How South Carolina Got the Storybook Finish That Caitlin Clark Was Chasing
Dawn Staley and the Gamecocks conquered college basketball’s biggest star to complete their dream season and seize the most satisfying revenge imaginable
South Carolina, the most dominant team in the most popular era of women’s college basketball, has somehow flown under the radar. Caitlin Clark’s singular magnetism is a culprit, but so is the South Carolina formula, which has rendered two titles, 109 wins, and just three losses in three years: strength in numbers. No one player is an effective vessel to tell the full story of the Gamecocks’ dominance in their 87-75 win over Iowa in Sunday’s national championship game or throughout their perfect 38-0 season. This win belongs to no one player or roster. It belongs to the “Freshies,” too, the core of Dawn Staley’s previous great South Carolina teams—Aliyah Boston, Zia Cooke, Brea Beal, Laeticia Amihere, and Olivia Thompson. They were part of the no. 1 recruiting class in the nation in 2019, had their first season derailed by the pandemic, won a title together in 2022, and were among the seven players who graduated after a heartbreaking loss to Iowa in the Final Four last year.
As a tearful Staley told ESPN’s Holly Rowe after Sunday’s win, “It doesn’t always end like you want it to end, much like last year, but my Freshies are the top of my heart because they wanted this, and I hope we can erase whatever pain they had last year.”
I don’t know whether the sting of missing out on a championship in your final year ever goes away—as she watched South Carolina celebrate, you could see in Clark’s blank expression that the agony will linger—but maybe when you and your successors are cut from the same cloth and stitched together by the tutelage and tough love of Staley, some of that pain can be ameliorated by another team’s success; their joy belongs to the people who came before them, too. Boston, who came down from the ESPN booth to celebrate as her former team beat her possible future teammate, fanned her face while the tears poured down her cheeks, embracing the South Carolina players as the confetti fell.
This was supposed to be a retooling season for the Gamecocks, who became the first team since 2000 to win a title after losing all five starters from the previous season. But Staley went to work. After her team shot 4-20 in last year’s Final Four loss, she hired Winston Gandy—whom she also credited with scouting this year’s championship game—to help her players develop their shooting range. She found Oregon transfer Te-Hina Paopao, an experienced shooter, in the portal. And last year’s bench players were more ready for prime time than anyone could have expected.
Kamilla Cardoso, who played big minutes in last year’s semifinal loss to Iowa while Boston sat out with foul trouble, spent the summer preparing for a bigger offensive role and showed she was ready for it right away—putting up 20 points, 15 rebounds, and four blocks in the Gamecocks’ debut against Notre Dame last fall. Point guard Raven Johnson, who rewatched last year’s Final Four loss more than 100 times and spent the summer honing her 3-point shot, which Clark had infamously waved off, hit one from deep in the same game. Paopao fit in seamlessly with her new teammates. Freshman MiLaysia Fulwiley, in her first college game, poured in a dazzling 17 points, while fellow newcomer Tessa Johnson, who scored just one point in her debut, adjusted her defensive intensity, which had been lacking early in the game. Staley knew this new group could be special if she molded them correctly. In the process, she changed, too.
“We like to be a lot more disciplined, to adhere to the standards that we’ve had throughout the years that we’ve been successful. And then this team pretty much blows up all of that in one summer, and then they figure out a way to work together,” Staley said last week, ahead of the Final Four. “Players from high school, they’re used to working on their time. They’re the biggest fish in a small pond, and they can run the roost.” Players missed practices and team meetings. Text messages went unanswered. None of it lived up to the Staley standard. “Then you know you have to insert yourself as a coach and a coaching staff to say that’s not how we do things.” But you can’t expect that from the jump, she said, “because they haven’t been that way. So we had to create the habits.”
This, to me, was the key: The expectation was never perfection, but betterment, and in the end they achieved both.
It would be tempting to say it took everything to beat Iowa on Sunday, but it didn’t, because that’s the secret to South Carolina’s dominance. You can’t really pack everything that makes them great into the short span of a 40-minute title game. Ashlyn Watkins spent most of the game in foul trouble, and Raven Johnson couldn’t access the range she spent the year developing. But it still took a lot to slay Clark and the Hawkeyes: Raven Johnson’s lockdown defense against Iowa’s star, Paopao’s shooting, Tessa Johnson’s midrange game, Fulwiley’s energy-infusing drives, a career-high 17 rebounds from Cardoso, and rim protection that wrecked Iowa’s ability to generate offense once their 3-pointers stopped falling. The drive and pocket-pass exploits that had been available to Iowa all season became deflections and short pull-ups—situations that neither Clark nor the Iowa offense is comfortable with.
