TIffany Mitchell just remembers the chaos. Yelling, jumping, running down the hallways.

How else would you react to the news of landing a teammate like A’ja Wilson?

“I remember when she committed we were all sitting in the dorms,” Mitchell told GameocckScoop. “Me and my teammates were sitting in our rooms, and when she said she committed to South Carolina, I literally remember the entire dorm in an uproar. “We were running through the hallways, we were screaming, we were just so happy.”

Wilson, the Columbia native from Heathwood Hall and No. 1 recruit in the class of 2014, spurned the likes of UConn and Tennessee to stay home and play for Dawn Staley’s Gamecocks.

She was a local hero, but it still raised eyebrows around the country. Dawn Staley’s program was on the rise with back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances at the time, but nothing in the same stratosphere of the monolith it is now. One SEC regular season title, zero conference tournament titles, zero Final Four appearances and certainly nobody outside the building was dreaming about winning a National Championship.

But in the way only a truly elite collegiate player can, she transformed everything. South Carolina won the SEC Tournament all four years she was on campus, won the regular season title all but one, made its first two Final Fours and of course captured the 2017 National Championship.

“We just wanted her to change the narrative,” Wilson’s former teammate and current South Carolina assistant coach Khadijah Sessions told GamecockScoop. “She just made people believe that top recruits can come here and still succeed on this level and the next level.”

It is one thing for a player to impact winning while playing for the team. But South Carolina’s ascension to the top of the college basketball world never looked back when Wilson departed in 2018, and in fact has only improved since.

This is the legacy of the greatest athlete in school history, who already has a statue outside Colonial Life Arena and will see her jersey retired to the rafters on Sunday before the Gamecocks host Auburn.

For all the great players Staley has recruited and coached, through all the trophies and parades in the last 17 years, the dividing line of everything is before or after A’ja Wilson.

South Carolina’s program today is unrecognizable from the one she committed to, the type of place Sessions, Mitchell and Staley only dreamed about.

The Gamecocks have cut down 17 nets in program history — eight conference tournaments, six Final Four appearances and three National Championships — and all 17 happened after Wilson first stepped on campus.

“She legitimized our program,” Staley said. “She took it to another level, and we still feel her legacy today. Everybody still talks about her contribution to our program.”

As a once-in-a-lifetime talent, her future was going to be set. She could have played at UConn or Tennessee, and everything in her personal career probably would have unfolded in a similar manner. Those three WNBA MVPs, two championships, two Olympic gold medals and every other accolade still could have come her way.

But because she stayed home, and remains involved with South Carolina, the legacy goes far beyond anything on the court. Her visibility as one of the best athletes in the world is a recruiting tool for Staley, something high school players and AAU camp participants still ask her about.

“If the best basketball player if the world can come from Columbia, South Carolina and achieve her dreams, why can’t you?”

It is a simple recruiting pitch, but one the program still sees a major advantage with. Players like Wilson grow the sport, and their impact trickles through generations. As more high school programs invest in girls’ basketball around the state — a push heightened in the last decade by South Carolina’s success — more talent flows.

Ashlyn Watkins, MiLaysia Fulwiley and Joyce Edwards? Three local products who grew up watching the Wilson-era Gamecocks, and decided to stay home and follow the same path.

A core moment for Edwards deciding to stay home after a late push from LSU? A conversation with Wilson at a South Carolina game just weeks before she committed last November.

“She’s been through it,” Edwards said. ‘She’s dominating the league right now. She knows what it is to get through everything that I want to get through. She’s what I aspire to be. Little Joyce was like, ‘Wow, this is crazy.’ Older me is trying to learn from her, get some wisdom.”

Wilson was not the first Gamecock of the Staley era to get her number retired; Mitchell earned the honor last year. But she was the accelerant, the player who turned good into great and set the Gamecocks up for everything in the future.

She is still an integral part of South Carolina women’s basketball, a consistent presence everyone turns to as an example of what they can be, and of what the standard for the program should be. Nobody else has had that type of impact, and nobody else can. She was one of one, the ultimate unicorn who came into a program exactly when it needed a player like her and left it infinitely better than she found it.

There was building, then there was A’ja, then there were trophies. Clear as day, past and present.

“I never would have imagined it, honestly,” Wilson said. “I just came here just wanting to win, wanting to be a sponge to it all. To see the legacy, the longevity of this program and where it’s going, I beam garnet and black. I’m just like, ‘That’s our program, that’s what we were built on, that’s our culture.’”

Tomorrow when her jersey is unveiled in the rafters, she will change the ceiling of Colonial Life Arena forever.

A fitting honor for the player who changed everything else.

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