South Carolina women's basketball: Maddy McDaniel's surprising success has everyone smiling

Freshman point guard Maddy McDaniel has quickly and unexpectedly become a fan favorite – and a favorite of her coaches and teammates. And whenever her name comes up, it seems to draw the same reaction: a smile.

It’s an appropriate response. When you talk to McDaniel the first thing you notice is her big smile and dimples, plus it’s impossible to dislike someone nicknamed “Mouse.” But it’s her play, not her smile or charming personality, that has everyone smiling. 

It started after McDaniel scored a then-career-high seven points at Clemson. After the game, we asked Dawn Staley about McDaniel, and Staley couldn’t stop grinning. 

“I love great point guard play. Oh, I love great point guard play,” Staley said. “Maddy is as solid as solid can be. She is running our basketball team. She is picking and choosing opportunities to score. She’s facilitating, she’s defending, she’s gaining more and more confidence. So if she continues to play like this, we’re going to continue to find time for her. I’m overjoyed with her play because she’s solid.”

McDaniel missed the first two games of the season as she recovered from offseason knee surgery. She played well in her first two games but mostly played in garbage time of blowouts against Coppin State and ECU.

It was that Clemson game when McDaniel first really stood out. She played crunch time minutes and arguably outplayed veteran Raven Johnson. Staley always tries to speak positively of her players, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen her giddy like she was after the game.

McDaniel has been a part of the rotation ever since. 

Staley trusted her to play 20 minutes at UCLA, beginning a three-game stretch in which McDaniel led the Gamecocks in assists. She scored a career-high 10 points against Purdue, had seven points and three steals against Duke, and then got eight points all on free throws against TCU.

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That would make anyone smile.

“I mean, I love Maddy,” Te-Hina Paopao said with a big smile after the Duke game. “This is actually my first time watching her play as a hooper. I even asked her, ‘Are you even 100%?’ and she said no. I was like Ooh it’s going to be scary when are 100%. She’s very calming. She has a calming presence. She knows when to go, when not to go. She plays with really good pace, tempo. She is really good. I’m excited to see her grow throughout the season.”

McDaniel was the second-ranked point guard in her class. The scouting report on her was that she was a lightning-quick, pass-first, true point guard. But McDaniel was still something of an unknown. 

She missed a season with a torn ACL, and then another knee injury ended her senior season in the playoffs. That injury also prevented her from playing in all of the summer all-star games. Then another minor surgery kept her out of both of South Carolina’s exhibitions and the first two games.

All of that, plus the fact that South Carolina already has two experienced points guards, meant that nobody, not even Mouse herself, expected her to play much this season.

“Yeah, I came in here already knowing that, so it’s not going to be like I’m blindsided by it. But  I’m prepared for whatever,” McDaniel told me over the summer. 

In retrospect, a mature comment like that probably should have been the first indication McDaniel was going to be more than an emergency backup.

“Maddy makes me smile. She really does,” Staley said recently. “She makes me smile because she’s such a – her mother calls her her sweet girl. And she’s really sweet. She’s smart. She’s quiet. She is a hard worker. She is a pleaser. She is playing well. She chose us. She could have gone to any school. Duke was one of her schools. Georgia was one of her schools. And she chose to come here. And when you choose to come here knowing that we had Paopao, knowing we had Raven, that could be intimidating. Some people told her she’s making the worst decision of her life. And we won’t play her until her junior year. I’m happy because she’s proven them wrong. But a player like Maddy is she’s always going to be successful in anything that she does because of her approach to everything that she does.”

That approach has led to McDaniel’s surprising start. She leads the nation in assist-to-turnover ratio at 6.25. McDaniel is averaging 5.6 points on 59.3% shooting and leads South Carolina with 3.1 assists per game. She is also third on the team in steals. 

“I don’t want to put myself in a box: ‘I’m going to have to sit back and learn,’” McDaniel said over the summer. “But if that’s what I’m going to have to do, then I’m willing to take that. I’m willing to do that.”

More than anything, McDaniel passes the eye test. She looks like a point guard, and she’s become one of Staley’s favorites in the process.

“I mean, she’s really a luxury,” Staley said after the Duke game. “You know, as a coach, you look down the bench and you see her, and you want to play her more, which is just like, hey, we got to get Raven going. We got to get Paopao going. We got to get all these players going. And you know when you call her to go into the game, she’s going to be solid. She’s made me feel that way. So sometimes you just kind of let the other guards do their thing because you know she’s going to be solid. Because of that, she sometimes loses out on some minutes. I mean, tried to get her in in the first quarter, which we did, and I thought she did some really nice things for us.”

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