Dawn Staley has been around great players throughout her life from her days at Virginia, an impressive professional career, time with the national team program as a player and a coach and during coaching stops at Temple and now South Carolina.

With No. 1 South Carolina set to play at No. 2 UConn on Monday, a conference call was set up for her to talk about the highly-anticipated showdown. There will be more from what Staley had to say about her team and the Huskies. However, I did want to share her thoughts on UConn's leading scorer Breanna Stewart and incoming freshman Napheesa Collier, who she got to work with during her time as the U.S. national team assistant coach and head coach of the U.S. U-18 squad.

"Both of them are really hard workers," Staley said. "I see Stewie gets shots up before practice, gets shots up after practice and she looks like a pro because that is what all the other pros were doing. It is something she has done, I don't think she was trying to impress anybody, I think it is what she does. She is highly-skilled, she is a scoring machine, she can score with the best of them and she can score in a variety of ways and that it pretty impressive. She goes about her business quietly with no flair which I really like.

"Napheesa Collier, I love her, I love her to death. She doesn't take a play off, she can shoot it, she can post up, she can run the floor. She is definitely going to add to what Connecticut does, she is adding another great player."

Staley also had good things to say about her time working as an assistant coach on Geno Auriemma's national-team staff.

"It was actually a breath of fresh air being able to see how Geno operates on a daily basis, how committed he is to the flow of an offense," Staley said. "I think he has a great basketball mind, I think he knows what to say to players at any given time. I liked how we operated especially because he is just himself. I don't think he is different for his Connecticut team or the Olympic team. I think he just tells it like it is and his players are receptive to that. When you are able to be who you are as a coach, not have a censor, not have to think about whether you are hurting somebody's feelings, I think everybody receives that information well because it is only going to help them. It was refreshing to see that because sometimes coaches kind of have to censor what they want to say because young minds are fragile, we want to keep them in a really confident place. He has a way of doing it and all the players he is around are receptive to it."