In your quest for the perfect season, you may need to keep the late-game magic intact.
The University of South Carolina certainly had success in last month’s SEC semifinals, crushing the University of Tennessee when center Camila Cardoso hit her first 3-pointer of her college career with 1.1 seconds left.
Drama was avoided on other climbs.
That’s what happened at the University of Connecticut in 2015-16, when the Huskies completed the ninth undefeated season in women’s college basketball and the third in seven years.
But since then, the sport has not had an undefeated champion.
There is further equivalence. The landscape has changed.
Talented stars are spread out across the major conferences, rather than concentrated on a select few teams.
Perfect seasons occurred five times between 2008-2009 and 2015-2016, with UW recording four of those and Baylor recording the other one.
Texas (1985-86) and Tennessee (1997-98) also accomplished this feat.
So if No. 1 South Carolina beats North Carolina State to win the championship on Friday, it would be the Siamcocks’ first win in eight seasons.
They maintained a perfect record all the way to last year’s Final Four, then faced an elusive feat that Minnesota Lynx star Napheesa Collier predicted would be “increasingly difficult” to achieve in the future. I’m back to this point.
“It was really special to have a perfect season for them,” Collier, a freshman on UW’s 2015-16 team, told the Post. “It’s always special whenever we do it, but the more the game grows, it’s a testament to what a good team they are.”
South Carolina guard Tehina Paopao ranks second in the nation in 3-point percentage (46.3).
Raven Johnson has the fourth-best assist-to-turnover ratio (3.0).
Cardoso averaged 14.1 points and 9.4 rebounds, both team highs. The Shamcocks’ opponents took just 26.9 3-pointers and had the No. 1 point differential (29.6).
Head coach Dawn Staley is somewhat unsure of why Shamcox has fallen under the radar.
“I love it,” she said Sunday after the Iowa-LSU game drew 12.3 viewers, the day before the South Carolina game drew 3.1 million viewers.
Staley’s hiring allows South Carolina to assemble a roster that can “stretch the floor,” Collier said. University of Wisconsin head coach Marisa Moseley, who has been an assistant on three perfect UW teams, said in a post that Shamcox has managed to “block out” the inevitable buzz that comes with the pursuit of perfection. told the paper.
“Now put the spotlight on it and put it somewhere else,” Staley said. “Hopefully this team can continue to grow in the space they’re given. At the end of the day, this time next week, we want a lot of guys to talk about a lot of things.”
The teams have gotten closer since UW won in 2016. In 2022, the University of South Carolina won the championship with a 35-2 record. Stanford only lost twice the year before. And in 2019, the only blight on Baylor’s championship season was a five-point loss to the Cardinal.
Los Angeles Sparks guard and former Union University star Kia Nurse told the Post that if anything, she expected the Huskies to put together another undefeated season.
Her freshman and sophomore years overlapped with a group of seniors including Brianna Stewart, Moriah Jefferson and Morgan Tuck, who went 151-5 and won four national titles.
“I didn’t know anything was different,” Collier said of the 2015-16 season.
But repeat championships and winning streaks spanning multiple seasons no longer exist.
His failure to strive for perfection served as a warning of how difficult the task was. But South Carolina could finally change that this weekend.
“If it was easy, everyone would be doing it,” the nurse said. “That’s going to happen consistently. So the fact that we were able to do that over multiple seasons probably speaks to the greatness of Connecticut.
“Because if you can have an undefeated season, you’re going to have undefeated seasons everywhere in every sport. But that doesn’t necessarily happen often.”
