WBB: 2022 Recruiting Targets
South Carolina’s 2021 signing class is all but set, so attention is turning ahead to 2022.
Recruiting for 2021 isn’t finished. Not only do Saniya Rivers, Sania Feagin, Raven Johnson, and Bree Hall still have to sign, they have to make it to campus, and neither is a sure thing. “We signed ‘em, now we’ve got to keep ‘em here,” Dawn Staley joked after the vaunted 2019 class of Aliyah Boston, Zia Cooke, Laeticia Amihere, and Brea Beal had all put pen to paper. The Gamecocks will continue to recruit the 2021 class for the next year.
South Carolina had already offered several class of 2022 players, but around the country offers really picked up in June despite the pandemic. South Carolina is no exception, and there could be more offers to come. As it stands, there are eight players the Gamecocks are known to be targeting.
Looking toward the future, South Carolina needs to sign a post player in the 2022 class. Amihere and Feagin each could develop into more of a low post threat than they have shown so far, but you still need more depth after not signing a post in 2020 or 2021 (It’s not for lack of trying - recruits simply looked at the roster and realized Boston has a stranglehold in the middle for the next few years). Fortunately, one of the top-ranked post players in the country for 2022 is right in the Gamecocks’ backyard: Ashlyn Watkins from Cardinal Newman. Watkins is ranked #12 overall, and has been a priority for the Gamecocks for a while. She recently attended a camp run by former Gamecock players Khadijah Sessions and Asia Dozier. Both are now coaches: Sessions is an assistant and JV head coach for the boys teams at Ridge View High, and Dozier is heading into her first season as Watkins’ coach at Cardinal Newman. Watkins is a superb athlete, and she has dunked in a game multiple times. Her most recent, in the 2020 SCISA playoffs, went viral.
Watkins is far from the only 2022 big the Gamecocks are looking at. Another post, 6-7 Lauren Betts from Colorado, is the #1 overall prospect. However, at this point I don’t get the sense there is much mutual interest between Betts and the Gamecocks. I’m not definitively ruling anything out this early in the process, though.
South Carolina offered 6-4 Maya Nnaji of Hopkins, MN, on June 12. Nnaji has picked up offers from just about everybody over the last month. Nnaji is the third-ranked forward and ranked eighth overall. She isn’t listed as a true post, but she plays from the low post and fits the Gamecocks’ need. Nnaji’s name may be familiar - her brother Zeke was a one-and-done player at Arizona for the 2019-20 season and her cousin Elvis is a 2022 prospect who has picked up offers from Marquette, Minnesota, Arizona, and others. Nnaji attends the same high school as 2019’s top recruit, point guard Paige Buekers, who chose UConn.
South Carolina is also heavily recruiting a trio of forwards. #20 Shay Bollin is a 6-3 forward from Bridgewater, MA. South Carolina has already had success recruiting the Boston area with Aliyah Boston. Bollin is more of a high-post, stretch four who received an offer from South Carolina as a freshman. South Carolina is also back in the Atlanta area, where it snagged Feagin and Johnson, for #27 Lazaria Spearman. At 6-3, Spearman is a strong, athletic defender in the mold of Victaria Saxton, another Georgia native. Spearman pumped the brakes on her recruitment early, announcing a top three of South Carolina, Louisville, and Miami (FL) last summer following her freshman season. 6-1 Nyla Harris is ranked 39th overall, but her stock seems to be rising. She’s picked up offers from NC State, Indiana Kentucky and Louisville. Staley made a point of giving Harris her first scholarship offer the summer before her freshman year, getting a head start on everyone else.
The Gamecocks also have several backcourt targets. The two biggest names to watch are Indiana wing Ayanna Patterson, Ohio guard KK Bransford, and in-state point guard Talaysia Cooper from East Clarendon. 6-2 Patterson is the third-ranked overall player, and her brother Andre played two seasons for Tennessee. She has a style similar to Brea Beal, both strong defensive wings. Patterson has offers from everyone and is a big focus for Indiana, Purdue, and other midwestern schools, but she has shown a lot of interest in South Carolina. 5-10 KK Bransford, and she’s another Buckeye. Bransford is from Cincinnati and is the top-ranked guard and ninth-ranked prospect overall. Bransford has kept her recruitment relatively quiet, but she visited the Gamecocks twice before her freshman year and is close to Bree Hall.
The Gamecocks have had a lot of success mining the midwest recently. They got Tyasha Harris out of Indiana in 2016, but recruiting the area has picked up since Jolette Law joined the coaching staff. The Gamecocks snatched Beal out of Illinois and have grabbed two Buckeyes, Toledo’s Zia Cooke and Dayton’s Bree Hall (the Gamecocks are really working I-75). Law tapped into her midwestern ties - she played at Iowa and was the head coach at Illinois from 2007-2012 - and was the lead recruiter on Beal and Cooke.
Cooper is from Turbeville, SC, much closer to Law’s hometown of Florence. Cooper is ranked 25th overall and the eighth-ranked point guard. She has long been on the Gamecocks’ radar, ever since leading East Clarendon to the Class A lower state finals as a seventh-grader. Cooper had so many offers by the end of her freshman season that I stopped adding them to my notes and just put, “Everybody.” At 6-0, Cooper is big for a point guard, and she is a do-everything player for East Clarendon, even playing in the post to take advantage of her size. Case in point: she recorded a quadruple double with 21 points, 22 rebounds, 10 blocks, 10 assists, and four steals.
South Carolina will have six available scholarships for 2022, but as always, don’t expect Staley to use all of them. Signing three or four players is more likely. A class of four would, numerically, line up with the four seniors (Amihere, Beal, Boston, and Cooke). Another issue is playing time. Outside of the need for a post, it will be no easy task for anyone to break into the rotation, let alone start. That hurt South Carolina in 2020, when recruits didn’t want to come in and spend three years behind Amihere, Beal, Boston, and Cooke.
