How Aleighsa Welch’s SEC tournament MVP season helped kick-start Gamecocks’ dynasty
Eleven years ago, almost to the day, South Carolina women’s basketball was celebrating beating Tennessee in its first SEC tournament championship win.
As the confetti rained down from the ceiling of Verizon Arena in North Little Rock, Arkansas, the All-Tournament team members were announced over the loudspeakers.
The names were rattled off: Kentucky’s Makayla Epps; Cierra Burdick and Jordan Reynolds from Tennessee; then South Carolina’s Alaina Coates and Aleighsa Welch.
Finally, it came time to name the SEC Tournament’s most valuable player. Welch stood there alongside her teammates waiting in anticipation.
“I remember when they were doing the buildup of it, I’m looking around, I’m like, ‘Oh, who are they going to call?’” Welch recalled to The State.
Much to Welch’s surprise, it was her name that was called.
“I was shocked. I didn’t think I was gonna win it. ... I was like ‘Me?’” Welch said.
Welch, then a senior, earned MVP after averaging 10.3 points and 7.3 rebounds across three games in the SEC Tournament. She recorded a double-double in South Carolina’s win over LSU in the semifinals (11 points/10 rebounds) and her 14 points in the championship game was only out-done by Tiffany Mitchell.
“I knew I played well across the entirety of the weekend, but I think I was always that type of player and that type of person where I didn’t focus on the stat sheet,” Welch said. “I focused on winning, I wanted us to win. So I never really took time to say, hey, Lisa, you had a really good SEC tournament. ... We had so many players that it could have been divvied up to, I had no idea. So when they called my name I just remembered genuine shock.”
That SEC tournament title — and tournament MVP for Welch — was just the beginning of a decade-plus of dominance for Dawn Staley and South Carolina women’s basketball.
Front row seat to the beginning of a dynasty
Welch played a key role in setting the foundation for what Staley’s program has become.
The Goose Creek native was Staley’s first-ever in-state signee back in 2011. Welch still remembers the moment she found out she’d gotten a scholarship offer from South Carolina a few days after guiding Goose Creek to a high school state championship with a 36-point, 15-rebound performance.
“Coach Staley happened to be there (and) I didn’t know it at the time,” Welch said. “We played Spring Valley and I played the best game I’ve ever played in my career literally, at any stage. I played the best game I ever played and that same weekend, I got a scholarship offer … To be recruited by her, to be wanted by that program, for her to see something in me that at the time I didn’t even see in myself, talk about a defining moment for me. At the time, I was 16 years old, so she saw the career that I didn’t even see for myself.”
South Carolina made the NCAA tournament for the first time under Staley (and the program’s first time in almost a decade) during Welch’s freshman year.
By her junior year, Welch had become an All-SEC player. She averaged a career-high 13.7 points per game and was second on the team with 7.6 rebounds while leading the Gamecocks to their first ever SEC regular season title. South Carolina finished just short of an SEC tournament title that year but was a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament for the first time in program history.
South Carolina was bounced from the 2014 NCAA tournament in a Sweet 16 matchup with North Carolina, but Welch could still feel the momentum swinging in the right direction for the program.
The Gamecocks ended the 2014-15 regular season (Welch’s senior year) 27-2 and, once again, were SEC regular-season champs. When South Carolina entered the 2015 SEC Tournament, Welch said the Gamecocks “1000%” knew they were going to get over the hump and win the conference title.
South Carolina beat its opponents by an average of 18.6 points in the next three games and did just that, giving the Gamecocks their first SEC Tournament title in program history.
“We had a lot of momentum, and we gelled, we clicked. We had a lot of talent, but we also had a lot of trust in each other,” Welch said. “…So we felt very confident, we knew we had the capability. It was just a matter of putting it all together.”
The end of Welch’s career with the Gamecocks
Welch’s 137-game career with the Gamecocks ended with a loss to Notre Dame in South Carolina’s first-ever Final Four appearance. Though her time wearing the garnet and black had come to a close, Welch remembers feeling, in the moment, that it was a “matter of when” South Carolina would return to the Final Four, not if.
Two years later South Carolina won a national championship for the first time in program history.
“I knew it wasn’t a one-off,” Welch said with a grin.
Since Welch, who now works for Pierce County Parks and Recreation in Washington state, graduated, South Carolina has turned into a dynasty in women’s basketball. The Gamecocks have won 10 SEC regular season titles, nine SEC tournament championships, been to the Final Four six more times and have won three national titles.
There have even been six other Gamecocks to earn SEC Tournament MVP titles. Tiffany Mitchell won it the year after Welch and was followed by A’ja Wilson who did it twice. Then came Mikiah Herbert-Harrigan, Aliyah Boston (who also won it twice), MiLaysia Fulwiley and Chloe Kitts last year.
But Welch will always have been the first to do it.
“I’m not someone who probably gives myself enough flowers for what I was able to accomplish in my career,” Welch said. “... I always am super proud of it. But more than anything, more than I’m proud of it for myself, (I’m proud of) what the program has continued to be, what it has continued to build on, and what it will continue to be. It is a cornerstone of women’s basketball.”
This story was originally published March 5, 2026 at 8:04 AM.
