Dawn Staley's veteran guards guide South Carolina to dominant national championship victory
- The South Carolina Gamecocks are the 2022 national champions.
- Dawn Staley's squad took down UConn 64-49 en route to the program's second title.
MINNEAPOLIS — South Carolina Gamecocks senior point guard Destanni Henderson only needed 18 seconds to connect from behind the arc.
Less than a minute later, her backcourt partner-in-crime — junior Zia Cooke — banked in a quick layup.
Before they could so much as blink, the UConn Huskies found themselves in a five-point hole. And Dawn Staley's mighty Gamecocks — the wire-to-wire top-ranked team in the nation — never looked back from there.
Led by Henderson's 26-point performance, South Carolina won its second national championship in program history Sunday night with a resounding 64-49 victory over UConn. The Gamecocks jumped out to a huge first-quarter lead that they never relinquished, even as Geno Auriemma's squad made several big pushes throughout the remaining three quarters.
Henderson and Cooke finished with a combined 37 points on the night, while superstar center Aliyah Boston — who earned consensus National Player of the Year honors this season — pulled in a whopping 16 of the Gamecocks' 49 rebounds.
With the loss, the Huskies faltered in the national championship for the first time in 12 trips to the title game.
South Carolina held UConn to just eight first-quarter points and managed to keep Huskies backcourt stars, Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd, off the scoreboard. And while Bueckers, the 2021 National Player of the Year, managed to find her shooting stroke for nine second-quarter points, the Gamecocks withstood a nearly five-minute dry spell to head into halftime with an eight-point lead.
South Carolina surged out of the locker room to kick off the third quarter with eight unanswered points — five of which came from the Henderson-Cooke duo. UConn needed almost a full five minutes to put the ball in the basket, but used a scoring outburst late in the period to close the gap to six.
Once again, Staley's seasoned backcourt provided the heroics the Gamecocks needed to fend off a late-game push from the Huskies. With eight minutes left on the clock, Henderson scored seven straight points for South Carolina to stretch the lead back to double-digits, putting the nail in UConn's first-ever national championship coffin.
The Huskies, who never held a lead, wouldn't come back within 10 for the remainder of the game.