It was a different kind of Saturday at Galen Center; the building was hosting NCAA Tournament games for the first time in its 18-year history. For the USC women’s basketball team, this game was simply business as usual.
The top-seeded Trojans easily handled 16th-seeded Texas A&M-Corpus Christi on their home floor by a score of 87-55 in the opening round of the tournament. In doing so, they kept their dream season, as well as the hopes of the program’s first national championship since 1984, alive.
USC’s game was not the first one Galen Center was scheduled to host on Saturday. In fact, the expected 1:30 tipoff time was pushed back when a back-and-forth game between eighth-seeded Kansas and ninth-seeded Michigan needed overtime to declare a winner.
Once the Jayhawks had finally secured the victory, thousands of fans donning cardinal and gold began to file into the lower bowl of the arena all at once. Shortly after, the Trojans took the court for warmups, and those just-arriving fans erupted into cheers for the Pac-12 champions. Thirty minutes before the game even began, USC had established the home-court advantage it had worked so hard to earn.
“Once that ball goes up, I’m enamored by the crowd,” head coach Lindsay Gottlieb said. “We never take it for granted how this community has come out for us, for this team. The change that’s happened so rapidly, it’s so amazing. The feeling of the building puts me at ease, ‘cause then it’s just our team playing a game. You get into the moment.”
Once the ball was tipped — approximately 15 minutes after it was supposed to — the Trojans rode that momentum to a red-hot first quarter. In the opening frame, the Islanders scored exactly twice: on their very first and very last possession. Between those two baskets, Corpus Christi missed 19 consecutive shot attempts, as the Trojans rallied from a 2-0 deficit to rip off a 21-0 run.
Early on, USC established its dominance most clearly in the paint. Offensively, the Islanders were trying to score down low, but the Trojans were too long and too locked in on the defensive side for that strategy to bear any fruit.
Of Corpus Christi’s 22 first-quarter shot attempts, 10 were blocked. Freshman guard JuJu Watkins and graduate forward Kaitlyn Davis each sent back three Islander shots, while junior centers Rayah Marshall and Clarise Akunwafo each rejected a pair.
USC used its height to its advantage both inside and out of the paint on the defensive side. Outside, the Trojans hustled, jumped and anticipated to deflect several passes and force turnovers, often doing so before the Islanders could even cross the halfcourt line. USC finished with 14 steals and 20 points off of turnovers.
“Yeah, obviously JuJu is a great shot-blocker,” graduate guard McKenzie Forbes said. “I try to be as active as I can defensively ‘cause when we’re running out in transition, I think that’s when we’re playing our best.”
Offensively, the Trojans had a very balanced scoring output. Watkins and Forbes tied for the team lead with 23 points each, but 10 different players got on the scoresheet, with four in double figures.
USC found its scoring production early in the low block, but the team’s range expanded as the game progressed. After a slow start from beyond the arc, the Trojans drained five of 10 3-point shots in the third quarter.
When the offense and defense were clicking at the same time, Corpus Christi had no answers for USC. During one sequence in the third quarter, graduate guard Kayla Padilla nailed a 3-pointer to beat the shot-clock buzzer, Forbes leaped in the air to knock down a full-court pass and force a steal, and then drained a triple of her own to balloon the Trojan lead to 26 points.
Saturday was not Watkins’ top scoring performance; she scored below her season average and shot 1-of-6 from beyond the arc. Still, her 23 points were enough to surpass Cheryl Miller’s record for the most points scored in a single season in USC history.
“I wasn’t even aware that happened,” Watkins said. “I’m just grateful, honestly. Coach has so much trust in me. I’m just grateful to be in that mention and to be part of the Trojan legacy.”
“You’d be crazy if you didn’t call her [a generational talent],” Gottlieb added. “I haven’t been afraid to talk about how good we think JuJu is, especially with what’s going on in real-time here.
When you guys said she broke the single-season scoring record, that’s crazy for any freshman. I just think we’re watching something really spectacular happen with JuJu … she makes others around her better.”
Watkins’ day came to an end with about three and a half minutes remaining in the contest, with the lead clearly insurmountable. As Gottlieb began to substitute, fans behind the Trojan bench began to clamor for graduate guard India Otto, who had not appeared in a game since December. Shortly after chants began to break out, Gottlieb signaled Otto to get ready to check in, prompting the fourth-loudest cheers of the afternoon from the Galen Center crowd.
The third-loudest cheers came at the next stoppage of play, when Otto was able to enter the game for the first time. About 50 seconds of game time later, she banked in a layup for her second made shot of the season, leading to the second-loudest cheers of the day from the fans, while her teammates on the bench jumped up and down in excitement. Just to put icing on the cake, she hit a 3-pointer one possession later for the final basket of the game — of course, answered by a massive roar from the home fans. At that point, all Gottlieb could do on the sidelines was smile.
Otto-Matic 👌 pic.twitter.com/nHz874CM7i
— USC Women's Basketball (@USCWBB) March 23, 2024
“Those are the best points I’ve seen all season,” Watkins said. “I was more excited for her than the win.”
After clarifying that she was joking, Watkins added on a more serious note, “She deserves it. We see her score every day in practice, so to see her come out and just, she lit up the crowd tonight.”
With the win, the Trojans will advance to the Round of 32 for the first time since 2006. They will square off with the No. 8 seed Kansas Jayhawks at Galen Center at 7 p.m. on Monday.