Women’s basketball prepares for heavyweight bout with Stanford
The Trojans hope to win their first Pac-12 Tournament since 2014.
By THOMAS JOHNSON
Adele said it best: This is the end. Hold your breath and count to 10.
No matter the result of Sunday’s game, Pac-12 women’s basketball will cease to exist in its current state.
USC (25-5, 13-5 Pac-12) and Stanford (28-4, 15-3) will conclude this chapter of the conference in the Pac-12 Tournament championship, with No. 1 seeds in the NCAA tournament likely on the line.
“My feet are where I am right now and they’re present in this group, this is our one year with this team and so that’s the most important thing, the chance to play in the championship game,” said Head Coach Lindsay Gottlieb after the team’s Saturday practice. “But for me overall, I do think representing this conference on the last day of women’s college basketball here as we know it in the Pac-12 really means something.”
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Following a double-overtime win in the semifinals over UCLA, the Trojans earned themselves a Saturday rest heading into their bout with the Cardinal.
Still, Sunday will pose a physical challenge for a USC team that is playing three games in four days for the first time since the 2019-2020 season. Stanford, meanwhile, has had such a stretch in six of the last seven seasons.
“[The Cardinal] have obviously been the standard bearer,” Gottlieb said. “Our players get amped up to play anyone, but certainly seeing Stanford is something that gets them going for sure.”
While the Cardinal are quite experienced in the Pac-12 Tournament final — winning three of the last five and 15 of the 23 total tournaments — the Trojans are far from experienced, as the only time they’ve won the tournament was in 2014.
It’s been a quick turnaround for Gottlieb at USC as she inherited a sub-.500 team in 2021 and turned it into a Pac-12 finalist a mere three seasons later.
“You don’t take the job unless you can imagine it, I think this was the goal,” Gottlieb said. “But the gratitude is always there. Coaching is hard, winning is hard, being in charge of games is hard.”
Junior center Rayah Marshall has been through the thick and thin of the Gottlieb tenure, becoming a Trojan the same season as her head coach.
“I wouldn’t say that I wouldn’t see us here because like I said, I have so much trust in Coach [Gottlieb],” Marshall said after USC’s Saturday practice. “I knew my future at ’SC, it would grow, it would come around a lot and with [freshman guard JuJu Watkins] here, I just feel like the sky’s the limit for this team. We’re competitors and we want to win, so I’m excited.”
But now, it’s time for David versus Goliath. Nick Foles versus Tom Brady. USC football’s defense versus literally any breathing human.
The Trojans all season have played as the underdogs in the conference, voted to finish No. 6 in the Pac-12 preseason coaches poll. They even came in as the betting underdog against UCLA, despite earning the No. 2 seed in the tournament compared to the Bruins’ No. 3 seed.
Now, they’ve proved to the country that they can keep up with the top dogs, as evidenced by their No. 5 ranking in the Associated Press Top 25 women’s college basketball poll.
“No one picked us. I looked at all the things, everyone’s picking either Stanford or UCLA to win this conference, and I get it. They’re great teams,” Gottlieb said. “So I think we’ve been able to enjoy being here, take in the experience, but at the same time, use the underdog mentality and the ‘we’ve never been here’ to play really hard at the same time.”
Still, USC will go into the championship game as an underdog, facing off against the No. 1 seed in the tournament and the No. 2 team in the country. The Trojans will have to contend with two of the best post players in the country — senior forward Cameron Brink and junior forward Kiki Iriafen.
The Trojans have their own dominant post players to contend with the bigs of Stanford; Marshall, junior center Clarice Akunwafo and graduate forward Kaitlyn Davis have caused problems for opposing centers all season.
“A priority for us playing against those bigs [is that] we want to rebound the ball,” Marshall said. “If we can keep them off the glass as much as possible, I feel like that’ll make our lives easier, as well as open up a lot of shots and opportunities for our guards.”
USC, of course, posts its own star player in Watkins, who was recently named the Pac-12 Freshman of the Year, and her 27.6 points per game rank second across all of the NCAA.
Along with the physical test of playing three games in four days, Watkins will have to contend with injuries that took her out of the UCLA game twice. However, Watkins said postgame Friday night that she would be ready to go against Stanford.
Stanford will be familiar with the Trojans’ star freshman, as Watkins hit a career-high 51 points in a USC victory the last time the two teams squared off.
But Gottlieb has consistently contended that the Trojans would not have had success this season without their non-JuJu players, and specifically their bench players, particularly in that first Stanford matchup.
“As much attention as there is on our starters, and there should be … our bench really matters,” Gottlieb said after the UCLA game Friday night. “We value everybody, we know what they can bring and I think they’re really understanding what their roles are and buying into that and that’s huge for us.”
USC will have to ride on all its players against the Cardinal — Watkins and the “non-Watkins” alike.
Watkins can score all she likes, but she will need her teammates to take down the vaunted Stanford team, headed by the winningest head coach in college basketball history, Tara VanDerveer.
If the Trojans can put in a complete team effort, they could be cutting down nets after their bout with Stanford on Sunday, scheduled for 2 p.m. at MGM Grand Garden Arena.
