The Hampton Pirates will face the unknown that comes with joining a new conference, but head coach David Six said he believes their non-conference schedule will prepare them for whatever may come their way this year in the Colonial Athletic Association.
That schedule includes the reigning National Champion South Carolina Gamecocks, whom they fell to 85-38 Sunday in Columbia and are now 2-3 on the year.
Camryn Hill led all scorers with 16 points.
The game started out slow for the Pirates as they were 1 for 11 at one point. Hampton head coach David Six said there were nerves and jitters to start.
Those feelings dissipated at the half as Hill went on a 6-0 run by herself to start the third quarter. Nylah Young was able to get a few to fall and Six said he’s going to want both her and Hill to lead the offensive charge in conference play.
“[Establishing our identity today was] difficult again because they’re so big, but I thought that the last few games, we’ve played hard and we wanna play hard,” he said. “So that’s a plus. We want to get the ball to Nylah Young and we want to get the ball to Camryn Hill so that’s really gonna be our identity; get the ball in the hands of our best scores and see what happens.”
“On the other end, we want to push the tempo on defense,” he added. “I thought that we may not have done that as much as I would have liked today, but again, sometimes it’s just the level of competition that you play.”
South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley said she saw some things that the Gamecocks need to correct in terms of execution and she credited the Pirates for shining a light on that.
“I do think Hampton had a lot to do with that because they slowed the ball and took the air out of the ball,” she said. “They made us play defense for 25 seconds [per possession] and they controlled the tempo the first and second quarter. W need energy, we need to create some offense from our defense and I thought our second unit did that.”
As far as what Six expects to see from the CAA, he’s certain it won’t be what they saw Sunday in Columbia.