It’s no longer South Carolina, Caitlin Clark and everyone else

Over the course of two years, South Carolina women’s basketball fans grew accustomed to unmitigated dominance. A national title in 2022 begot a nearly perfect record the following season, when Dawn Staley’s Gamecocks lost just once, in the Final Four, to Caitlin Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes. They atoned for that blip in 2024, beating Clark and Iowa in the national title game to complete an undefeated season and cement themselves as a dynasty.

At this season’s outset, pundits were already framing the national title as the Gamecocks’ to lose. But the rest of the nation wasn’t so sure.

For years, programs across the country that aren’t considered the game’s modern strongholds – Tennessee, Connecticut, Stanford, Notre Dame and now South Carolina – have been hustling mostly out of the mainstream spotlight, working to take advantage of recent developments in college athletics, namely name, image and likeness and the transfer portal.

Athletic directors, having seen the revenue-producing and clout-boosting potential of a thriving women’s basketball program, have invested in new facilities and taken audacious swings at big-name coaches.

The result, two years after Clark pointed a floodlight at the women’s game and flipped the switch, is a new era defined not by a standalone talent but an increasingly level playing field.

Consider: Four teams – UCLA, South Carolina, Texas and Notre Dame – have led the Associated Press poll this season, just the sixth time that has happened since it began in 1976. The longest ruler was UCLA, which long has been the best program without a Final Four berth. Behind a standout season from Lauren Betts, who began her career at Stanford, the Bruins appear finally on the verge of a breakthrough after winning the Big Ten tournament. The Bruins earned the overall No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament and will be headed to Spokane if they advance to the Sweet 16.

The Trojans were never ranked No. 1 this season, but they achieved a different milestone, drawing more national attention than ever thanks to sophomore superstar JuJu Watkins. A program that won two titles in the 1980s but hasn’t been to a Final Four since 1986, USC had its best ranking in 39 years when it peaked at No. 2 this season and is also a projected No. 1 seed.

Then there was Texas, which scored its lone national title in 1986 and hasn’t been to the Final Four since 2003. The Longhorns have SEC player of the year Madison Booker and earned a No. 1 ranking for the first time since 2004.

All three teams represent a new level of parity at the top of the game and count themselves among the group of six or so legitimate contenders to win this year’s NCAA Tournament, each a thrilling challenger to stalwarts South Carolina, Connecticut and Notre Dame, which are also favorites.

But travel below the top line. There’s a new level of depth in the women’s game, in the view of Carolyn Peck, the 1999 national-title-winning coach at Purdue. Right under the six top contenders sits a group of teams that includes TCU, North Carolina State, Duke, Mississippi, LSU, West Virginia and Kentucky that should ensure the tournament shakes off the outdated reputation it carries with far too many viewers – that audiences must endure early rounds rife with blowouts before the games get good.

“I think of it like a child. They scoot, they crawl, they walk, they run,” said Peck, now an ESPN analyst. “That’s what women’s basketball is doing right now. You used to watch and just, applaud. Now? JuJu Watkins is a sophomore! These women, they bring curse words to your mouth when you watch. We’re just at a jog.”

Freedom of movement

No factors were as effective of an accelerant in the women’s game as the two major changes that shook college sports when they arrived in 2021: NIL and new transfer portal rules. Nearly every team has at least one significant contributor on the roster who began her career at another school.

When the NCAA in 2021 eliminated the requirement that athletes sit out a year after transferring, then relaxed those rules even further last year, an annual spring migration began. ESPN reported that more than 1,300 players entered the portal last year, all in search of more minutes, the elusive perfect fit, more NIL opportunities, the chance to bring glory to an unheralded program or a mix of the above.

“Basically, if you’re not happy,” recently retired Iowa coach Lisa Bluder said, “you can go somewhere else.”

