How do you beat a Connecticut team that has not lost since 2014?

COLUMBIA, S.C. - With 12 minutes left in the second half of what would become the Connecticut women's basketball team's 100th victory in a row, South Carolina coach Dawn Staley called a timeout in an obvious attempt to stop the wheels from coming off what had been a very disciplined run.

She was watching Gabby Williams outhustle and outdo everyone to grab the ball and will it into the basket. It was only a 4-0 run, but she knew that UConn had an ability to make even the smallest runs seem like impossible deficits to come back from. And with her team down by seven, she knew it was incredibly important to stop the bleeding.

Two days earlier, Staley and her assistant coaches had warned their players about Williams.

"You've got to match her energy for 40 minutes," she said. "She never stops playing."

South Carolina invited For The Win to its practice Saturday as the coaching staff attempted to prepare the No. 6 team in the country to stop perhaps the most efficient and ruthless program is sports history.

We wanted to know: How do you even approach a task so daunting? How do you prepare your players for a team that hasn't lost since November of 2014, for a group that plays at an entirely different level?

We found out.

***

Before practice could begin, senior Alaina Coates had to tell her team a story about a dream she had the night before. They were facing off against UConn when suddenly, Geno Auriemma brought in a former UConn player that had graduated in 2016 and had already played a season in the WNBA. Then, before she knew it, there was a church service going on in the middle of the game. She was so mad, she took off her heel - which she was suddenly wearing instead of her sneakers - and it became her only weapon.

"I threw my heel at the pastor," she said.

Apparently unfazed by the strange dream, the team applauded the story and Coates settled back into her seat. The team then turned their attention to assistant coach Nikki McCray, who began practice on Saturday by breaking down UConn's personnel while showing snippets of film.

The second player in the scouting report was Kia Nurse, the junior guard who was averaging 13.3 points per game heading into Monday's game. She is a 3-point shooter who prefers to go to the right and is dangerous - as is all of UConn - in transition, where South Carolina expected her to sprint down the sidelines. But the Gamecocks got lucky: Nurse missed much of the game with an ankle injury.

McCray moved on to the Huskies' leading scorer, Katie Lou Samuelson, another 3-point shooter who gets a lot of her shots in transition. "Make her work hard for catches," Staley said. "High hands. Get into her face on the catch. Make her two-up rather than three-up. She will post up, she's going to try to get you on one side so she can create a big target - you have to keep your feet moving. You have to make her change target hands and not just play one way. Keep your feet free and make it really hard for her to make catches."

That scouting report worked: South Carolina held Samuelson scoreless for the first half and she got into foul trouble in the second half.

The keys to stopping Williams, who leads the team in assists and steals, were to exploit that she's foul-prone and occasionally can be out of control, the coaches said. She was also liable to make a mistake on defense. "She can guard us with her speed, but she's very jumpy," Staley said.

After running through the rest of the lineup, Staley stopped the film session and gave her team some keys to the game, as she does every game.

That's the thing about playing Connecticut: They don't do anything different; they just do everything better, faster and more efficiently. They exploit small runs to make them feel so much worse. And so a coach like Staley is left simply imploring her players to do what they usually do, only better than they've ever done it. In this case she asked them to do several things. And for most of the game, they did.

Take high percentage shots: The Gamecocks did that.

Fight through screens to avoid mismatches.

Get back in transition.

Get offensive rebounds. The Huskies don't box out because they're already sprinting down the floor.

Don't turn the ball over. If you do turn the ball over, sprint back on defense and don't let UConn go to their spots.

This was going to be hard: Going into the game, UConn forced an average of 19.2 turnovers a game, holding their opponents to an average assist-to-turnover ratio of .5. By comparison, their own assist-to-turnover ratio was 1.9.

The biggest key though? Control the tempo. Keep it around a 60-point game and keep the ball out of UConn's hands as much as possible because they score about 50 percent of the time they have the ball. "Make them work, make them be patient on defense," Staley said. "They want the ball. They want to score. So make them play. They might get antsy, they might start gambling. They're pretty disciplined but I don't know if anyone's tried that so we're going to try that."

To do that, she wanted her team to try to run 20 seconds off of the 30-second shot clock before shooting - and to try to get in three to four passes in each possession. And to try to force them to take that many, too.

"No more than three passes, then they want to get the shot up," McCray said. "If they have to go deeper into their offense it's hard for them. Because they're going to get into low shot clock."

Staley also planned to keep the Huskies on their toes as much as possible and planned to switch the defense between a combination of zones, man, triangle and two, whatever she thought might work. She also planned to switch the defense every three to four times down the floor and stressed to her players to look over to the bench on dead balls.

"Just different alignments so they have to put some thought into what defense we're in and maybe it slows them down a little bit and gives them pause," she said. "And once they start figuring it out they're really hard to stop for what they do from an offensive standpoint."

That was the plan going into the game. It had been carefully - and hopefully - crafted by a coach known for her fight and for rising to big moments.

***

For nearly three quarters, it worked. The Gamecocks passed well, sending it in and out of the lane and around the arc with consistency. South Carolina didn't control the pace the way Staley wanted, but they were still in the game. And most importantly, they were making UConn play defense for 25 to 30 seconds at a time. The Huskies were frustrated.

Halfway through the second quarter, the Gamecocks took the first lead that any opponent had had against UConn since their Notre Dame game in December.

"They made a couple of threes which changed everything," Geno Auriemma said at half. "They've done a pretty good job, but they've only scored 29 points."

Then came the end of the third quarter. Williams took over and UConn stretched its lead to 11 and South Carolina just couldn't get close again. She finished the game with 26 points and 14 rebounds.

"They had their advantage of being bigger and taller," she said after the game. "But I had my advantage of being smaller and quicker, so I used that."

Staley's plan, in retrospect, was sound. But UConn is too dynamic. She had tried on Saturday to explain what, exactly, makes the Huskies so much more difficult to stop than possibly any college basketball team in history.

"I think movement: ball movement, player movement, a lot of activity," Staley said. "They do a really good job of reading defenses. So they're not really looking at what their teammates are doing, they're looking at what the defense is doing. And that's a really hard concept for young people to see because they only see their teammates, they don't see the opposing jerseys. And once you advance to that where you're just seeing defense, the ball will tell you where to go. I think UConn does a really good job at teaching that."

And the Gamecocks managed to stem that for much of the game, forcing the Huskies out of that rhythm. It wasn't enough. In the end Williams seemed to will her team singlehandedly to its 100th win, with a 66-55 win over South Carolina.

On Saturday, South Carolina star A'ja Wilson told For The Win that UConn's ability to suddenly shut a team out of a game was one of the things that made them so hard to beat. She almost perfectly predicted what would happen.

"They dig you in a hole where it's just two points but it feels like 12," Wilson said. "So it makes it feel like it's hard to bounce back.

"I mean basketball's already a game of runs," she added - two days before watching UConn do it her team. "And if you capitalize on those runs, it's hard to come back."