With South Carolina’s 87-75 win over Iowa on Sunday afternoon, the Gamecocks received their third nationwide championship beneath head coach Daybreak Staley and accomplished an ideal 38-0 season.
Now that the event is full, let’s check out a number of the largest winners and losers from the event as an entire.
Winners
Girls’s sports activities: Not simply girls’s basketball. Not simply girls’s faculty basketball. However girls’s sports activities generally.
This yr’s event appeared like a serious turning level for ladies’s sports activities with file TV scores that outdrew NBA Finals video games and World Sequence video games and new discovered consideration within the mainstream sports activities dialogue.
It was additionally not nearly Iowa’s Caitlin Clark. The truth is that when Steven A. Smith and social media are delivering wild and sizzling takes about your play, meaning you might be true superstars. Girls’s sports activities has arrived.
Daybreak Staley and South Carolina: As for this particular event, the most important winner is clearly Staley and her program. With Sunday’s win Staley has led South Carolina to a few championships throughout her tenure and two prior to now three seasons.
Throughout this most up-to-date three yr run the Gamecocks have misplaced a complete of three video games, and two of them 2021-22 championship season. That could be a 109-3 file over three years and 74-1 over the previous two.
What makes this yr’s championship much more spectacular is Staley needed to nearly fully rebuild the roster after final yr’s Ultimate 4 look and got here again even higher.
Kamilla Cardoso (South Carolina): Cardoso was one of many driving forces behind South Carolina’s championship run, and she or he was at her very best within the NCAA event. She had a double-double in three of her 5 video games within the event, and was an absolute drive within the championship win over Iowa with 15 factors, 17 rebounds and three blocks.
The Pac-12’s final hurrah: The Pac-12 might not exist subsequent season, however it made fairly an impression within the girls’s event by placing 5 groups (USC, Stanford, Colorado, Oregon State and UCLA) into the Candy 16.
Caitlin Clark’s private impression: No, she didn’t get a championship to finish her profession at Iowa however it’s exhausting to think about a person participant lifting a sport greater than Clark did for ladies’s basketball over the previous two years, and particularly this season. When the profitable coach says this about you, that’s vital.