Schools have more opportunity than ever to rebuild quickly if a season doesn’t end well. TCU won its first conference tournament title since 2005 – to secure its first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2010 – after nabbing two top-tier talents: center Sedona Prince, who has been playing despite a string of abuse allegations, and elite point guard Hailey Van Lith, who is at the tail end of a basketball odyssey that began at Louisville, curled through LSU and detoured last summer at the Paris Olympics, where she won a bronze medal with the U.S. women’s three-on-three basketball team.

As Van Lith and Prince can attest, rosters are also older than they have ever been (particularly this year, the final season for those players who gained an extra year of eligibility amid the pandemic). A player might not want to stick around at the same school for five years, but why not wring out one’s final year of eligibility at a new program? Especially if a player can build a brand and earn money – women’s basketball players make far less than men’s basketball and football players through NIL, but it’s more than the nothing it used to be.

Coaches are all too happy to reap the benefits.

“In this day and time, you don’t ever want to be young,” said Coach Yolett McPhee-McCuin, who has sustained a fruitful rebuild at Mississippi in part by bending the portal to her will. Her rotation includes three fifth-year players and two sixth-year players. “Young rosters ain’t going deep in the tournament. Young rosters ain’t hosting. All right?”

The flip side is coaches and schools are under more pressure than ever to make the college experience worth it if they want to retain recruits. That doesn’t necessarily mean kowtowing to a player’s demand for more minutes. But it does mean flaunting all the program has to offer, including facilities, NIL opportunities and an athletic director who cares – and proves it with their checkbook.

‘An infusion of resources’

Shea Ralph needed just three years as Vanderbilt’s coach to end the Commodores’ decadelong NCAA Tournament drought. This year, they will return with the NCAA’s single-game freshman scoring record holder, Mikayla Blakes, who chose Vanderbilt over Stanford, Tennessee, UCLA and others.

Ralph credits Vanderbilt’s athletic director, Candice Storey Lee, for the Commodores’ revitalization. Among other things, Ralph said, Lee makes sure the program is keeping up with the country’s elites, including opening a new basketball practice facility for the men’s and women’s teams this year.

Yet even with a strong foundation of support, Ralph noticed a change since women’s basketball started drawing wider interest nationally. The explosion of the game collided with NIL to create “an infusion of resources” for her program, she said.

“I have an AD and a school chancellor who will make sure my team is not left out of the conversation,” Ralph said. “I can’t tell you what that does for me as a leader, to go out and recruit people and (be) able to say, ‘You’re going to have this and this and this’ – and know that I’m telling them the truth.”

It means more to have a winning women’s basketball program now, when your school might be featured on ESPN on Sunday afternoon. As nontraditional women’s basketball powers bulk up, quality coaches are at a premium, too.

Kentucky poured $82 million into renovating a facility for its women’s basketball, volleyball and gymnastics programs that opened this season, and athletic director Mitch Barnhart needed a coach to match. Barnhart went out and poached Kenny Brooks, the beloved coach who took Virginia Tech to the Final Four in 2023.

Former Hokies point guard Georgia Amoore followed, and the Wildcats have their most wins since the 2019-20 season and will play in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2022.

“With the eyeballs that are on us from a television perspective on the SEC Network and on ESPN, it’s been incredibly helpful,” Barnhart said. “… We sold out four of our last five games this season, and our average crowd was significantly up from last year. It’s been outstanding. … Kenny’s style of ball is fun to watch, he’s got really exciting players, and the combination of all those things, it was the right time, right place.”

More changes are ahead in college sports, with a revenue-sharing model for athletes in the pipeline and women’s programs finally earning financial rewards for their participation in the NCAA Tournament, just as the men do.

Combine that with the still-skyrocketing interest in women’s sports, and there’s going to be less and less distance between the traditional powers in women’s basketball and well-funded programs from power conferences that are on the rise, such as Ralph’s Commodores.

There’s more opportunity than ever to get highly ranked recruits, build a successful program and win, Ralph said. For the first time, it feels as if true parity is in the hands of people like her.

“We have to start winning championships,” Ralph said. “We have to show up and beat these teams that have been powerhouses for decades. I think then, actually, people will believe it.”