South Carolina Back in N.C.A.A. Championship Game With Win over Louisville

All through the course of the N.C.A.A. ladies’s basketball match, Daybreak Staley, South Carolina’s storied coach, has preached a message of consistency and strain to her gamers: Keep 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 sport scheduled for Friday evening in the identical enviornment.

Louisville tried and tried once more to chunk into South Carolina’s lead, utilizing its velocity and wealth of various expertise to depart the Gamecocks frazzled at occasions. The groups often 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 method to the basket.

The Gamecocks misplaced to Stanford by 1 level within the Remaining 4 in 2021 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 among its losses was a shock defeat to Kentucky on the buzzer within the Southeastern Convention match. However its defensive prowess has already taken down the perfect 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 may have despatched South Carolina to the championship sport. 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 drive across the basket to steer South Carolina with 23 factors and 18 rebounds, securing her twenty ninth double-double of the season and a single-season rebound document for South Carolina.

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 extensive 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 by the Gamecocks protection, and made three consecutive layups to present the Cardinals a lead within the second quarter. However South Carolina took it again shortly and decisively. Whereas Engstler discovered open paths to attain 18 factors and 9 rebounds earlier than fouling out of the sport, South Carolina was in a position to cease 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. match appearances underneath Staley, not together with the 2020 match that was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. 4 of these appearances have been Remaining 4 runs.