This is where the South Carolina women’s basketball team separates itself from the competition, at the Final Four end of a grueling trail that started with off-season conditioning drills.
The Gamecocks have not only leveraged exceptional talent and big-game experience to get to an April 1 national semifinal date with Louisville in Minneapolis, they’re also a picture-perfect poster of physical fitness.
It starts with Dawn Staley, South Carolina’s Peleton-peddling, iron-pumping, trail-walking head coach still relentlessly in shape at 51.
Aliyah Boston is the consensus national player of the year. She is joined on the All-SEC team by Destanni Henderson and Zia Cooke. Another half-dozen Gamecocks are all-conference worthy. But it takes a larger team to make a basketball team work at peak efficiency.
The star here is Molly Binetti, South Carolina’s sports performance coach for women’s basketball, and her state-of-the-art mix of weight training and cardio plans.
“The sports performance piece is a huge piece,” Staley said. “Like it is a piece that we decided several years ago that we were going to invest in because it creates an edge.”
It wasn’t always that way. Staley said she was tired when she led the Gamecocks to the Sweet 16 for the first time in 2012.
“I wasn’t really used to playing during that time in March,” Staley said. “Like I felt more tired than anything. If I felt tired, I’m sure our players (felt tired). There was something in them that – they may not have mentioned it or were aware of it because of the excitement – but that’s when I knew that this is some serious stuff right here.”
A ‘lifestyle’ approach
Katie Fowler came from the University of Maryland to take South Carolina’s basketball sports performance emphasis to another level in 2015, Staley said. When Fowler moved to Charlotte to enter a non-profit venture in 2018, she recommended Binetti.
Staley told Binetti she wanted a fitness approach that went beyond basketball and college. She talked about a “lifestyle” emphasis to player conditioning.
“I want them to be aware of how much right now in college really has an impact on what the rest of your life could look like and feel like when you take fitness pretty seriously,” Staley said.
What a dynamic duo.
Staley is the daily example of what Binetti and her assistants are selling. She competed as a WNBA player into her mid-30s even while serving as head coach at Temple.
She took part in ESPN’s All-Star Ride, a Peleton competition in May of 2020 including 16 prominent female and male sports personalities.
Binetti, a native of Eau Claire, Wis., is splendidly cast as the Gamecocks’ fitness leader going into a Final Four semifinal clash with fellow top seed Louisville at the Target Center.
She came to South Carolina from Louisville, where she ran sports performance programs for the volleyball, softball and women’s tennis teams and helped out with women’s basketball.
She got her master’s degree in Kinesiology and Exercise Science in Minneapolis at the University of Minnesota.
“The best way to prepare a team for a long season is to train them to be physically, mentally and emotionally robust enough to handle the demands of what will be asked of them,” Binetti said. “This starts long before the season ever does, by meeting each player where they’re at and designing a plan that meets their individual needs.”
Louisville, too
Not that the other Final Four teams aren’t up to the grind. Most NCAA Division I athletic programs have greatly increased their commitment to sports performance over the last several years.
Louisville women’s basketball, for instance. Check out Cardinals star guard Hailey Van Lith, just a 5-7 sophomore but the team’s leading scorer at 14.5 points per game.
Head coach Jeff Walz credits much of Van Lith’s progress to muscling up.
“She’s strong,” Walz said. “She’s really worked hard in the weight room, conditioning. She’s able to absorb contact. It doesn’t knock her off balance. Then she can finish with her right or left hand.
“But the bottom line is she’s trained so hard ever since she was in high school. When she got here as a freshman, her freshman summer, she’s one of the few freshmen we’ve had that’s ever passed our conditioning test the first time she did it, and that’s because of the training that she did before she got here. That’s in the weight room, the cardio.”
This isn’t your mother’s Final Four.
These women – and the men in the Final Four in New Orleans, and baseball players and rowers all over the country – have benefited from modern exercise science advances.
Combine the new-school innovation with an old-school coach and you have the Gamecocks.
“It’s a daily collaboration between the coaches, strength coach, athletic trainer, and the players to make the best decisions regarding player health, performance and recovery,” Binetti said. “This synergy creates an environment that allows our players to be healthy and performing at their best on the biggest stage in April.”
Even Staley’s dog, a Havanese named Champ, is in shape. That’s because part of Staley’s in-season workout routine includes dog walks. And also longer walks, or an hour on the treadmill with a little weight work mixed in.
“I wish I could do more,” Staley said, “but that’s all the time that I have.”
Staley isn’t as tired as she was at that Sweet 16 in 2012. That was 10 seasons and four Final Four appearances ago. Her teams have more March energy, too.
Follow Gene Sapakoff on Twitter @sapakoff
