Women's basketball is no small attraction at the University of South Carolina — the school team has won three of the last nine national championships and has led the nation in attendance for 12 straight seasons.
That dominance has been replicated by the school's club team, which has won two of the last three national championships.
South Carolina's women's club basketball team captured this year's national championship in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 19 in a 49-46 victory over Iowa.
The club, led by head coach Thomas Lutz, a fourth-year economics and operations and supply chain student, has two teams: garnet, the starting team, and black, the developmental team, totaling 24 players on the roster.
"The university really does a good job with the extracurriculars, and it allows me and allows the girls to just focus on winning," Lutz said.
For the team's seniors, it was their second national championship victory, having won the title in 2024 and reached the semifinals in 2025.
The Gamecocks lost their first game of group play to the Virginia Cavaliers in a low-scoring 28-26 affair. The loss was the lone defeat they'd suffer in their trip to the Midwest.
"We felt like we had worked super hard and deserved it without even playing a game," Lutz said. "First game, we shot 10 for 40 from the field, could not buy a bucket against UVA, and we lost ... Everything that could've gone wrong did, and we only lost by 2, which says how good we are."
South Carolina didn't struggle often prior to nationals. Entering the tournament with an overall record of 18-1, many of those victories weren't often close either.
"We tended to blow people out more than not," Addison Marston, a third-year public health student, said. "It was different when we got to nationals and we had close games the entire weekend ... We lost our first game too, so then we were on a rampage. We were like, 'We're winning everything.'"
This season, Marston grabbed the third-most steals and second-most blocks of all players on the team. Defensive success became the Gamecocks' calling card this season.
"I think our biggest challenge with club basketball is that we don't have a lot of time together to play," Marston said. "If you want to be really good, you have to dedicate time yourself ... It was a big challenge for us to learn the new defenses, the new plays and things like that, especially with such little time, and it definitely helped us persevere past that loss (to UVA)."
South Carolina third-year public health student Addison Marston holds a piece of basketball netting atop a ladder while posing in celebration following victory in the National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association national championship game.
After their first tournament of the season, the Gamecocks switched to a no-middle defense, forcing the ball to the baseline and applying pressure to frequently force steals, a strategy that found success due to multiple girls on the team standing over 6 feet tall.
Kate Stuhlreyer, a fourth-year finance and operations and supply chain student, helped the team impose that defense. Standing at 6-foot-4, she logged a team-high 45 blocks on the season. She was named Tournament MVP after a 12-point championship game performance, her second time earning the award, as she received the same honor in the team's 2024 championship victory.
In opposite fashion of Stuhlreyer, third-year accounting student Cassidy Kropp aided the team's defensive efforts from the top of the key. Her 27 steals were the second most on the team this season, but her ability to convert those steals into offense earned her a team-high 204 points on the year.
"I've played basketball my entire life, so AAU-wise, I was always traveling, always had a good team that I was super close with, and that's exactly what this reminds me of," Kropp said. "Coming to school here and finding such a talented and great group of girls to play with has been amazing."
Kropp laid heavy emphasis on the team's defense as reason for its success throughout the season.
"This new defense, it was hard to get everyone on the same page at first," Kropp said. "When we got really good at it, it was really good. It would just be perfect rotations, then we'd get a steal or we'd get a stop, and it would be really encouraging on offense ... We play off of our defense into our offense, so when we're hot, we're hot."
The club's team co-president, fourth-year operations and supply chain and marketing student Olivia Gaspar, echoed similar sentiments regarding the defensive success.
"We are a defensive-heavy team. We really pride ourselves on that," Gaspar said. "We have the mentality of, 'If you messed up on offense, make it up on defense.'"
The connection between the club's success and the school's Division I success in the same sport is real, and Gaspar said it brings the team pride to wear the South Carolina logo.
"We put on that jersey, and we know that we're representing a women's basketball school," Gaspar said. "We kind of look at it in the sense of we really want to make the school proud, and we want to do a good job of making the school live up to its name."
Co-president Katherine Palmer, a fourth-year psychology and neuroscience student, shared her pride for touting the South Carolina name as well.
"I've seen our women's team accomplish so much, and to see that kind of bleed into our team has been awesome," Palmer said. "The logo is a big part of it, honestly, like knowing we are the USC women's basketball club team, and yes, the club team word is in there, but people know us."
The sport of women's basketball has rapidly developed over the course of the 21st century, and the ripple effect of its fandom has impacted thousands of female athletes all over the country. As the son of two former Division I basketball players, Lutz thinks many take the sport of women's basketball for granted.
"My grandma played women's college basketball back when they had three zones on the court," Lutz said. "You were either an attack, a middy or a defenseman. If you read about the history of women's basketball, it's super interesting. It was banned in colleges, banned in high schools, all this stuff. I think we take it for granted too much."
South Carolina's club women's basketball team will face significant roster turnover in between seasons, losing various players and coaches, including Lutz, to graduation. The impact left on the club won't lose value any time soon.
"Obviously, it's a club sport," Lutz said. "If these girls wanted to take basketball as serious as possible, all of them could've played at some level of college basketball. Kind of mixing in that fun, having team bonding activities, super important to keeping them engaged because, again, it is a club sport."