nashville on Sunday, but head coach Shea Ralph remains focused on how she’s leading her players—on and off the court.
Earlier this season Swish Appeal had the opportunity to speak to Vanderbilt freshman Mikayla Blakes and sophomore Khamil Pierre, both of whom praised Ralph for the coach and the woman she is. In a postgame press conference, Ralph said that feedback from her players was “good to hear.”
The coach then shared:
I think most of the reason that I wanted to coach was because of the way that people had changed my life, in terms of my coaches and mentors and guides. I was a little bit of a shithead—there’s not really another way to say it—when I was younger.
Ralph added that she was “stubborn and selfish,” explaining:
All the things that get in your way when you’re a young kid and you’re trying to do something really cool. You’re trying to grow into a young woman who can be successful in any arena in life. You’ve got to learn to sacrifice, you’ve got to learn how to be unselfish. You’ve got to learn how to put people and teams and bigger visions before yourself.
Ralph also credited those who supported her when she was on the court as an athlete, noting, “I had a lot of people do that for me. I think it’s time for me to give back, in terms of not only our game, but for the young women that want to play it and have the same goals that I had.”
Ralph, who is married to Tom Garrick, a former LA Clippers player who now coach on her staff, added:
I also want to show them that you can do that and still be a wife and a mom. Somebody in the community that’s a leader, you can do all the things. You can’t always do them at once, [and] I’ve learned that myself here, being where my feet are. To me, it’s more important that my players know how much I care about them and love them, how much I want to set them up for success in the future, and how much I’m going to pour into them, whether or not they perform on the basketball court.
Regarding the lopsided outcome of Sunday’s game, Swish Appeal’s Tremaine Dalton also asked Ralph if she felt her team was caught by surprise. She responded:
I don’t think we were caught by surprise. I mean, I don’t know that I would say that, we were caught by surprise. I think they just took advantage of our mistakes.
And that wasn’t surprising, but it was disappointing. Because you can’t make mistakes like that against really good teams. The things that we did, I mean, they were self-inflicted: just not a lot of offensive flow, turnovers, rebounding, not moving the ball crisply enough, not making free throws, not scoring one point in transition. Now that sucks. You just can’t do that against good teams and think you’re gonna win the game.
