Chloe Kitts details ACL injury rehab, why she’ll return to Gamecocks for final season
South Carolina women’s basketball forward Chloe Kitts jumped up for a rebound during an October basketball practice.
It’s a routine play Kitts has performed countless times in her career. It’s something she’s done successfully 542 times in games with the Gamecocks. Except this time, things didn’t end the way they usually do.
“I jumped up and I heard a pop,” Kitts recalled.
Kitts at first believed she’d just hyperextended her knee. Then there was thought she’d be fine in 10 to 12 days, Chloe’s father Jason Kitts told The State. But a few more MRIs later, it was determined that “pop” was the sound of Kitts’ ACL tearing.
Soon after, South Carolina announced Kitts needed surgery and would miss the 2025-26 season. Her senior season was finished before it even started.
That was nearly six months ago. In the days since, Kitts has worked hard to recover from her ACL injury, grow as a leader and mature as a person, her family, teammates and coaches told The State. Plus, she’s already announced she intends to return to South Carolina next season.
“Everything happens for a reason,” Kitts said. “This is just like a small bump in my chapter. I know I’m gonna be OK. I kind of just relax and look at stuff in a different perspective and understand, this is God’s plan for me. This happened for a reason, it’s just gonna make me a better person and a better basketball player.”
The road to recovery
A few weeks after Kitts had her surgery, a thought hit her: “I can’t go back and undo it. So why am I gonna dwell on it?”
That mindset has helped Kitts attack her recovery vigorously. She’s progressed fast in her recovery, so much so that there have been times where she’s had to be reined in and slowed down, USC’s women’s basketball sports performance coach Molly Binetti told The State.
“I don’t have to tell her to push,” Binetti said. “If anything, we have to rein her in, reel her in a little bit. But I think when you have the mentality that she does, and the work ethic, and she’s already put so much into that prior to getting hurt, this is just kind of a bump in the road.”
Kitts isn’t being irresponsible in her rehab. Binetti, head athletic trainer Craig Oates and South Carolina athletics physician Dr. Jeff Guy keep Kitts on an appropriate timetable with her recovery.
“I felt great the whole time, my knee feels great. But it’s just not about how you feel,” Kitts said. “The inside of your body has to heal. So of course, they’ve told me to slow down a whole bunch of times, but they’re not letting me get ahead. … I’m not going to do dumb stuff. I’m gonna take my time for sure. This is a serious injury, not to play with, and I don’t want it to happen again.”
Binetti said she expected Kitts to be on track with her recovery but admitted she looks better than anticipated at this point. South Carolina point guard Raven Johnson, who tore her ACL in her freshman season, has been impressed with Kitts’ recovery.
“I feel like Chloe could play now,” Johnson said at the SEC Tournament. “She’s running, she’s shooting the ball, she’s working out already; it’s her mindset. Her mindset is so different. She’s ready to get back on the court, and she’s attacking her rehab. See me, when I tore my ACL, I wasn’t doing what she was doing, so I’m watching her. I was like, ‘Dang. I’m learning something new about her.’”
Recovering from an ACL injury can be a long and arduous process. To help get through it, Kitts finds solace in celebrating any milestone that comes along during her rehab. For example, she said doctors told her she can run again starting Monday.
“Honestly, what really helped me is just celebrating the little moments,” Kitts said. “Like the first time I got off crutches, the first time I did [the bike]. ...The doctor told me today I can run, like, consistently run more. So that was good. I needed to hear that.”
Kitts said the easiest part of the recovery has been pushing herself and bringing her “competitive side” to rehab. For example, in the first few months after her surgery, Kitts said she lost about 17 pounds. Instead of getting down about losing the weight she’d worked hard to gain in her college career, she worked hard to gain it back.
“The biggest thing that really pissed me off was it took me so long to gain weight in college,” Kitts said. “... I was so skinny, I felt like I was back to square one, and that made me so upset. So that was really big. So I just kept eating and kept eating, and now I’m six months in and this is the most I’ve ever weighed in my life. I was able to get it back surprisingly fast.”
