PARIS — As Sania Feagin, Kamilla Cardoso, TeHina Pao-Pao and several other Gamecocks flooded off the floor into a small but unmistakable sea of Garnet and Black gathered at Halle Georges Carpentier, some faint cries could be heard from the court.
There were hugs, smiles and laughs around, the type of warm embraces you would expect to see more at a family reunion than an open basketball practice.
And still through it all, the same cries from the hardwood from coaches, staffers and personnel.
“Come on back! Back this way!”
The Under Armour-sponsored youth clinic the Gamecocks ran along with Notre Dame — the opponent for Monday night’s historic match-up in Paris — was about to get underway. South Carolina’s players, so lost in the joy, surreality and spectacle of even just a normal practice given the location and magnitude in the trip, missed their cues to return to the court.
Eventually they filed back on, where around 50 overjoyed kids greeted them and the Fighting Irish.
“At some point in my life I was a kid and I looked up to other people,” South Carolina forward Kamilla Cardoso said. “So it’s really nice to be out there and be someone that they can look up to.”
The business of practice was a brief diversion back to normality after two days exploring Paris. A trip opening that included visits to the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre ran more into fastbreak drills and some five-on-five action, but even there the term “normality” only goes so far.
How can anything about this be normal?
Practice was open to the team’s traveling party, a collection of fans that filled up a full section inside the quaint gym, and made their voices heard throughout the two hours South Carolina was on the court. Parents, family members, program donors, lifelong fans and everyone in between experienced the joy of the moment, one basketball-related snippet of a trip with reverberations far beyond the sport.
"I think it does bring us together a lot more,” Dawn Staley said Friday about the trip. “When you spend time with each other off the court and you build the trust and you build some laughter and you experience new things together, it creates a bond that PaoPao spoke about after practice today. We can say it as coaches, but when players actually say those things that are happening, it makes you feel good about the decision that you made to allow us to come over and experience this."
If this trip as a whole is a celebration of women’s basketball and what it means to so many people, Saturday afternoon was a microcosm of the experience.
Raven Johnson high-fived kids as they completed the dribbling course as they crossed the finish line. Bree Hall and Feagin decided to keep score between the two layup lines themselves, smiling and laughing the entire time. Hall then joined forces with Sakima Walker to briefly exit the court and find their way to the computer controlling the playlist, because the music had to be exactly right for an afternoon with nothing but positive vibes around.
It was, and the dancing clinic soon followed.
But for an afternoon, at the end of a week full of it, there was nothing but joy.
Real, uncut love, the type of love that can make fans jump on an airplane for seven hours to watch one regular season game and hang around two days before said game to view a practice. Genuine, unmistakable joy from the players and coaches, so many positive vibes that the players had to be reminded that their interactions with fans was cutting into their time interacting with kids.
So much happiness, so many smiles, they quite literally lost track of where to place it all.
“It was just so fun,” Cardoso said about the youth clinic. “It’s great to be out there and see how happy they are.”
The happiness extended far beyond just the kids, too.
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