Aug. 27, 2004
Shannon Johnson will join the rest of the USA women’s basketball team on Saturday afternoon in the gold medal game vs. Australia. Johnson, a native of Hartsville, SC and a 1996 graduate of the University of South Carolina will join USC senior Otis Harris in their quests for gold on Saturday as Harris will run on the USA’s 4x400m relay on Saturday night. If both win gold on Saturday, Johnson is already guaranteed a silver – it will be a record medal haul for the Gamecock-affiliated athletes at this Olympics, with USC bringing home seven medals to Columbia.
Johnson talked on Friday night about the win over Russia and the gold medal game.
SJ: This team is 12 strong, no matter who come off the bench, no matter who starts, this is a very strong team. It doesn’t matter who plays, how we play it, who puts the ball in the hole, as long as we do it. It says USA on the front of our jerseys and that’s what we worry about. We know exactly what that means, that means going out there and playing as a team and enjoying it This is a very good win for us but were going to keep ourselves focused for another game.
USC: This was your closest game yet, talk about the team’s mind set.
SJ: We knew these games would be close. We been preparing the entire time, we went to practice and we didn’t let ourselves down by not practicing and taking time off because we were beating other teams. We kept our focus and the coaches did a great job of keeping us ready. We knew they’d play some zone, we knew different things they’d do, we just tried to attack them tonight.
USC: You had a spurt there at the end of the third quarter when you made a couple of shots, talk about that.
SJ: That’s my job to try and bring a spark off the bench. We always say try and make a difference when we come of (the bench), give a spark, try and do something different. It’s been a lot of fun playing with this team, everybody is really confident and helping each other out.
We weren’t putting the ball in the hole, Coach told me to take the ball to the basket. A couple of times I went before and had an opening but just wasn’t able to knock the shot down. He told me to keep my confidence and just knock the shot down
USC: Is this as physical of a game as you have played?
SJ: They were very physical today. But we knew that, they’re a very good team. Russia is a very good team and we knew they would play like that. We came out with a win and are very fortunate.
USC: Your depth wore them down:
SJ: Yeah, we’ve got 12 players that can play and that’s one good thing about us. We brought 12 to play not to sit. We’ve got a rotation out there now and we’re going to go out there and try to win the gold medal.
USC: Was it beneficial having a game like this?
SJ: It was very beneficial for us, very beneficial mainly because we’ve been beating everybody by a lot of points. We knew against Russia we weren’t going to blow them out, we knew they would stick around, we knew how good they are and we knew we had to go out there and play for 40 minutes.
