For the first time since 2004, South Carolina will be playing in the NCAA Tournament.
Selected as a seventh seed, the Gamecocks will play the tenth-seeded Marquette Golden Eagles out of the Big East Conference, who finished the regular season with a 19-12 record.
“When I saw the seven, and I saw the South Carolina come up next to it with that beautiful block ‘C’ I was standing with my wife and I didn’t realize that was us,” coach Frank Martin said as he reflected on the moment. “Pretty powerful moment for me.”
SEC Player of the Year Sindarius Thornwell spoke to the team's reaction upon hearing their team was in the tournament, saying, “Once we saw our name pop up, just like any other team, we all jumped up, started screaming, hugging each other, giving each other high fives and stuff.”
The Gamecocks will be forced to face a balanced yet explosive Marquette team. The Golden Eagles come into the game ranked 17th in the nation in points per game, as they average 82.5 points per contest. This high score has been equally distributed among their players though, as five Golden Eagles average double figures on the season.
When asked what he knew of the Golden Eagles at the moment, Thornwell was frank, laughing as he said he knew “nothing” about the Golden Eagles.
Thornwell then followed this by saying that all he knows is that “they’re a good team because they made the NCAA Tournament.”
Coach Martin had a similar reaction to Thornwell, joking that all he knew about Marquette was, “That their trainer weighs more than me.” Martin later expanded on this comment, saying that Marquette’s trainer, Brandon Yoder, was a past trainer of his at Kansas State.
The game will take place in Greenville, South Carolina, which Frank Martin saw as a major advantage for his team.
“We’ve played in that building, we’ve won in that building,” Martin said on playing in Greenville. “Not everyone on our team, but guys on our team have. Having the security blanket of knowing that your friends and family are with you makes it powerful.”
The Gamecocks have lost six of their last nine games, yet Thornwell talked about a pressure the team has felt down the stretch of the season, and how that pressure has been lifted with the NCAA Tournament bid.
Despite these struggles of late, senior guard Justin McKie spoke to the team’s way of thinking now that they are in the tournament, saying “It’s a clean slate.”
Martin even took these struggles as a positive, tying it into the overall body of work that made his team tournament-ready.
“Every single thing we did since August till Friday, whether it was a positive or a negative, a good, a bad, a win or a loss — it didn’t matter,” said Martin. "It was ... to harden us. To create an opportunity for us to be good enough, to be able to be sitting here talking about this right now.”
Now, South Carolina is in search of its first win in the NCAA Tournament since 1973. And as their coach explained, they aren’t content to just be in the tournament, or to just get one win, no matter how long it's been since either of those things happened.
“There’s nothing like the NCAA Tournament, it’s an unbelievable experience,” Martin said. “And the one thing I’ve told our players is don’t just be happy to be in it. Be focused and prepared to make a run.”
The Gamecocks will look to start that run Friday against Marquette.