Make it two: Gamecocks heading back to Final Four

You know A’ja Wilson for the bubbly personality, the big pearls, the ability to goof off in a press conference or crash a teammate’s interview.

The South Carolina women’s basketball star stood in the locker room Monday night in Stockton Arena, wearing a Final Four shirt, Final Four hat with a piece of net tied to it, and one word, “Syracuse,” snapped her to seriousness.

She offered a look at the fire within.

“My biggest thing was making sure my teammates did not feel the way that I felt last year,” Wilson said, referring to the upset loss to the Orange a year ago in the Sweet 16. “I didn’t want to put that on any of them. They don’t deserve to feel like that.”

She was the one who sat out much of the second and third quarters against Florida State with foul trouble. And she was the one to take out any frustration by swatting away two of Florida State’s final three shots to smother a comeback attempt in a 71-64 win that clinched a spot in Dallas against Stanford.

The win makes South Carolina the one team to have men’s and women’s teams in the Final Four, the 10th time it’s ever happened. It’s almost fitting the last team to do it was Syracuse a year ago.

USC (31-4) was facing a foe that pushed it to the limit in the Elite Eight two years prior. The Gamecocks were without 6-foot-5 defensive anchor Alaina Coates and had to sculpt a new identity through the crucible of tournament play. They saw a 16-point lead whittled down to three with 3:26 to go.

But Dawn Staley’s crew never gave it all the way up the way the Seminoles had in 2015. They were well-drilled: It’s a game of runs, and this is their push.

“I just told them we had to stay calm,” freshman point guard Ty Harris said. “They’re going to get their runs and we’re going to get ours. That was just their run and we just had to get back.”

The Gamecocks were in that position because the team showed it could deal with Florida State without Wilson. She came out at the 4:57 mark of the second quarter in a five-point game. The lead was 11 at halftime.

Wilson made it all of 21 seconds in the third quarter before picking up her third foul, and the lead had ballooned up to 16 before falling back to 10 in her absence.

“As a staff, when you see a significant player go out, knowing that you probably won’t have her for a large part of the game, you don’t fret it,” Staley said. “You just embrace it. Your team sees you embrace it, and they don’t lose confidence.”

The resulting production came by committee. Regional most outstanding player Kaela Davis hit big buckets, as did Harris. Reserve guard Doniyah Cliney pulled in seven big rebounds and a steal, keeping the Seminoles’ usually ferocious offensive rebounders at bay for stretches.

In the end, the Gamecocks fell victim to two of FSU’s strengths, giving up 18 offensive rebounds and losing 18 turnovers. But that doesn’t matter much when you hit buckets.

USC shot 57.8 percent against a team that allowed opponents to shoot only 38.2. Even without Coates in the lineup, they held the Seminoles to 36.6 percent shooting. South Carolina was ahead by double digits during much of the middle of the game, partially owing to a good start and very strong third quarter.

“Our biggest thing was coming out and being aggressive,” Davis said. “We didn’t want to settle for jump shots. We were just trying to attack them and hope to get them in foul trouble.”

It turned out, USC needed all of that.

Florida State (29-7) had erased a 17-point deficit in the Sweet 16 game against 2-seed Oregon State, forcing 23 turnovers from a team that included All-American point guard Sydney Wiese.

The victory sends South Carolina to meet Stanford, which upset the Notre Dame program that knocked off USC during its last Final Four trip. That game is at 7:30 p.m. Friday on ESPN2. The other side of the bracket includes two foes familiar to the Gamecocks in UConn and Mississippi State.

It’s the Gamecocks’ second Elite Eight win in as many tries. Staley has led her team to five Sweet 16s in six years. Only two members of the current team, A’ja Wilson and Bianca Cuevas-Moore, played true roles the last time the team made it this far.

Athletics Director Ray Tanner was in the building after spending the weekend in New York watching the men’s team advance to its first Final Four.

The 2015 meeting with FSU had South Carolina leading for less than one of the first 38 minutes, but it was tied at that juncture, and Tiffany Mitchell took over with back-to-back buckets to give the Gamecocks the win.

Monday night was a different story, but the ending was the same for the Gamecocks.

Climb the ladder, cut down the nets.

This story was originally published March 27, 2017 at 10:59 PM with the headline "Make it two: Gamecocks heading back to Final Four."