Sydney Affolter, a favorite hit-ahead target, hadn’t yet faced a transition defense with the size and speed of Watkins and Fulwiley.
And then, of course, the Staley signature: subtle second-half adjustments. Chloe Kitts opened the second half attacking from above the free throw line, giving her more space to use her length and speed to get to the rim. Raven ran pick-and-rolls closer to the rim to give herself a look at easier jumpers. Guard-guard pick-and-rolls freed up shooters on the weakside wing, where Iowa’s zone is most vulnerable.
Clark scored 18 points in the first quarter but lost her range in the second half, clanking logo 3s when she had time to create more reliable plays and wasting precious seconds chasing layups when the game was getting out of hand. Clark is the first player to lead Division I in scoring and make it to the championship game. The Hawkeyes, who spent the entire season learning to rely less on her ball dominance, were rendered an overdependent mess by South Carolina’s defense, which showed the nation why it’s no. 1. Clark ended up finishing with 30 points, but it took her 28 shots to get there. By the end of the game, Iowa head coach Lisa Bluder was out of answers: Play Hannah Stuelke, whose pace and playmaking were greasing Iowa’s offense, and get killed on the boards, or play Addison O’Grady and watch the offense shrink to its simplest dimension.
“South Carolina is just so good. Like, there’s only so much you can do,” Clark said.
It wasn’t that Staley had built a better team than the one anchored by the Freshies, but it was deeper, faster, and more accurate from beyond the arc, better prepared to both slow Iowa down and keep up with them. This season, the Hawkeyes were the no. 1 3-point-shooting team and no. 2 free-throw-shooting team in the nation in terms of volume, and they loved running the floor. South Carolina almost matched them in 3-point makes Sunday, drilling eight to Iowa’s nine; outscored them 12-10 in transition; and relied on their second unit when Iowa put them in foul trouble. The Gamecocks bench outscored Iowa’s bench 37-0. In fact, South Carolina was so deep that ESPN’s postgame show didn’t have enough earpieces, chairs, or table space to accommodate all of the current (and former) Gamecocks on set.
On Sunday, the Gamecocks completed the 10th undefeated season in NCAA women’s basketball, and Staley became one of five women’s D-I coaches with at least three rings.
After the victory, Staley talked about how her staff had to learn how to teach the kids in a way they’d receive it. At this point, she could run a master class on how to manage Gen Zers in the workplace. She doesn’t get in on their TikToks much, but she can do the dances. She has learned to allow the players to talk to one another in “the most unadulterated ways” and understands their brashness to be a declaration of love and accountability. (This is total fan fiction, by the way, but I’m laughing at the idea of Raven Johnson telling Kitts that she’s “serving cunt” after a free throw line drive while a bewildered, stone-faced Staley silently tries to unhear it.) Staley allowed Raven, who bloomed into a vocal leader, to be herself, while making sure she toed the line between confidence and delusion. You could tell Staley didn’t always agree with Raven’s boisterous comments, like when she called the Gamecocks “unguardable” after a win over Indiana in the Sweet 16 (Staley interjected to remind her that South Carolina also blew a big lead in that game), or when Johnson called this a “revenge season,” but Staley understood.
“I think it was psychologically helpful to play Iowa and Caitlin Clark,” Staley said of Raven on Sunday evening. “Just release. As a player, you want to release certain things that have held you captive, and I do think the waving off in the Final Four held her captive.”
Cardoso is now off to the WNBA, but Raven, Kitts, and Watkins are just sophomores. Bree Hall and Sania Fagan are juniors, and Paopao is returning for a fifth season. It’s easy to imagine these Gamecocks adapting to an even more fast-paced, drive-heavy steal-and-run style. Tessa Johnson and Fulwiley should blossom into starters, passing on the Tao of Staley to incoming forward Joyce Edwards, the no. 2 recruit in the country. Adhel Tac, who stands at 6-foot-5 and is another incoming freshman, graduated high school early after breaking her kneecap and spent her last semester learning on South Carolina’s bench.
After the game, Raven climbed the ladder, took a pair of scissors to the top of the net—a series of crisscrossing and connecting strings—and cut out a tiny strip. She waved it in the air, climbed down, joined the ESPN crew in the booth, and gave it to Boston. “She instilled this leadership role last year,” Raven said. “There’s no better way you can learn.” South Carolina’s perfect season is complete, but their self-fulfilling greatness is here to stay.
