On Sunday, UConn will either win its 12th national championship — all coming under legendary head coach Geno Auriemma — or Dawn Staley’s South Carolina program will win its third title in four years.
It’s the heaviest of heavy hitters squaring off here at Amalie Arena. Paige Bueckers is one of the greatest Huskies in program history but the rare UConn great without a national title to her name. South Carolina’s best players may be the ones who come off the bench. It’s a compelling stylistic matchup in its own right, made bigger by the Hall of Fame coaches on the sidelines and the increased attention on the women’s NCAA Tournament at large.
And it should be a heck of a game.
“There’s a sentimental narrative about Paige — a great freakin’ player,” Staley said Saturday. “Anybody would start their franchise with Paige because of her efficient way of playing, because she’s a winner, because she cerebrally just knows the game, just has an aura about her. And she’ll be the number one pick in the WNBA draft. And she’ll be an Olympian. She’ll be all those things. …
“(But) I want the sentiments to be about our players and what our players have been able to do — equally, because there’s room to do both. We can raise Paige up because she deserves that and raise our players up because they deserve that. And that’s not talked about enough. There’s room for it in our game.”
The Gamecocks are attempting to win back-to-back championships with a roster filled with familiar names but a team that wins differently from some of Staley’s title-winners in the past. There’s no Kamilla Cardoso. There’s no Aliyah Boston or A’ja Wilson. This is a team that comes at you in waves, with a deep rotation that includes stars like MiLaysia Fulwiley and freshman sensation Joyce Edwards coming off the bench. Any number of South Carolina players can step up to win a game when it matters most.
“To me, it’s just old-school basketball where you’re just playing to your strengths, and our strength is our depth, our ability to play together, to play linked up,” Staley said Saturday. “A staple for us has been our ability to defend because the offense will sometimes go off on a journey on its own, and our mainstay has been our ability to defend and come up with schemes that will help us through those stretches where we’ve got a lull from an offensive standpoint.
“It makes it easier when you’ve got a go-to player for sure. But it’s not an impossible thing to do if you don’t. You just have to lean on each other a lot more because you don’t have that go-to player.”
The Gamecocks do tend to start slow, like they did on Friday against Texas. They have a relentlessness and a sense of inevitability, meaning that they know their rugged defense will wear opponents down and their rotation will lead to fresh players late who can make big plays.
They can’t afford a slow start against a UConn team that is playing its best basketball right now. Bueckers scored 30-plus points in three games to lead the Huskies to the Final Four, and then Azzi Fudd and Sarah Strong — her partners in crime — took over the national semifinal game early to set the tone and eventually beat No. 1 overall seed UCLA by a historic margin. UConn’s offense is efficient and masterful, with enviable ball movement, but this team is far from one-dimensional. Its collective defense is also astounding, as evidenced by the way the Huskies shut down Bruins center Lauren Betts, who had been one of the most dominant players in the country heading into Friday’s game. After the game, Auriemma said he didn’t think his players made a single mistake on the defensive end of the floor.
Sunday’s championship game is also a rematch; UConn went to Columbia, S.C., in February and beat the doors off the Gamecocks. The 87-58 rout snapped a 71-game home winning streak for South Carolina.
Both sides have downplayed that result heading into Sunday. UConn doesn’t want to lose focus because it beat a good team soundly nearly two months ago, behind Fudd’s 28 points. And the Gamecocks are using the loss as a motivator, but less because of UConn specifically and more because these players feel that a loss like that is part of the reason that fans and media members have spent the last month talking up teams not named South Carolina as the top national title contenders. (And, hey — when you’re the gold standard in the sport, you’ve got to figure out ways to motivate your incredibly talented roster however you can.)
The flip side, of course, is that UConn hasn’t won a national championship in nearly a decade. Auriemma won four in a row, through 2016, and then hasn’t cut down the nets since. It’s a drought of sorts for the program that has won more titles than anyone else in the history of women’s college basketball.
And this opportunity means a lot to the 71-year-old coach on the sidelines, the man who has seen such incredible growth in this sport over the past decade — including South Carolina’s emergence and dominance as well as increased parity among the upper echelon. Five different teams have won national titles since UConn’s last.
“How many more times can we do it? I don’t know,” Auriemma said. “But runs like this make you still feel relevant, like you still have an impact. Kids still respond. Our coaching staff is really, really good at what they do. And I’m fortunate enough to coach great kids who want to win for each other. There’s not a lot of drama on our team with all that NIL nonsense and guys that are halfway in the portal, halfway out during the season.
I’m really, really fortunate of what I have. Because when it stays like that, it’s very difficult to walk away from something like this.”
