COLUMBIA, S.C. – It is easy to forget now, six months after celebrating a 38-0 season and third national championship under Dawn Staley, that South Carolina wasn’t supposed to be so good so soon.
It was a new team. It was a young team. It was a team with question marks at key positions and bouts of immaturity that suggested a bumpy season by South Carolina’s sky-high standards.
“When we started (last) summer, it was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ ‘ associate head coach Lisa Boyer said. “Just stuff that we had not had to deal with, like being on time and returning text messages. They were out of shape. They weren’t ready. There was no connection, no leadership. We had to learn drills all over again. We didn’t know how they were going to really be.”
The Gamecocks weren’t always perfect, but they managed perfection in a way that confirmed Staley’s program as the new dynasty ruling women’s college basketball.
And now, with all but one of their top players returning, there is no question what’s expected for an encore: As the preseason No. 1 in the USA TODAY Sports women’s basketball coaches poll, South Carolina is heavily favored to repeat as national champion.
For Staley, beginning her 17th season at the school, that means a new challenge has arrived. Having grabbed the baton from UConn as the sport’s dominant program, how long can South Carolina keep its place at the top in an era of NIL, transfers and a more competitive landscape across women’s college basketball?
“I do know that the pace that we’re winning, it’s hard to sustain,” Staley told USA TODAY Sports. “Heck, if we take a loss this year, the bottom will fall out.”
She’s kidding, of course. South Carolina is, at the moment, operating at the highest possible level with no signs of slippage.
They haven’t lost an SEC regular-season game since Dec. 30, 2021. They’ve reached four consecutive Final Fours. Despite having a deep team full of high-profile recruits who could play more minutes or have bigger offensive roles elsewhere, South Carolina has been mostly impervious to the transfer portal. They replace WNBA draft picks like Kamilla Cardoso, who went No. 2 after dominating last season’s Final Four, with talent like Joyce Edwards, a consensus top-five recruit who grew up just a few miles down the road in Camden, South Carolina.
IN-DEPTH: Team outlooks for the women’s basketball preseason poll Top 25
UCONN’S TIME?: Paige Bueckers ready for new women’s basketball era
They have packed more than 16,000 fans a night into Colonial Life Arena for several years, creating a huge fan base for women’s basketball at a school that had a mediocre history prior to Staley’s arrival. And with Staley in the middle of contract talks to extend her deal beyond the 2027-28 season – Geno Auriemma’s new $3.74 million per year extension at UConn is the current benchmark – she dismisses any talk of going to the WNBA or even the NBA, where she interviewed with the Portland Trail Blazers in 2021.
“This is where I’m supposed to be,” Staley said. “I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. I don’t think I’m supposed to be coaching in the NBA or the WNBA. This is real natural – like, natural.”
The downside of creating a monster, though, is that expectations only go up. And South Carolina is in the rare position where there’s little room to top what it pulled off last year, running the table on a schedule that included top programs like Notre Dame, UConn and LSU (twice) before getting revenge in the championship game on Caitlin Clark and Iowa, who had knocked a then-undefeated Gamecocks team out in the semifinals one year earlier.
Pulling off that kind of season after losing five WNBA draft picks, including No. 1 overall Aliyah Boston, was a shock to everyone in the program. But as they reflect on it, they believe it was the product of an unusual chemistry and closeness on a team with a lot of good players but no singular standout star like a Clark or Angel Reese at LSU, whose fame transcended the sport.
“We just had such a great connection with each other that we knew what each other needed if someone was frustrated, or if someone had it really going we could feed them the ball,” senior guard Bree Hall said. “You just have to have the right players on the team, honestly. It’s something you can’t really create. It has to be like that naturally.”
It was, by all accounts, about as low-stress of an environment a team could have, given the expectations, the spotlight and the success. Maybe the only question about South Carolina this season is whether it’s possible to maintain those same carefree vibes for a second go-round when there are natural threats Staley must monitor, like complacency or players beginning to calculate future ambitions.
“We have a lot of players who are WNBA draft-eligible, and they go through that,” she said. “It’s a real thing where they have one foot in, one foot out at some point. That usually happens a little later on, and they’re so worried whether they’re going to get drafted, they start thinking how can I make a big impact?
‘They want it all. They want to win, they want to get drafted, they want championships. They want it all, but sometimes there’s a sacrifice to success.”
When she started at South Carolina in 2008, Staley was 38 and just a couple of years removed from a Hall of Fame career that included two Naismith College Player of the Year awards at Virginia, six WNBA All-Star selections and three Olympic gold medals.
Now 54 and in a different phase of life, Staley has evolved. There are certain things, she says, that she no longer tolerates. In recruiting, she places an emphasis on building relationships with parents and uses them to help communicate messages in the emotional push-and-pull that naturally happens with players.
But most of all, Staley’s experience and success give her the gravitas and perspective to run a program that emphasizes its depth of talent over relying on one or two stars. Last season, for instance, seven different players led South Carolina in scoring – and rarely did any of them do it for consecutive games or score more than 20 points on a given night.
Staley’s ability to get players to buy in to that kind of program where they often have to wait their turn or sacrifice stats is the secret sauce of the Gamecocks’ success, especially in this era of college athletics.
“These young people have so much other stuff going on that you have to be attentive to that,” Staley said. “As a basketball coach, you just want to practice and be done with things. No, it’s a full service. So we give them full service, not just me but everybody here.
“It’s enabling them to a certain degree, almost to the point where I find some of our pros have a hard time transitioning because we’re straight-up. We give it to you raw. It is what it is, and I don’t think pro coaches can always handle pros in that way. They have to keep them at an all-time high in confidence, and they just got the juice as players in your organization.
‘I think the players that come through our program, they understand that they do have some juice but they don’t have all the ingredients to make it juice, to make it sweet. That’s where we come in as coaches. You balance how much sugar you put in there or honey or whatever it is, or sometimes we need to add some water to it.”
Staley seems to have the right recipe for now. But dynasties are, by definition, hard to maintain. South Carolina is no longer a new face challenging the likes of UConn and Stanford; it’s now the program with the biggest target on its back, expected to produce championships year after year.
After winning title No. 3 and being favored to win No. 4, the program moves into a new phase where everyone will be looking for cracks in its dominance.
“We’re talking to them right now like, you know, nobody likes you, OK?” Boyer said. “Everybody hates you now. Everybody wants you to lose. The cuteness is over, right? So you’re constantly talking to them about that, but I think especially in the last few weeks, they’re way more locked in. In this era, it’s a lot when you win a national championship.”
We’ll find out soon if South Carolina is ready for more.
