South Carolina's Recent Success Against UConn Symbolizes Growth
Dawn Staley and the South Carolina Gamecocks are fresh off of a four-point victory over the UConn Huskies, their first ever at the XL Center and arguably the final feat they'd yet to pull off against their rivals heading into the weekend. While it's clear that Dawn Staley has the Gamecocks well positioned to be the best program in women's college basketball for the foreseeable future, eight years ago, this wouldn't have been a trendy theme when comparing South Carolina to UConn.
The first time the Gamecocks and Huskies faced off against one another with Dawn Staley serving as South Carolina's head coach was the 2008-09 season, where they lost by whopping 29 points at home to the eventual national champions that season. In the 2014-15 season, Dawn Staley decided that even among the most competitive coaches wouldn't be for the fate of heart, as she started scheduling annual matchups against Geno Auriemma's UConn Huskies.
While the Gamecocks had arrived on the national scene that season, making it to the Final Four, probably nobody would have found annual scheduling matchups against the standard bearers of the sport in UConn as an advantageous long-term plan. With how the annual series began, you might have thought those contrarians had a valid point, as South Carolina lost the first six games of the newly minted annual series against UConn by an average margin of 20 points per game. The Gamecocks, however, have completely changed the perception of this game, as they've won four out of the last five games against UConn, with their one loss occurring in overtime in Hartford, CT.
Looking back, this individual decision to make this game a yearly occurrence might be remembered as Dawn Staley's single greatest move. It forced her program to go against the sports cream of the crop every single year. It wasn't pretty at the beginning, but South Carolina learned over time what their program still lacked and needed to adjust to reach a point where they couldn't just consistently compete with UConn but defeat them to where they would be viewed as the team with the target on their back.
The Gamecocks now find themselves in that position, which indicates how this series has morphed during their rise to the proverbial throne in women's college basketball.
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