All through the course of the N.C.A.A. ladies’s basketball event, Daybreak Staley, South Carolina’s storied coach, has preached a message of consistency and stress to her gamers: Preserve the factor.
And as typically occurs with Staley and her gamers, they listened.
South Carolina, the top-ranked ladies’s basketball workforce within the nation, will get one other shot at a championship title after defeating fellow No. 1-seed Louisville, 72-59, on the Goal Area in Minneapolis on Friday evening. The Gamecocks will play the winner of the UConn vs. Stanford recreation scheduled for Friday evening in the identical area.
Louisville tried and tried once more to chunk into South Carolina’s lead, utilizing its velocity and wealth of assorted expertise to depart the Gamecocks frazzled at occasions. The groups steadily discovered themselves in a tangled mess on the court docket as they fought for possession. However the Cardinals couldn’t penetrate South Carolina’s defensive wall, which blocked, stole and danced across the Louisville gamers with the boldness of a workforce that has misplaced solely twice this season.
Even double and triple groups couldn’t cease the Gamecocks from making their option to the basket.
The Gamecocks misplaced to Stanford by 1 level within the Closing 4 in 2021 and have been hungry for redemption and a second nationwide title since 2017. South Carolina was ranked No. 1 within the Related Press ballot all season and one in all its losses was a shock defeat to Kentucky on the buzzer within the Southeastern Convention event. However its defensive prowess has already taken down the most effective opposition within the nation earlier this season — together with Connecticut and Stanford.
This run has been a candy flip of occasions from final yr, particularly for Aliyah Boston, the Gamecocks’s centerpiece 6-foot-five ahead, who missed a last-second shot that will have despatched South Carolina to the championship recreation. Requested final weekend if she replays any of these moments, her response was a definitive no. “I’ve let go of that since final season and we’ve moved on,” she mentioned.
Moved on she has. Boston, 20, used her relentless power across the basket to guide South Carolina with 23 factors and 18 rebounds, securing her twenty ninth double-double of the season and a single-season rebound file for South Carolina.
“We knew that we had been going to be examined and this was the hump we would have liked to recover from,” Boston mentioned after the sport.
However she didn’t carry her workforce alone. The Gamecocks have come to depend on a core assist system of rebounding abilities from Victaria Saxton, who scored 10 factors, the low and large protection of Brea Beal, who scored 12 factors, and the offensive flexibility of Zia Cooke, who scored 10, and Destanni Henderson, who scored 11.
Ahead Emily Engstler was in a position to plow via the Gamecocks protection typically and scored 18 factors and 9 rebounds earlier than fouling out of the sport. Her three consecutive layups to gave the Cardinals a lead within the second quarter. However South Carolina took it again shortly and decisively. The loss means the top of Engstler’s collegiate profession, however she is prone to be chosen within the first spherical of subsequent month’s W.N.B.A. draft.
Engstler’s 6-foot-one construct helped her discover open paths to the basket. However South Carolina was no match for 5-foot-7 Hailey Van Lith, Louisville’s star guard and main scorer, who scored simply 2 factors within the first half. She completed with 9 factors.
South Carolina entered the sport with Staley and Boston having simply picked up the Naismith coach and participant of the yr awards. Staley, a Corridor of Fame participant and an Olympic gold medalist as a participant and a coach, started build up the South Carolina ladies’s basketball program in 2008.
The Gamecocks have made 10 consecutive N.C.A.A. event appearances underneath Staley, not together with the 2020 event that was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. 4 of these appearances have been Closing 4 runs.
Supply: NY Times
