SOUTH CAROLINA GAMECOCKS BASKETBALL
Sindarius Thornwell hasn’t played a basketball game at South Carolina in two years but his face, along with the rest of South Carolina’s 2017 team, is plastered over murals across the arena.
Thornwell was a key cog in the Gamecocks’ run through the Final Four, a moment immortalized on the media room wall just 30 feet from the court at Colonial Life, but it took a lot of growing pains to get to that moment holding up four fingers on the floor of Madison Square Garden.
The Gamecocks’ senior class consisting of Thornwell, Duane Notice and Justin McKie had to do a lot of losing before getting to experience their winning and Thornwell thinks that what next year’s talented iteration of the Gamecocks will have to do.
“I think next year’s team can be pretty good. I think they’re special. I think they have a lot of special pieces. They just have to learn how to play college ball. They have to figure out how to win at a young age. I don’t think talent is the issue,” Thornwell said. “I think learning to play the game is. Not having a lot of leadership and older guys around will be the issue. Can those young guys play? Yeah, they can play. Can they compete? Yeah, they compete. All that’s good but when it comes down to winning games it comes down to do you know how to win, the IQ of the game and your knowledge of the game. That comes with experience. With them not having a lot of experience, once they learn how to win games, they’re special.”
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Now, it might not take 36 losses over two seasons like Thornwell endured his first couple years for a young Gamecocks team this year to learn how to win, but he thinks it’ll take some time for this team to feel comfortable executing down the stretch.
Entering this season, they currently have just two players—Justin Minaya and Maik Kotsar—with at least two years of experience in Frank Martin’s system.
Of the 13 scholarship players in 2019, 11 are either freshmen or sophomores. While they have talent in guys like potential first rounder AJ Lawson, Keyshawn Bryant and Minaya along with a standout freshman class, Thornwell thinks they’ll be a learning curve while young players figure out how to succeed late in games.
“When I got older, that’s when I started to learn how to execute, learn how to finish games. We’d play the first 30 minutes and the last 10 blow the game,” he said. “When we got older and the more experience we got we started to value the last 10 minutes and realized those last 10 are more important than the first 30.”
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One of the biggest things Thornwell said needs to continue to develop is the team’s mindset every time they step on the court.
“Once they all get the mindset of, ‘We’re about to whoop people when we step on the court.” Once everybody thinks that on the court, they’ll do it. That’s what I think was so special about our Final Four team. It didn’t matter who we played, you couldn’t tell us we were going to lose. It didn’t matter if they were ranked number one or 1,000. We still approached the game like we were about to bust them. Once everybody has that mindset, you’ll have different results,” he said. “Once the whole team and all the young guys get it, you’ll see the difference.”
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The Gamecocks are coming off back-to-back seasons where they didn’t make the postseason and entering 2019 Martin said this is deepest team in his tenure.
Thornwell admits this team has talent but it’ll be about how quickly they develop and if the upperclassmen can bring along the younger guys.
“When you come into Frank, it’s like you’re learning basketball all over again. You’re learning a new defense, you’re learning a new offense and if you don’t have a junior or senior there to teach you that, then you’re by yourself,” Thornwell said. “You’re on your own. The juniors and seniors are going to tell you you’re not going to understand until you’re a junior or senior. Right now they have a bunch of freshmen.