Learning and leading from the bench
Kitts hasn’t exactly been used to sitting on the bench during her time with South Carolina.
The forward has played in 93 college games and started in 69 of those. Kitts came off the bench in all 18 games of her shortened freshman campaign after enrolling early. In her sophomore and senior years, she started all but six of the 75 games she played.
After being an integral part of last year’s squad, averaging a career-high 10.2 points and 7.7 rebounds per game, she’s had to readjust to not playing at all.
“Sitting on the bench and watching the game, it’s completely different,” Kitts said. “When I tell you it’s so slow, but when I’m out there it feels so fast. … I’ve just never been in that situation. I’m learning a lot from it. Trying to lead, be the best teammate I can be, you know? It’s been hard, but not that hard because I have my team and a good support system around me.”
While Kitts can’t lead on the court, she’s found ways to lead from the bench in the regular season and now in the Gamecocks’ March Madness run. South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley has joked she gained another coach on the sideline in Kitts.
“Chloe is constantly talking to them and she’s speaking from a player’s perspective, someone that’s been out there,” Staley said back in December. “... I think I saw (Ta’Niya Latson) in a postgame interview, say, Chloe asked her what’s wrong with her? It’s things like that. If a coach says it, it is probably taken a little bit differently than a peer. So Chloe’s saying the things that she should be saying as a teammate.”
That player-to-player feedback Kitts has grown to be good at showed up in the SEC Tournament, Johnson said.
“Chloe’s a leader,” Johnson said. “You hear her voice from a mile away. Chloe, she helps the bigs like Madina, Joyce, all of them. Chloe knows what it takes to win. Chloe [was] SEC Tournament MVP last year. She knows what it is to be in a hard predicament of an SEC Tournament. So I think she uses her voice right. It may come off a little mean sometimes, but sometimes you gotta get to that moment for people to understand and hear what they need to hear.”
From a leadership standpoint, Kitts implied her time on the bench this season due to injury was something she needed to happen.
“I want to be the best teammate I can be. If that means being a leader, coach, I try my hardest,” Kitts said. “Whatever they need, they come ask me questions, so I just kind of pour into them. It sucked that it happened, but like, this is probably something that I needed.”
Running it back in the garnet and black
An ACL injury is never ideal, but the timing of Kitts’ injury was a bit of a bright spot.
Since it was determined Kitts would be done for the year before her senior season even began, it meant Kitts would be eligible to play for South Carolina in the 2026-27 season. But, Kitts also would’ve been eligible for the 2026 WNBA Draft and was widely considered a potential first-round pick..
That gave Kitts essentially two options: (1) spend this season on the bench, rehab from her injury and return for a redshirt senior season in 2026-27; or (2) spend this season on the bench, rehab from her injury and declare for the draft.
At the time of the injury — and the last few months in general — the future of the 2026 WNBA season was up in the air due to collective-bargaining-agreement negotiations. That uncertainty played a bit of a part in Jason Kitts telling Staley early on he wanted his daughter back at South Carolina, as opposed to literally (and figuratively) limping into the draft.
“(Staley) gave me a call, and I said, ‘Hey, this is non-negotiable,’” Jason Kitts recalled. “She’s coming back. She’s going to be around you, she’s going to be in the culture, she’s going to be in the community. She’s going to be bigger, faster, stronger, and we’re definitely not limping into a WNBA Draft that we don’t even know if there’s going to be one.”
While the WNBA might’ve been an option, the pros will have to wait a bit longer for Chloe Kitts. Her decision to return to South Carolina was made public in February, but she said she knew “immediately” she wouldn’t be leaving the Gamecocks.
“I still got some more stuff I gotta do here,” Kitts said. “There’s no point in leaving.”
This story was originally published March 25, 2026 at 9:03 AM.
