{"id":826494,"date":"2025-03-10T10:59:20","date_gmt":"2025-03-10T14:59:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/?p=826494"},"modified":"2025-03-10T11:00:08","modified_gmt":"2025-03-10T15:00:08","slug":"south-carolina-slamu-8-digital-cover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/slam-university\/digital-covers\/south-carolina-slamu-8-digital-cover\/","title":{"rendered":"MiLaysia Fulwiley, Chloe Kitts, Joyce Edwards and the South Carolina Gamecocks are DEFYING THE DOUBTERS | SLAMU 8 Digital Cover \u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When you win as much as the South Carolina women\u2019s basketball team does, the act of winning goes from being exceptional to expectation. But what happens when they don\u2019t win? Amidst their 30-3 record so far this season, it\u2019s just three losses\u2014to UCLA, Texas and UConn\u2014that caused crash outs in real time. Whether it\u2019s Twitter analysts or the media like\u00a0The State<\/em>, who ran the headline,\u00a0South Carolina\u2019s WBB Final Four chances suddenly feel not so certain<\/em>, everyone has something to say about the Gamecocks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI feel like people kind of forget that it’s normal to lose, you can’t win them all,\u201d MiLaysia Fulwiley said to us in February. \u201cI mean I wish we could, but it’s been a year. It’s coming. It’s been years, like, we just keep winning so easily. These losses ain’t gonna do nothing but prepare us more for when it matters the most.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prior to winning the SEC Championship, we sat down with MiLaysia Fulwiley, Chloe Kitts and Joyce Edwards to talk about this season, their preparation, the meaning of legacy and so much more. Because really, who better to speak on where this team is at right now? And if the Gamecocks can win another national championship and go back-to-back, they\u2019ll be the ones to say\u00a0I told you so\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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SHOP THE SC COLLECTION<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

WSLAM: From the first time y\u2019all got to play on the court together, what kind of growth have you seen from then to now?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joyce Edwards:<\/strong> It\u2019s just surreal, kind of full circle. You play these girls in high school\u2014you think you\u2019ll never really see them again. They\u2019re gonna go their ways [and] you\u2019re gonna go your way. But the fact that we\u2019re all on the same team, and we\u2019re literally three McDonald\u2019s All-Americans\u2014we\u2019re so tough. Like Lay said, I just feel bad for our opponents because it\u2019s crazy to think about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MiLaysia Fulwiley: Definitely. Everything she said.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

WSLAM: When did you realize this team was ready for this season? When did it all click?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chloe Kitts:<\/strong> I feel like we knew right away. Some workouts this year were really good. Everyone was hooping. We were like,\u00a0Dang, we\u2019re gelling really good<\/em>. Because last year, we didn\u2019t really see that, but it ended up working out good for us. But this year, from the beginning, from the get-go, everyone was ready, everyone was excited. You can see everyone\u2019s main focus is winning. You can just see it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MF: <\/strong>I agree, because last year, some workouts was pretty bad. We had a lot of hard days, and I
feel like this year, it was completely opposite. We came in knowing what we wanted to do and what we wanted to execute. I feel like we did that every practice, and that helped us grow into who we are now. We\u2019re still trying to find us as a team, as a whole. So I also feel like our freshmen played a big role in that. They came in ready to hoop. Joyce Edwards, Maddy McDaniel, they came in ready to dominate, ready to fill in. And Joyce did a great job with just being confident in herself and remembering who she is as a player. Because coming into college, that can be the hardest part about it, and having a freshman that plays like a senior is really good for us. That really gels us together, helps us be confident and believe who we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JE:<\/strong> For me, I wasn\u2019t really here last summer. I came late from [Team] USA, but this is by far the best team I ever played on, so I can\u2019t say if I knew we [were] ready for that, because I didn\u2019t know what we were getting ready for exactly; I never experienced it before. I just knew that everybody on the floor had a huge impact on what we did in practice, and we were all talented. So I knew that anybody who\u2019s going to face this is gonna have a hard time beating us\u2014that was really my mindset.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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WSLAM: What does South Carolina mean to each of you?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

