South Carolina women's basketball: August notebook
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It’s vacation time for the Gamecocks, plus why playing TCU this season could pay dividends next season.
Last week, South Carolina announced six more games for the upcoming season. Included are the return game from ECU and a home game against Charleston Southern. South Carolina owed CSU a home game but was apparently able to convert that into another game in Columbia.
South Carolina also announced the UConn game will be on February 16, but since that matchup was already known, the biggest announcement was probably a game against TCU on December 8. TCU may not be the sexiest name on the schedule, but the Horned Frogs should be ranked and will be expected to compete for the conference title in the new-look Big 12.
There’s also another reason to like this game on the schedule. The game is not at TCU’s campus Schollmaier Arena but about ten minutes away at Dickie’s Arena. Dickie’s Arena seats about 5,000 more people and opened in 2019.
But the main reason to like the move is that Dickie’s Arena is one of the two NCAA tournament regional hosts in 2026. The other is Golden 1 Arena in Sacramento, so it is likely that South Carolina would be sent to Ft. Worth. It can’t hurt to get a little advance scouting on the venue and any potential idiosyncrasies.
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Dawn Staley has been living her best life at the Olympics, which she attended as part of the Presidential Delegation. She has toured the U.S. Embassy, attended the Opening Ceremony, water polo, track and field, 3×3 basketball, swimming, fencing, and gymnastics. The latter led to mutual Twitter fangirling with Suni Lee. (The group stage of basketball was in Lille, not Paris, so she did not attend any games.)
Staley has also appeared on NBC’s coverage of women’s basketball and met Sha’Carri Richardson, Wanda Sykes, Flavor Flav, and Tom Brady among many others. Staley has also fallen in love with glass bottle Cherry Coca-Cola. I don’t quite understand it, so that will be my first question when she returns.
Raven Johnson held a back-to-school backpack giveaway and meet and greet in suburban Atlanta over the weekend. Next weekend she will host a skills clinic, also in Atlanta.
Sania Feagin played in the AEBL over the weekend, an Atlanta-area pro-am. She had 16 points and 10 rebounds to win game MVP.
Chloe Kitts hosted a pair of basketball camps over the weekend in Puyallup, WA. Kitts lived in Puyallup before moving to Florida. Kitts and Bree Hall also appeared in ads for a makeup brand. The ads launched last week.
Kitts will stay in the Pacific Northwest to attend the Nike Basketball Skills Academy from August 5-8. She will be joined by Joyce Edwards, Tessa Johnson, and (on the men’s side) Collin Murray-Boyles.