No. 1 recruit puts South Carolina women’s basketball in her top 10 schools
Coach Dawn Staley and the South Carolina women’s basketball team made the initial cut for the No. 1 junior recruit in the country earlier this month.
Five-star Monterey (Tex.) High School point guard Aaliyah Chavez, the No. 1 player in ESPN’s Class of 2025 rankings, included the Gamecocks as one of her top 10 schools.
Chavez, a junior, also listed Texas Tech, Southern Cal, Arizona, Oklahoma, Ohio State, LSU, UCLA, Texas and Tennessee as finalists.
“I just want to thank all the coaches for their time invested into recruiting me on this journey,” she wrote in an Oct. 1 post on X (formerly Twitter). “After much consideration me and my family have come down to a list of my top 10 schools.”
As they’ve risen to national prominence over the last decade, Staley and the Gamecocks have had plenty of success with top-tier recruits – two of them, A’ja Wilson and Aliyah Boston, ended up being the respective centerpieces of USC’s national championships in 2017 and 2022.
South Carolina also remains in the running for five-star 2024 forward Joyce Edwards, who plays locally at Camden (S.C.) High School and has ranked as ESPN’s No. 1 recruit for most of the cycle, leading into next month’s early signing period. (Edwards recently dropped to No. 2.)
Looking ahead to the 2025 class, Chavez is establishing herself as another elite prospect who could immediately help the Gamecocks or any other program.
The 5-foot-10 point guard has been nothing short of excellent at Monterey High School in Lubbock, Texas (also home to Texas Tech, one of her 10 early finalists).
Chavez got her first scholarship offer from the Red Raiders when she was in eighth grade and stopped posting scholarship offers on social media after she hit about 45 of them, according to the website Our Esquina; she now estimates she has 85 to 90 offers to choose from.
Chavez averaged 30.0 points, 7.2 rebounds, 5.2 assists and 3.1 steals per game as a sophomore for Monterey, following up on a freshman season in which she averaged 25.7 points per game as a freshman in Texas’ second largest high school classification.
She set school records for single-season points, single-season 3-pointers and single-game 3-pointers as a freshman and promptly broke all three as a sophomore.
And midway through her sophomore season, she broke Monterey’s all-time scoring record, which had stood for 41 years. Chavez has 2,021 points through two seasons of varsity play and is on track for 4,000 career points (something only 38 high school girls basketball players have accomplished, according to a 2020 MaxPreps article).
Unsurprisingly, Chavez has racked up plenty of honors based on those statistics. She’s all-region, all-state, the two-time Lubbock Avalanche-Journal player of the year and a member of the 2023 Naismith Girls All-America Team.
ESPN recently ranked Chavez as the No. 7 recruit in the country regardless of class, calling her “arguably the best shooter in the country” and someone who can “hunt shots better than anybody at the high school level.”
The website compared Chavez to Kelsey Plum, the star 5-8 point guard who broke the NCAA’s women’s scoring record playing at Washington from 2013-17 and is now a multi-time All-Star and WNBA champion with the Las Vegas Aces.
South Carolina will have fierce competition in the recruitment of Chavez. Other schools pursuing her include in-state programs Texas and Texas Tech, household names Southern Cal, UCLA and Tennessee and LSU, the reigning national champion.
Working in USC’s favor, naturally, is Staley’s past experience as an elite college and professional point guard and the Gamecocks’ knack for developing point guards, plus the program’s overall family feel and status as one of the sport’s annual powers.
Chavez hasn’t yet detailed a timeline for her commitment. As a Class of 2025 recruit, she won’t be able to sign a national letter of intent for a school until fall 2024.
She’s the second top 2025 player to include USC as an early finalist in her recruitment. Grandview (Col.) High School forward Sienna Betts, ESPN’s No. 3 player in the class, listed the Gamecocks as a top 11 school in May.
South Carolina WBB recruiting update
For the 2024 class, USC still has only one committed player, five-star point guard Maddy McDaniel (No. 12 on ESPN).
The Gamecocks remain in the mix for five-star forward Edwards (No. 2), five-star wing Kennedy Smith (No. 6), five-star forward MacKenly Randolph (No. 21) and four-star center Adhel Tac (No. 33).
The majority of top high school women’s basketball recruits choose schools on or before the early signing period, which runs Nov. 8-15 this year.
Last cycle, for example, USC had zero commitments for the Class of 2023 entering October before picking up pledges from Sahnya Jah, Tessa Johnson, Chloe Kitts and MiLaysia Fulwiley by Nov. 10. (Kitts chose to reclassify to the Class of 2022 and enroll early at USC last fall.)