MF:<\/strong> To me, it means a lot. I came from South Carolina, born and raised in South Carolina.
Growing up here, it means a lot to me, but not only me, with my family and my friends, putting
a jersey on for any college level, it means a lot. So just saying that I can be able to represent my hometown, my home state, it means a lot to me, and I love it. I appreciate [Coach] Dawn [Staley]
and the University of South Carolina for giving me the opportunity to play here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK:<\/strong> For me, growing up, South Carolina is your dream school. I\u2019m from Seattle, and everybody\u2019s like,\u00a0That\u2019s a dream school, South Carolina<\/em>. I mean, South Carolina, and UConn, but it was just different, and it just means a lot. Coming here and playing in front of 18,000 fans, and you go into the grocery store and people ask for pictures, you\u2019re walking down the street and people are like,\u00a0Can I get your autograph?<\/em>\u00a0I mean, that\u2019s really cool. A lot of people don\u2019t get to experience that in college, so I appreciate that a lot. And of course, winning. I mean, South Carolina, we\u2019re winners over here, and we get held to a higher standard.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JE:<\/strong> South Carolina is really just home. You know, I feel like my basketball career really took off in South Carolina, just from high school to college, being able to do what I wanted to without any limitations. And having the support of people from South Carolina being there\u2014my family being there for me\u2014to grow up in South Carolina and play basketball here. Like they said, playing for Dawn Staley, who\u2019s the embodiment of head coaches in women\u2019s basketball. South Carolina is this school [that] every female basketball player wants to come to because we\u2019re just winners, our culture. Being in South Carolina, it\u2019s like being a part of a big family, not even just in university, but outside as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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WSLAM: What do you all think is the \u201cit\u201d factor that makes this place what it is?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

JE:<\/strong> Us people, literally us three, the whole team. It\u2019s the people that make South Carolina, South Carolina. We want the best for each other. We literally love each other, we support each other and everything. I feel like that’s the it factor, because you can have statues anywhere, you can have championships anywhere, but it’s really all about the people.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK: <\/strong>I also feel like a lot of us come from different backgrounds. Everybody’s kind of different. We all are one big family, and we all want to learn about each other, their culture and everything like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WSLAM: What\u2019s one word to describe this team at the beginning of the season, one word to describe the team right now and one where you hope to be at the end of the season?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

JE:<\/strong> I want to say anxious, but not in a bad way, like, we were just itching to play, wanting to show the world what we could do. We just wanted to play, like, just anxious. We just wanted to play.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MF: Determined. Everybody is so determined.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

JE:<\/strong> That\u2019s perfect. We had our setbacks in the season, but the way that we come out of them
is crazy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK:<\/strong> It\u2019s just the early season. I think at the end of the season, hopefully we can say winners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MF:<\/strong> Champs.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK:<\/strong> It\u2019s exactly what we want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MF:<\/strong> I also feel like people kind of forget that it\u2019s normal to lose, you can\u2019t win them all. I mean, I wish we could, but it\u2019s been a year. It\u2019s coming. It\u2019s been years, like, we just keep winning so easily. I feel like these losses ain\u2019t gonna do nothing but prepare us more for when it matters the most.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JE: <\/strong>The way that we come out of losses, it\u2019s really insane. We go on, we just destroy everybody else in our path.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK: <\/strong>I mean, we\u2019d rather lose now than later on. People try and play their best game against us, people scout [us] forever just to play against us because they want to beat us so bad. I mean, it\u2019s
OK to lose. We\u2019re not going to lose when it matters, and that\u2019s all that matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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WSLAM: This team carries a lot with them: the pressure of everyone watching, people rooting for you, people rooting against you. How do you keep your composure through the season?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK: <\/strong>You have to realize that you go through highs and lows. Everyone goes through highs and lows. You might have a good stretch of games, you might have a horrible stretch of games. You just have to find a healthy balance and know that everything\u2019s gonna be OK. That\u2019s for me, especially because you can\u2019t get too high with the highs [and] too low with the lows. Just try your hardest to stay consistent.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MF:<\/strong> I agree. When you\u2019re playing basketball, it\u2019s a mental thing, and if your mental is not there, then your game, your play, isn\u2019t going to be there. I feel like it\u2019s very important for all of us to keep our mental together. Just always remember that the main goal is winning a national championship, and you win some, you lose some, but we just all need to be locked in on that one goal. And I feel like that\u2019s what keeps us together and keeps us able to get through the pressure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JE:<\/strong> I feel like we\u2019re composed because we have to be. I mean, you get uncomposed after the season, after you win the end goal. But the end goal is still the end goal, and you haven\u2019t reached that yet. So there\u2019s no need to be happy or sad because you haven\u2019t reached that yet. You have to be composed, because every team in the SEC is there trying to kill you every single time. You don\u2019t have time to get high with the highs or get low [with the] lows, because at the end of the day, nobody\u2019s gonna care about your emotions or how you\u2019re feeling. You have to stay composed to get to the end goal. And if you\u2019re not, then you\u2019re not gonna succeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WSLAM: Can you talk about legacy and what it means to you individually, for each other and for the future of this program?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

