Dawn Staley bucking her own history with Gamecocks’ roster size next season
Dawn Staley has coached the South Carolina women’s basketball team for 18 seasons. In that time, she’s only carried a full roster once.
Next season, though, she’ll buck her own tradition and carry 15 players on the South Carolina roster.
USC on Wednesday announced the signing of French prospect Justine Loubens. She’s the fifth member of Staley’s 2026 recruiting class, joining Kelsi Andrews, Kaeli Wynn, Jerzy Robinson and Oliviyah Edwards. South Carolina is returning nine players next year and added talented Texas transfer Jordan Lee.
The addition of Loubens this week brings South Carolina’s roster for the 2026-27 season to 15 players. That’s the maximum allowed by the NCAA’s roster limits.
Last season, South Carolina entered the offseason with 12 active players on the roster. Then Ashlyn Watkins (ACL) took a year off from basketball. And when Chloe Kitts tore her ACL, the Gamecocks were left with just 10 healthy players.
When the games began, South Carolina battled injuries and depth issues and even played with just eight players at one point, before some pressure was relieved with the midseason addition of Alicia Tournebize.
In December, Staley was asked if the adversity of the first half of the 2025-26 season would cause her to reconsider how she constructed her rosters going forward.
“No,” Staley answered quickly, saying she wanted “12, 13 at the most.”
Staley’s formula has clearly worked: South Carolina has racked up 511 wins, nine SEC tournament titles, eight trips to the Final Four and three national championships during her tenure.
South Carolina’s upcoming roster is chock-full of talent that’s been recognized on the national and conference levels, meaning depth shouldn’t be an issue for the Gamecocks next season.
About that one time…
Staley has only carried 15 players once in her tenure at South Carolina. That one instance came during the 2021-22 season.
If there’s ever been a good example of carrying a full roster, it’s the 2021-22 South Carolina team. The Gamecocks finished 35-2 that season and won the program’s second national championship after beating UConn in the title game.
Not only did South Carolina carry a full 15 players on the roster ... there were actually 16 players on the team. Here’s the roster from that season:
- Seniors: Destanni Henderson, Victaria Saxton, LeLe Grissett, Destiny Littleton, Elysa Wesolek
- Juniors: Aliyah Boston, Zia Cooke, Laeticia Amihere, Brea Beal, Olivia Thompson
- Sophomores: Kamilla Cardoso, Eniya Russell
- Freshmen: Bree Hall, Saniya Rivers, Sania Feagin, Raven Johnson
There is a disclaimer with that year’s roster. Though South Carolina entered the season with 16 players it typically only had 15 active players as Raven Johnson suffered a knee injury two games into the season.
Beyond the 2021-22 season, there are no other instances where Staley had 15 players on a roster at South Carolina. In fact, there have only been two other instances where she’s had more than 13 players. The Gamecocks had 14 players on the roster in the 2022-23 season and 2014-15 season, according to Sports-Reference.
A big reason for why Staley has typically had fewer than 15 players, especially in this day and age of college sports, could be money.
In October, Staley told The State she felt her program was “competing with the top programs in the country” when it comes to the amount of revenue share dollars USC is allocating to its women’s basketball team. When asked in December, Staley made it seem like she might have to get creative with how she’d come up with enough money to go around if she carried more than her usual 12 to 13 players. Granted, she was referring to this past year’s team and NIL and rev share budgets are not made public. So there’s no telling if that’s a problem for this year’s roster.
“If it’s 13 [players], somebody’s gonna have to go ask our AD for a little bit more money to fill that roster,” Staley said in December. “But for right now, I really think for this particular year, it’s probably what we had as far as rev share and NIL. Gotta go panhandle a little bit for some more to increase our roster.”
This story was originally published May 1, 2026 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Dawn Staley bucking her own history with Gamecocks’ roster size next season."
