How South Carolina women’s basketball inspires the football team

The South Carolina football team was inside the locker room Saturday when the women’s basketball team was getting its national championship rings.

They weren’t watching or listening to the crowd, but they feel the reverberations from that title.

“It’s great for them,” Gamecocks guard Zack Bailey said. “A lot of universities, they have that one good team. At South Carolina, everything is good. Across the board, it doesn’t matter what it is. For them that’s great. We’re pushing to do great things as well.”

His team had just moved to 6-2 on the season with a win over Vanderbilt. Not quite the sport-wide dominance of Dawn Staley’s squad or the achievement of Frank Martin’s Final Four, but taking steps toward something consistent in the second year with a new coach.

Quarterback Jake Bentley said the men’s Final Four brought a certain kind of pride to USC, and it reflected something larger.

“This university, President [Harris] Pastides and coach [Ray] Tanner do a great job of getting really high-level coaches in here and believe in the culture of winning,” Bentley said.

The Gamecocks women will open their title defense soon enough. They still have A’ja Wilson. They still have a roster stacked with high-level talent.

And while football often garners so much attention, Bentley felt that gets spread out to a degree.

“I think our fans appreciate what they do,” Bentley said. “It’s great for the university.”

This story was originally published October 30, 2017 at 12:35 PM with the headline "How South Carolina women’s basketball inspires the football team."