NC State welcomes former USC basketball 5-star Saniya Rivers ‘back home’ as transfer
N.C. State women’s basketball coach Wes Moore was about to hit the stage for a Greensboro speaking engagement this May when his phone rang.
It was Saniya Rivers, the dynamic five-star guard he’d recruited so hard out of Wilmington’s Ashley High School only to see her choose coach Dawn Staley’s South Carolina program instead.
Now, with Rivers having entered the transfer portal after one season with the Gamecocks and officially visited the Wolfpack earlier that month, N.C. State had another chance. Based on the opening seconds of that call with Rivers, though, Moore didn’t feel very confident.
“She says, ‘Well, Coach, this is tough. I really had a great visit and all, but it’s really hard.’ … I’m thinking, ‘Aw, just get it over with,’ ” Moore said Wednesday at 2022 ACC Tipoff. “But no, then she goes, ‘But I’m coming to N.C. State.’ So it was all good.”
When you’re the No. 3 player nationally in your high school class and a McDonald’s All-American fresh off providing national champion South Carolina with a big boost in a Final Four victory, you can get away with a joke like that. Right?
“I’m glad you reminded me,” Moore said, laughing. “I need to make her run a (wind sprint) or two.”
Lauding her sense of humor, her athleticism and her “off the charts” potential as the 2022-23 women’s basketball season nears, coaches and teammates said it’s been a smooth transition for Rivers since she committed to N.C. State in May and enrolled over the summer.
Rivers, part of a decorated 2021 South Carolina recruiting class, had entered the transfer portal on April 14 less than two weeks after the Gamecocks routed UConn in Minneapolis to capture their second NCAA national championship under Staley.
Rivers arrived in Columbia as the reigning Gatorade National Player of the Year, a coveted prospect who’d averaged 34.3 points per game as a high school senior, but had quite the up-and-down freshman season.
The 6-foot-1 guard from Wilmington, N.C., appeared in 27 of South Carolina’s 37 games, but she went almost three weeks in one stretch of the season without playing in a game.
She was excellent off the bench against Louisville and played 25 minutes across two Final Four games, but she sat USC’s first three NCAA tournament games in what Staley described as a “coach’s decision.”
She played the most minutes per game of any South Carolina freshman and third most of any South Carolina reserve, but she shot 24.5% from the field and made one of 31 3-point attempts while averaging 2.3 points, 1.6 rebounds and 1.4 assists per game.
“Everyone was calling me crazy for leaving a championship team,” Rivers told Wrightsville Beach Magazine in July. “It really just wasn’t a good fit for me personally.”
Rivers entered the transfer portal on April 14, 11 days after USC’s national championship win and one day after its national championship parade in downtown Columbia. In a Twitter post, she thanked Staley and her staff for “the experience of a lifetime.”
The rising sophomore said she heard from schools across the country, but her decision ultimately came down to two in-state schools: N.C. State, which won a third-straight ACC tournament title and reached the Elite Eight last season under Moore, and UNC, which reached the Sweet 16 in Year 3 under coach Courtney Banghart.
Rivers officially visited both schools and announced her commitment to the Wolfpack on May 19. Teammates Jakia Brown-Turner and Diamond Johnson offered rave reviews of Rivers as a player — she’ll likely play on and off the ball as a guard for N.C. State — and as a person.
“Her being here now, I’m just happy that she’s back home and she’s able to continue to grow her own game,” Brown-Turner said. “She’s just been bringing a lot to the table: playing her game, scoring, playing defense and getting everybody involved.”
Moore said Rivers has “some things to work on,” specifically as a shooter, but he foresees her playing a key role on an N.C. State team that lost four starters from last year’s 32-4 squad.
And, Rivers’ own jokes aside, Moore is happy that she’s now sporting red and black instead of garnet and black — even if it took a year longer than he and the Wolfpack program had hoped.
“So excited to have a player of that caliber,” Moore said, adding with a smile: “And again, we recruited her hard out of high school, but she got led astray, you know, and luckily she’s seen the light.”
This story was originally published October 11, 2022 at 2:57 PM.