MF: <\/strong>I feel like we\u2019re doing a great job of creating legacy. Last year was a historical year. I don\u2019t think no team in South Carolina history has ever went undefeated and won a national championship. Things like that would be how we create our legacy. Every single person who\u2019s on that team last year has now created a legacy just because of that. So doing things like that, just being great people, not only on the court but off the court, too, helps create legacy. It\u2019s not all about what you do on the court or what we do as a team.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK:<\/strong> What you do in the community\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MF: <\/strong>We did a whole lot of community things, giving back, donations and stuff, and I felt like that helped play a big role in the legacy that we created not only last year, but this whole past decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JE:<\/strong> We understand legacy is important because it inspires the next generation of little girls who want to play basketball. So we uphold ourselves to a certain standard on and off the court that we have to be consistent with. And that\u2019s what we do. So every day we go out there, we work hard on the court. We donate, like they said. We do charities and stuff, because we want to uphold that legacy, to inspire the next generation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WSLAM: Playing for a national championship, the path to back-to-back, what does it mean to you? How do you prepare for the big stage, and how do you make sure the whole team knows what\u2019s about to happen?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK: <\/strong>We have to all be on the same page, like we kind of just talked about before. We\u2019re gonna go through highs and lows, and that means wins and losses. But we\u2019re gonna win when it matters and try and get through this hump, and we\u2019re gonna come out as strong as we can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MF:<\/strong> Yeah, and I feel us as a team, we do a great job with understanding\u2014everything she just said\u2014and\u00a0actually<\/em> understanding, not just hearing it. And the freshmen, they seem to catch on very quickly, and they understand that assignment, from what I see. They know that we really want it and how much it will mean to us if we have it. It\u2019s all up to us now.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JE:<\/strong> We prepared for the national championship game in the beginning of the season. So the preparation isn\u2019t necessarily any different than it was for the first week of the season. It\u2019s all about being consistent, all about having that same mindset and that same goal, and all about all of us being determined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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WSLAM: In 10 years, when you look back at your cover, at everything you all have been able to accomplish at South Carolina, what do you hope to see?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK:<\/strong> I hope I reached my goals, everything I wanted to do since I was younger, since I was at SLAM in high school. And hopefully I can look back then in New York, when I played [at] Rucker Park in the SLAM Summer Classic, and hopefully I can see in 10 years how far it came.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MF: <\/strong>Hopefully I can be proud of my younger self and basically tell my younger self that I did everything that I work hard for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JE: <\/strong>Yeah, hopefully, it seems I’m still playing\u2014I\u2019ll be 29\u2014 I probably wouldn’t look back that early, but let’s say I retired, something happened. I don’t know if I look back, I want to know that I’ve reached my potential. Looking back at all the things I did when I was younger, I want to look at myself and not be disappointed in what I did when I was older. That makes sense, because I was younger, I was ambitious, I worked hard. I got the goals that I wanted. I got the goals that I wanted to get to. So to me, I just hope that I don’t disappoint myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Get ready for March with exclusive South Carolina women’s hoops merch. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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SHOP THE SC COLLECTION<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Portraits by Diwang Valdez<\/em>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When you win as much as the South Carolina women\u2019s basketball team does, the act of winning goes from being exceptional to expectation. But what happens when they don\u2019t win? Amidst their 30-3 record so far this season, it\u2019s just three losses\u2014to UCLA, Texas and UConn\u2014that caused crash outs in real time. Whether it\u2019s Twitter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":548,"featured_media":826505,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65307],"tags":[62525,2116,65233,63726],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-826494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-digital-covers","tag-feature-1","tag-south-carolina-gamecocks","tag-south-carolina-womens-basketball","tag-wslam"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/548"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=826494"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":826514,"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826494\/revisions\/826514"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/826505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=826494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=826494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=826494"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=826494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}