Unspoiled by success, Gamecocks keep on striving

For a lot of teams, this would be a wait-’til-next-year type roster.

For the South Carolina women’s basketball team, it’s just another team off the assembly line, complete with a No. 1 seed and trip to the second weekend of the tournament, same as the three seasons before that.

It’s almost lost in the Gamecocks’ dominance that almost feels standard. The team has only two seniors: Alaina Coates, who is injured and not with the team for the NCAA Tournament, and Tiffany Davis, who has played all of 117 minutes this season.

Yet excellence it expected and delivered.

“I think last year we really had a veteran team, and this year we brought in a lot of newcomers,” said Gamecocks forward A’ja Wilson, whose team will face Quinnipiac at 4 p.m. Saturday. “Our transfers got to play, so it’s a lot of new people within our system. I think that we are a little bit overlooked, but at the same time, I think our talent’s overlooked more than anything.”

It’s an odd place, a team that’s young in certain ways, yet deeply steeped in success.

Gamecocks coach Dawn Staley pointed it out, Wilson hasn’t lost 10 games in her career (nine thus far). Coates, the longest-tenured Gamecock, was part of 14 losses in four years. The rotation includes two freshmen and two transfers who didn’t play last season.

In a way, it’s a transition point for a program. When Staley came to Columbia, the narrative was building a program (much like Frank Martin’s men’s program leading up to this year), and that yielded a Sweet Sixteen and No. 1 seed in Years 4 and 5.

Those groups came through the struggle of growing pains and reaped the rewards. But as the successful years piled up, newer groups hadn’t gone through that. Keeping those players hungry can be an issue that stunts rising programs.

South Carolina hasn’t seen that.

“You don’t want to always dwell on the past, but the past is a good teacher,” Staley said. “The past is what fuels me to think about what was happening nine years ago. And that’s part of our history, part of our history here at South Carolina. And our players have to understand that part of it. Because some of them have been part of where we’ve come from. They just bought into it and they got into it on the winning side.

“Sometimes, winning kind of camouflages some of the weaknesses.”

Players said the lessons from those early years trickled down in different ways. Wilson talks to former USC stars Tiffany Mitchell and Aleighsa Welch, and in some ways, the message is passed down the generations of team leaders.

Ty Harris is new to the tradition, the freshman having arrived only this season. She said there are still small traditions that carry down from Staley’s early seasons, connecting them to the past.

“This team is actually very superstitious in what they do,” Harris said. “So everything that they do, or that they did do from the beginning, previous years, we still do now. That could be from sitting in the right spots at dinner or bus or how we run out for the game or warm-ups or anything like that.”

This year’s team has the chance to add to the tradition. Quinnipiac is formidable as a 12 seed, but will have trouble matching Wilson’s size. After that, Oregon State or Florida State and 40 minutes separate the Gamecocks from a second Final Four in three seasons.

It a good place to be for a team that loses no contributors from this NCAA Tournament run. They’re just a subtly young team, different from the past two, but carrying the torch of an upstart that arrived and seems intent on staying.

“It’s what they’ve made it,” Staley said. “We just coach and they just bring us along for the ride. They’re committed to winning and when you have that kind of winning culture, obviously the winning is part of it, but the culture is also part of it.”

This story was originally published March 25, 2017 at 1:43 AM with the headline "Unspoiled by success, Gamecocks keep on striving."