South Carolina women’s basketball: The Gamecocks seniors reflect on their careers
South Carolina doesn’t have a lot of experience with losing. That goes for the entire season, but especially the NCAA tournament. South Carolina has won two of the last four national championships and made five straight Final Fours.
In 2023, the mood was heartbroken. There was a feeling that the Freshies, the group of seniors that won it in 2022 and had gone undefeated until the shocking loss to Iowa, had lost their chance at immortality.
That group had been through the ringer. They were the best team in the country in 2020, only for the tournament to be canceled. They lost a heartbreaking game to Stanford in 2021, missing two game-winning layups in the final seconds.
That group got redemption in 2022 but still faced criticism, almost all of it unfair. They didn’t score enough, they were too physical, a defensive-minded team wasn’t fun to watch, all of it with a racist lining that ranged from silent to overt.
2023 was supposed to silence those critics, but the loss to an inferior Iowa team just supercharged the critics. The mood in the locker room reflected the weight of that pressure.
The undefeated 2024 season exorcised those ghosts. Everything went right, and the critics were silenced.
The Gamecocks may have paid for that this season. There was an injury to Ashlyn Watkins, their most irreplacable player. There were shooting slumps from – well, almost everyone. Their three vaunted winning streaks (consecutive wins, consecutive home wins, and consecutive SEC wins) all came to an end.
And yet, South Carolina won the SEC, won the SEC tournament, made the Final Four, and played for the national championship.
Yes, the Gamecocks lost. Yes, there were a lot of tears in the locker room. But it wasn’t like 2023. They all knew they had lost to a better team on Sunday, and they knew what they had to overcome just to get there. They cried for the teammates they would never play with again.
There is a lot that happens off the record in the postseason. Casual conversations with players and staffers as everyone kills time, friendly locker room chats with players, hushed mining for some inside information, and of course, drinks at the hotel bar.
That’s why I can say with great certainty that the senior group of Bree Hall, Sania Feagin, Raven Johnson, Te-Hina Paopao, and Sakima Walker was not the Freshies. They were both less and more.
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They don’t have the same symmetry. There’s no nickname, and the membership timeline is a bit muddled. Paopao joined late as a transfer. Johnson missed a year due to injury and is coming back for next season. Their paths are all different, unlike the Freshies, who were a unified group throughout.
That’s what made this group special. Hall was the lowest-ranked recruit of the group and probably had the most linear career. She went from lightly-used reserve to key reserve to starter. But even Hall saw her senior minutes reduced by an emerging younger player.
Those trials and challenges made this group more human than other groups. We saw their struggles, their comebacks, their victories. To borrow from one of Dawn Staley’s favorite sayings, it felt like we lived their highs and lows with them.
Hall drew the short straw after the game and had to go to the podium in the media room. She said that might have been easier than being in the locker room.
“It’s been amazing,” Hall said. “I’m glad I came up here and could do this presser because I’m just not as upset as you would think I would be. I’m so appreciative of everything that this program has done for me. Coach has put me in a great position. I’ve won two national championships. It’s upsetting, of course, to lose and you’re right there. But, I mean, I can’t express how appreciative I am of this program, and I just had such a great experience here.”
Paopao stood with a smile, perhaps a grimace, and answered questions. Her perspective was a little different after three seasons at Oregon. Her lows were all in the Pacific Northwest, with nothing but highs in South Carolina. Plus, it’s not in her nature to focus on the bad things.
“It hasn’t hit me just yet, so I’m going to enjoy my time with my family after this,” Paopao said. “I’ve got to hold up my head high. I’m just proud of my journey here, and I just want to thank the coaching staff and South Carolina just being able to pour into someone who was looking for a home, and I found my forever home. It hasn’t hit me yet. Maybe it will tonight.”
For several minutes, Feagin tried to answer questions through her tears. Talking to her was the hardest. She had been through the most, going from almost unplayable as a freshman, ignoring all the transfer rumors, to becoming a likely WNBA Draft pick. It was too much to sink in after the game.
“No, not really. It hasn’t really – “ she said. “We played our heart out.”
Finally, Feagin couldn’t do it anymore and retreated to the privacy of the showers. That was the last time most of us would see her in person as she moves on to the WNBA.
Johnson had to be coaxed out a little later. At that point, she already knew she was coming back for her redshirt senior season, but she wasn’t ready to announce it yet. Johnson wasn’t fighting back tears after the championship game because South Carolina lost; it was because it was her last game with her running mates.
“We’re about to split and and it honestly hurts my heart because it feels like yesterday when I came in with these girls,” she said. “We’re about to go our separate ways, and it hurts.”
It’s not what they said at one of the hardest moments of their life that we’ll remember. It’s all the little things along the way.
Feagin was also a reporter’s dream. She has a quick wit, her answers are short and concise, and she is honest. Even when she wasn’t playing, she was a go-to player for quotes.
At least in the locker room. Put Feagin on a podium and you are lucky to get anything other than “Yeah,” “That’s right,” and “What she said.” Still, you immediately see why Feagin is so popular on the team. Also, she’s a great cheerleader on the bench, one who thinks every shot is going in.
Hall is infamous within the media for the range of her responses to questions. She is capable of incredibly polished, insightful comments, but if Hall doesn’t like a question or you talked too long and she stopped listening, she’ll say, “I’m sorry, can you repeat that?”
The same player who could talk for five minutes about her mental health or the game plan or immediately recall her favorite plays would also forget who South Carolina played that day.
Paopao has the deep, booming laugh that drowns out everything else. Actually, her entire family has that laugh, and they laugh all the time. Paopao is starting to develop just a hint of crows’ feet around her eyes, but in her case, it’s probably laugh lines.
Johnson never stops smiling. She finds the good in every situation, although sometimes she’ll try to please you instead of giving an honest answer. Johnson had a subpar season, but she came up big several times in the postseason, including a big game against Duke.
I asked her if it was a “vintage” Raven Johnson game, and she used that opening to talk about how the social media criticism stung her.
“I do see all the stuff on Twitter, people saying I can’t score the ball, things like that. I find a way to win. I don’t need to score the ball. I have player one through 12 in this building that can score the ball,” Johnson said. “It hurts my feelings because I’m human. People don’t know what it’s like to be in my shoes and how to run this team. It’s hard. I go through things already and then they just bring on more stuff.”
This group didn’t change the program the way A’ja Wilson did. They didn’t create a juggernaut the way the Freshies did. They were less than that, but they were more.
They maintained what was already there and built on it: a culture of selflessness, sacrifice, and, most of all, winning. They made a national championship game appearance the expectation, and a loss was disappointing but not program-defining.
Nobody will have her jersey retired, but that doesn’t matter. With a lot of laughter and tears along the way, they are responsible for a whole bunch of other banners. That’s their legacy.
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