How Clemson WBB is taking ‘drastic strides’ in Shawn Poppie’s second season
For as long as anyone on this year’s roster has been alive, Clemson women’s basketball and the NCAA Tournament have been like oil and water.
In other words, they don’t mix.
But over the weekend, Clemson rolled into Littlejohn Coliseum, took care of business against two ACC opponents and added more two wins to its growing résumé.
In other words: Don’t sleep on these Tigers, who continue to hang around in the top half of the ACC standings late into the season and are fighting for an NCAA Tournament bid in their second season under coach Shawn Poppie.
Clemson blew out SMU 83-54 at home Thursday and added a 77-58 home win vs. Florida State on Sunday to improve to 16-7 (7-4 ACC). Those seven conference wins are more than Clemson won last year in 18 tries and are a big reason the Tigers are pushing for only their second NCAA appearance in 24 years.
Clemson ranks No. 37 nationally in the NCAA women’s basketball NET rankings as of Tuesday, and a big road win at Notre Dame last weekend kept the Tigers squarely in contention for an NCAA at-large bid in March Madness.
Clemson – tied for No. 7 out of 18 teams in the ACC standings – isn’t a world beater. The Tigers don’t have a win against an AP ranked opponent this season. They lost by 28 points in their annual measuring stick game against in-state rival South Carolina. They are very much a bubble team (ESPN, CBS, USA Today and The Next all listed the Tigers among their “last four teams” in the 68-team field last week).
But it’s a notable improvement from last year (when Clemson finished 14-17 and 6-12 in the ACC in Poppie’s debut season) ... and the better part of this century.
Since 2005, Clemson has employed five different head women’s basketball coaches, and they’ve combined for exactly one NCAA tournament appearance and one NCAA win (both by Amanda Butler in during her first season in 2019).
“We’ve been saying it for a long time, and you could feel it coming,” Poppie said Thursday. “This group has a chance to be really special because of who they are.”
Inside Clemson’s resurgent WBB season
Clemson’s season-long accolades include the program’s first win against NC State in 15 years on Jan. 11 and its first road win against Notre Dame since 2019 on Jan. 25.
The Tigers rank as one of the ACC’s best scoring defenses and 3-point shooting teams and have now won six of their last eight conference games. As of Tuesday, they are tied with Virginia (7-4) for No. 7 in the ACC standings.
Georgia Tech transfer guard Rusne Augustinaite (11.7 PPG) UAB transfer guard Mia Moore (11.6 PPG) and Wofford transfer guard Rachael Rose (10.3 PPG) all average double-digit points. Three other players – including talented Wake Forest transfer forward Demeara Hinds, the team’s leading rebounder off the bench – average at least eight points.
Augustinaite, who scored a season-high 21 points in Thursday’s win vs. SMU, said a big part of Clemson’s effectiveness this season is how close its players are – no small feat on a roster composed almost exclusively of first- and second-year transfers.
“I don’t think we have any drama on our team,” Augustinaite said. “Everybody’s talking to each other. There’s no groups. You can hang out with anybody you want. I think it just builds a really strong foundation for our program.”
The team’s success is also a reflection of the energetic, “win now” style Poppie has brought to Clemson since athletic director Graham Neff poached him from Chattanooga to become the school’s next coach in April 2024.
In the 21 years since legendary coach Jim Davis’ departure, Clemson has hired (and fired) Cristy McKinney, Itoro Coleman, Audra Smith and Butler. Each of those coaches finished well below .500 and did ot come close to replicating Davis’ consistent, winning product when he was Clemson’s coach from 1987-2002.
Poppie, 40, feels like a good candidate to truly get things going in the right direction.
He produced instant results in his first head coaching job at Chattanooga, making back-to-back NCAA tournaments as the SoCon conference champion, and was previously a well regarded assistant for Kenny Brooks at Virginia Tech. Poppie’s modern approach to roster construction has generated portal success stories and a historically good high school recruiting class.
“I thought we did a good job last year, but we’ve taken drastic strides this year with the personnel we’ve put in here,” Poppie said, adding that he has “a heck of a staff.”
NCAA bubble team tries to keep things rolling
This year’s Clemson team is far from perfect, or a finished product.
The Tigers are 1-6 in Quad 1 games and 0-3 against AP-ranked teams. They don’t have elite size. They’ve struggled at the free throw line – somehow, they won at Notre Dame despite shooting 6-17 (35%) at the charity stripe. Three days before arguably their biggest win of the year vs. the Fighting Irish, they blew an 11-point fourth quarter lead and lost at Virginia Tech.
Clemson’s remaining ACC schedule also ramps up with road games at No. 25 UNC and Syracuse, two teams firmly trending toward NCAA tournament bids, and a home game against No. 17 Duke, which hasn’t lost an ACC game.
The Tigers also take a West Coast trip to play at Cal and Stanford … right before the 2026 ACC Tournament in greater Atlanta, where they’ll probably need a few more wins to shore up a bubble team résumé before Selection Sunday.
That Clemson is in this position at all, though – and somewhat ahead of schedule, since the Tigers’ celebrated 2026 recruiting class led by five-star Trinity Jones doesn’t enroll until the summer – is credit to Poppie and a transfer-heavy group of players who’ve put themselves in position to play meaningful basketball games.
“This is genuinely a family that loves one another and wants the best for one another,” Poppie said. “With that, we have a chance to be really good. And I think we’re becoming really good.”
This story was originally published January 30, 2026 at 10:55 AM.
