Any hotshot high schooler who commits to South Carolina is also committing to a kind of amnesia. How many points you scored last game, how old you are, whether you’re a starter or come off the bench, whether you’ve been on this stage before—none of those things seem to matter as much as what you’re doing right now, in this game. When sophomore Joyce Edwards was asked, after Monday night’s Elite Eight game against TCU, how she was motivated to put up a 24-point, 12 rebound performance after a quieter game in the Sweet Sixteen, she seemed almost puzzled by the question. “I didn’t feel like my last game was necessarily bad. Obviously, my point production was reduced,” Edwards said. But that was last game, a self-contained universe with its own rules. Oklahoma had sent two or three defenders her way; TCU didn’t. It wasn’t a matter of fuel so much as it was a matter of circumstance. “Whenever you get single coverage, coach tells you to go score it, and so that’s what you do.”
This is what South Carolina does: Their 78-52 win over TCU sent the Gamecocks to a sixth straight Final Four and set up a Final Four repeat of sorts, with last year’s field of teams all returning. Edwards shone alongside freshman Agot Makeer, who came off the bench but ended up earning her 31 minutes by taking on a tough defensive assignment—TCU star point guard Olivia Miles had just six assists to four turnovers—and then adding 18 points of her own.
“You can’t give them that many opportunities at second shots,” TCU head coach Mark Campbell said after Monday’s game, lamenting the 22 (!) offensive rebounds his team allowed the Gamecocks, nine of those from Edwards. Tireless still, yes, but the South Carolina team that will play UConn in the Final Four in Phoenix on Friday looks a little different from the one that was routed by the Huskies in last year’s national championship game. That team had gutted out some ugly wins through the tournament; this March has been a rather drama-free one for the Gamecocks so far. (I did a double take when TCU scored first to make it a 2-0 game and a little box popped up on the ESPN broadcast to say this was South Carolina’s first deficit of the tournament.) Last year’s team also found themselves in the odd position of losing at their own game when they played UConn. In both their regular season meeting against the Huskies and in the championship game, those Gamecocks were severely outrebounded and UConn dominated in the paint.
But that was last year’s team, playing in wholly different circumstances. Madina Okot, a 6-foot-6 sophomore transfer from Mississippi State, is among the new faces in the rotation this year. Ta’Niya Latson, who led the country in scoring last season at Florida State, was another key offseason addition. She, Makeer, senior Raven Johnson, and junior Tessa Johnson make for a long, versatile backcourt that’s powered the team’s offense amid injuries to the frontcourt. This year, South Carolina has been a top-five three-point shooting team. If UConn is still likely to be favored in the matchup, the Gamecocks might at least have a new source of juice.
There are the moments in South Carolina’s games where every player seems to realize at once what sort of game this is and whose game it will need to be. Those are the moments the opponent fears. Campbell can attest to what happens when the Gamecocks figure out who they are that night, and how quickly it can happen: “I think we called timeout and there was three minutes into the fourth quarter and it went from eight to 20 like that.”
