After last season’s national championship game, when South Carolina was run off the floor by UConn, it still was easy to suggest the Gamecocks would be back.
In 2025, South Carolina made their fifth-straight Final Four, only a year removed from winning it all in 2024. It is expected that the Gamecocks will be March mainstays, with their return to the final stages of every women’s college basketball season seemingly written in stone.
And, here they are.
The Gamecocks are in Phoenix, having secured a sixth-straight Final Four after mostly cruising through the first four rounds of the 2026 NCAA Tournament. In the first and second rounds, South Carolina scored over 100 points. In the Sweet 16, they outclassed Oklahoma. In the Elite Eight, they turned a closer contest into another rout, taking down TCU.
South Carolina has made the meeting of high expectations mundane. Nearly coasting through another NCAA Tournament is not normal. Reaching a sixth-straight Final Four should never be treated as a guarantee.
That level excellence—season over season, game by game—is not ordinary, as head coach Dawn Staley rightly emphasized after the Gamecocks’ booked their trip to Phoenix. Staley stated:
It doesn’t feel [ordinary] because of all the work that it requires to get to this place. It’s a lot.
People don’t see what actually happens to get a team and a program up for the challenges of a season and get to the Final Four.
Don’t take South Carolina’s greatness for granted
At the end of last season, when many automatically assumed that South Carolina would return t0 the top of the sport in 2026, they likely envisioned a senior frontcourt of Chloe Kitts and Ashlyn Watkins leading they way, with dominant, experienced interior players again taking the Gamecocks toward greatness.
Neither, however, played a minute this season.
Kitts tore her ACL shortly before the season, while Watkins decided to sit out this season as she recovers from the ACL she tore at the beginning of 2025.
Instead, the Gamecocks had to reconstitute their greatness in a different way—and have done so in manner that has led to it being taking for granted. That attitude discounts what the Gamecocks have done. They are once again great because of lots of growth.
Or, as Staley put it, “all the work that it requires to get to this place.”
“All the work” is evident in every Gamecock.
Raven Johnson becoming a confident, clutch shooter. Ta’Niya Latson prioritizing the little things over big numbers. Madina Okot cleaning the glass and draining 3s. Joyce Edwards raising her voice alongside game. Tessa Johnson being unguardable. Agot Makeer biding her time before stepping up on the biggest stage. Maddy McDaniel persevering into a trusted point guard. Alicia Tourenbize fearlessly adjusting on the fly to a new team, and in a new country.
Win or lose, appreciate “all the work” that got South Carolina here
“All the work,” still, might not be enough to avenge last season’s national championship loss to UConn.
The Huskies, like the Gamecocks, have normalized excellence. On a 54-game winning streak, the undefeated No. 1-overall seed is an absolute juggernaut, as Staley herself acknowledged to ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt after South Carolina’s Elite Eight victory.
The head coach was blunt about the challenge ahead, admitting that “a bad night” from UConn would help her team’s cause, in addition to explaining:
You gotta keep the game close, you gotta be able to score. Obviously, we’re probably not gonna keep them from 25 points under their average. I think you just gotta go pound for pound and just be unafraid of playing against an undefeated team.
If South Carolina comes up short, it’s not a failure.
The sky-high standards imposed on Staley’s teams—because they’ve so often reached them—shouldn’t diminish what this team has achieved, regardless of what happens on Friday night in Phoenix.
And if “all the work” results in South Carolina reversing the result of last year’s matchup and extinguishing UConn’s back-to-back quest, the Gamecocks will deserve all the praise.
