USC’s second straight trip to Final Four represents ‘unfinished business’ for juniors
Aliyah Boston soaked in her moment as the first Gamecock to cut down the net after South Carolina’s 80-50 Elite Eight win over 10-seed Creighton.
The Gamecocks’ star junior forward smiled wide while taking photos with the NCAA tournament’s Greensboro Regional championship trophy before heading back into the locker room with one thought prominent in her mind.
“We still have unfinished business, and we still have two more games to play,” she said.
Boston and the rest of USC’s talented junior class — starting guards Brea Beal and Zia Cooke, key reserve Laeticia Amihere and Columbia-area product Olivia Thompson — know what unfinished business feels like all too well. They’re taking that mindset into Minneapolis this week on the hunt for South Carolina’s first national championship since 2017.
South Carolina will face either Louisville or Michigan on Friday in the Final Four.
The Gamecocks’ No. 1 overall recruiting class from 2019 still calls themselves “the freshmen,” head coach Dawn Staley says. Perhaps it’s a nod to the fact their freshman season — when South Carolina went 32-1 (16-0 SEC), won both the conference regular-season and tournament titles and had a legitimate shot to win it all — was canceled at the COVID-19 pandemic’s onset in March 2020.
Feeling “robbed” of a finish to the 2019-20 season is something that’s in the back of the juniors’ and seniors’ minds when they remember that team led by Mikiah Herbert Harrigan and Tyasha Harris.
The Gamecocks’ upperclassmen could couple that feeling with the 2020-21 season, when South Carolina lost in a Final Four heartbreaker to eventual champion Stanford, already in a unique circumstance of a tournament held in a “bubble” environment in San Antonio, Texas.
“Having the experience of what we had to go through in the Final Four last year, it’s helped guide them,” Staley said of the junior group. “They were unafraid to make plays or do things out there on the floor. They’re just a year older, with a year more understanding of how to navigate through it, not get too high with the highs or low with the lows.”
That level-headed mindset with a narrow focus on the Gamecocks’ ultimate goal of winning the national championship has helped set South Carolina up for success through two losses, including a last-minute defeat to Kentucky in the SEC tournament championship.
“That particular group has learned how to just embrace the margin of error each and every day,” Staley said. “They practice like it. They play like it, even through our losses. They really understood it.”
Staley felt joy for her whole team after clinching a trip to Minneapolis, but she felt especially glad for Boston and the juniors. They had the 2019-20 season stripped from them. The 2020-21 ended in a gut-wrenching loss. Now, they have another shot to get what they feel is theirs.
The Gamecocks plan on making it to a national title game the same way they’ve gotten to the Final Four — keeping an even keel through the highs, like Sunday’s regional win, and lows, like the Gamecocks’ two losses.
“Just continue to stay level headed,” Beal said. “Again, we have two more games. So keep doing us.”
This story was originally published March 28, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
