Gamecocks cut down down another net in Greenville
GREENVILLE, S.C. — Freddy Ready looked like a surgeon underneath the basket at Bon Secours Wellness Arena.
Standing next to a ladder, blue and yellow confetti scattered all around him like fallen snowflakes in the aftermath of South Carolina’s 74-58 win over Tennessee in the SEC Championship Game, he went to work.
One at a time as every South Carolina player and coach climbed the ladder and grasped a pair of orange scissors to cut down the net, Ready — South Carolina women’s basketball’s Director of Player Development — showed the way.
He told them where to cut. What threads to slice. One chop at a time, precisely mapping out a plan so that sure enough when Dawn Staley climbed the ladder herself to finish the job, there was exactly one thread left to remove.
After winning its seventh SEC Tournament Championship, net-cutting has become an art form in Columbia.
It wasn’t always that way.
“Years of experience,” Ready said post-game about his plan. “Coach likes to keep it as a necklace. After that year [when the net was cut incorrectly] we couldn't do it because it was messed up completely, we decided to show them how to cut the proper way because a lot of them don't know. But we have a lot of vets in the room."
Nothing summarizes South Carolina’s (32-0) stranglehold over the sport right now than having the science of cutting down nets down to a tee.
Sunday was South Carolina’s seventh conference championship win in the last nine seasons, and 38th consecutive win overall. The Gamecocks will enter the NCAA Tournament as the unquestioned No. 1 overall seed, and would not have to leave the state before the Final Four with two games in Columbia and a regional back in Greenville on the docket.
“It’s part of our culture,” Victaria Saxton said. “It’s something that coach has built here.”
Sunday was a three-point game early in the second half, but Tennessee (23-11) never led. A talented but emotionally drained Lady Vols team ran out of gas in the face of relentless defense and a battle-tested championship mettle. For all the different ways South Carolina can, and has, put teams away this season, defense was death knell.
Tennessee's Jordan Horston scored 14 points in the first half and zero in the third quarter as the Gamecocks course-corrected on her savvy inside moves. For over four minutes in the fourth quarter while the margin was still floating within the range of slight doubt, Tennessee never scored. The lead expanded from 10 to 16 as the scent of another championship wafted through the mostly garnet-clad lower bowl of a packed arena.
A scent everyone affiliated with the program is familiar with by now, but one that never gets old. Not for the young players getting their first opportunities to grasp those scissors, and not even for the seniors who have had enough practice with it to know these moments backwards and forwards.
Sunday’s win did not require any last-second heroics, individual explosions or late rallies. For the seniors who have played in four of these and the coaching staff that has been through eight, it was almost an air of business as usual down the stretch. Enough championship experience to notice the differences between them, even.
“I think freshman and sophomore years when you're winning it's like, 'okay we won, congrats let's go home,’” senior Brea Beal said. “But when it's getting close to the end of the road, time slows down and you look around. You're not so much on your phone recording, you're just kind of seeing the confetti fall and watching people cut down nets because it's probably the last time we will see it.”
When Beal looked around she saw the sights, both usual and unique. She saw Aliyah Boston winning another tournament MVP honor, the most positively unsurprising sight that exists anywhere in sports right now. She also saw Boston wearing a paper Burger King crown, which she said freshman Talaysia Cooper’s cousin gave her in the aftermath of the win. A warm and lengthy embrace between Raven Johnson and Kierra Fletcher, two point guards who have never been through this as a redshirt freshman and a transfer respectively.
Friends and family members of the players and coaches spilled onto the court for photos, from parents who are seasoned championship celebrators themselves to the children rolling around in the piled up confetti.
And of course, under that basket where South Carolina was shooting at in the second half, another net-cutting ceremony.
When Boston stepped up, she briefly hesitated on where to cut. As many times as she has done it, she still had to ask Ready how to maneuver through the remaining dangling strands.
Ready, already thinking ahead to the net he could be helping his team cut down in Dallas in 28 days, has an idea on how Boston should mark the occasion with her strand of the net.
“I’ll show her how to get that bracelet,” he joked about the cutting pattern. “That’s the key.”
In one swift motion — some might even say a cut — he encapsulated the mindset around the program’s dynastic run.
Not just cutting down nets, but immedietely planning the next one.