Two years, two heartbreaks: Once more, USC’s title hopes meet a cruel ending
Just when you thought the basketball gods couldn’t find a more cruel way to deny South Carolina women’s basketball a shot at the national title ...
Yes, last season’s end was abrupt and jarring, with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing the cancellation of the entire NCAA tournament and denying a historically great Gamecock squad a chance at even more history. But at least USC and its fans could take a little comfort in knowing they were No. 1 in all the polls, and no one else would be able to claim a championship either.
On Friday night in San Antonio, Dawn Staley and South Carolina saw their title dreams slip away in just a few agonizing moments, and they saw another team, Stanford, reap the benefits.
▪ There was the controversial no-call on what seemed to be a kicked ball, leading to a Cardinal layup that swung the game.
▪ There was a shove under the basket on sophomore guard Brea Beal that led to a missed layup but no foul call.
▪ And of course, there was that brutal final possession, when the Gamecocks seemed to have secured a miracle, stealing the ball off the inbounds pass, only for not one but two attempts at the game-winner to clank off the rim.
That’s not to mention the wonderful start to the game Carolina had, only to watch it fall apart after the first media timeout. Or the heave of a shot Stanford sophomore Haley Jones launched late that wound up being the final basket. Or a hundred other moments. In April, every second becomes magnified, dissected and discussed.
“I just told our players, the margin of error is that small,” Staley said afterward. “It’s that small to competing for a national championship, winning a national championship. It won’t be our last time being in this situation. Next year we just got to practice with that margin of error in mind.”
If the margin of error seemed larger in 2019-20, when the Gamecocks stormed through their schedule, winning 26 games in a row and looking virtually unstoppable late in the season, that just goes to show how delicate team chemistry can be and how utterly crucial seniors Tyasha Harris and Mikiah Herbert Harrigan were to making everything work.
In retrospect, anointing South Carolina the overwhelming preseason favorite to start this season — in large part because they returned so much from that 2019-20 squad — probably meant missing just how important Harris and Herbert Harrigan were. Without them, the Gamecocks were a completely different team — a wildly talented one, to be sure, but one that needed to sort through new roles and responsibilities and figure out on a fundamental level who they were.
And to Staley’s and the players’ credit, they did that. It may have taken a little longer and involved more losses than anyone wanted, but it did happen. With the help of team-builders, emerging leaders and hard-won experience, the Gamecocks sorted themselves out. For proof, look no further than the difference in Staley’s perspective after the first and last loss of the season.
Back in December, USC lost at home to N.C. State, 54-46, in such a fashion that seemed to leave Staley shaken to her core. She was unsparing in her criticism in the aftermath, calling her players’ performance selfish and uncoachable.
On Friday, Staley’s comments could not have been more different.
“I am proud. I am honored to coach our basketball team,” she said. “And I look forward to getting back to the biggest stage of women’s college basketball.”
As Staley pointed out, the Gamecocks did many things right against Stanford, even if it wasn’t their finest basketball. They shot more 3-pointers than they had in all but one game all season. They pulled down nearly two dozen offensive rebounds. They took care of the ball, turning it over fewer times than the Cardinal.
But there were mistakes, both on South Carolina’s part and on the officials’ part, even if Staley couldn’t say much about that for fear of incurring punishment from the NCAA. As she did say, the margin of error at this time of year is small. That goes for teams and referees alike. The Gamecocks aren’t the only ones to experience that this tournament — if USC fans want to complain, they’ll have to get in line behind the Baylor faithful.
Staley herself stayed relatively stoic in the immediate aftermath, which isn’t too surprising given her long playing and coaching career and first-hand knowledge of how a few bounces of a ball can make the difference between triumph and agony. She also has the comfort in knowing the Gamecocks return every starter from this team and add the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class.
“We’ll continue to get better. I mean, this experience has been great. We got some young guns coming in that will help us,” Staley said. “So I told our team, hopefully in the future we can be on the other side of this emotion.”
Still, that won’t take away the pain of Sunday, when South Carolina will have to watch Stanford take on Arizona for the national championship. For two years now, the Gamecocks have seemed on the verge of history, stamping themselves in the record books, only to be denied — denied by a global pandemic, denied by a last-second miss, denied by whistles that were never blown.
As Staley said, the margin of error is that small. It’s small enough that sometimes, you can’t control it. Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer, asked about the final misses that saved her team’s season, gave some credit to her players for contesting the shot but also acknowledged that it wasn’t in their hands.
“It is nice to have a little karma going your way,” VanDerveer said.
If anyone would know about that pesky margin of error and cruel twists of fate, it’s VanDerveer. She won two national titles in three years at Stanford in 1990 and 1992 — and hasn’t won one since despite making nine Final Fours in 29 years. She’ll try to end that drought Sunday, but nothing’s guaranteed.
So for South Carolina and Staley, all that’s left to do is pick up the pieces and try again. The Gamecocks unquestionably have the talent to return to this point and to win a national title. Staley and her staff have the know-how. And if and when they stand victorious in 2022 or beyond, they’ll look back at these last two years with their crushing endings and see a foundation for greatness, built with a lot of work and pain and hard-fought experience.
“Every single time we’ve lost — and I’m just going to talk about the two-year span — we lost to Indiana last year in the first month of the season, then we never lost again. Then we come into this season, and we lose our fifth game of the season,” Staley said. “But every single time that we’ve had a setback, we’ve gotten better.”
