It was real, it was great and it was really great, but it’s over for South Carolina softball in 2025.

South Carolina fell 5-0 to UCLA in game three of the Columbia Super Regional, a bitter end to a remarkable first season under head coach Ashley Chastian Woodard. The Gamecocks were one out away from advancing to their first College World Series since 1997 before losing a heartbreaker in game two, and never found the momentum again as the Bruins led wire-to-wire in the season finale.

"I just have so much gratitude for the year and the season,” Chastain Woodard said. “Just for everyone who was a part of it. Ending a season is never easy, and you work really hard to play as long as you can, and I just am filled with so much gratitude and so much pride."

Calling the season anything other than a remarkable success would be short-sighted, and missing the bigger picture.

It was a devastating weekend, as heart-wrenching a loss as a team could ever take on Saturday. But South Carolina had just its second SEC winning season out of the last 22, swept a regional, hosted a Super Regional for the first time in program history and won a Super Regional game for the first time ever, all with a first-year coach and a team picked dead last in the conference pre-season.

“To be able to represent this university and to represent this program means the absolute world to me,” sixth-year senior pitcher Sam Gress said. “Just so grateful for these girls, the coaches, the administrators, the community, the fans and everyone who has supported us all season.”

There will be a rebuilding task in the off-season for sure. South Carolina will lose seven seniors off its roster including Gress, the team’s ace pitcher. The roster is going to look different, something Chastain Woodard acknowledged post-game with the transfer portal already open.

But for the first time in decades, there is legitimate positive momentum for the program. There is tangible success to point to and even more crucially, to take into meetings and visits with recruits and transfer portal targets.

And on top of that, there is a Gamecock leading the resurgence. Chastain Woodard, the former South Carolina player who has talked about the privilege of leading the program since the day she arrived last June, did it one more time in Sunday’s aftermath.

“I just love this place so much,” she said. “In the process of building the team and the wins and the losses, I fell back in love with this place."

Before this year, nobody had any concept of what a Super Regional would look like in Columbia, of what the community rallying around the softball program to this degree would look like.

Chastain Woodard talked last June about her belief in South Carolina’s untapped potential as a program, that the school was something of a sleeping giant in softball capable of waking up.

They were hopeful words, but 11 months later, it feels like she called her shot.

Even through the pain of a final loss, everything seems like it is on the table.

“I’m just so proud of the player,” she concluded. “It’s never easy to end a season, and obviously there is a ton of heartbreak and disappointment that we didn’t make it to Oklahoma and the World Series, which is where this program belongs. One hundred percent, it’s where it belongs.”

Oklahoma City was not to be in 2025, but her team made sure this will be the last year for the foreseeable future where it is not the expectation.

*******************************************************************************************

Looking to continue the conversation? Join us on the insider's forum to talk all things South Carolina athletics