It’s an end-of-summer ritual, along with waiting on the NCAA to clear a football player and wondering whether South Carolina will use the tight end more this season: panic over the state of women’s basketball recruiting. 

Every year, I preach patience. And every year, it always ends with the Gamecocks signing a top-five class.

So why does it happen every year?

There are always a handful of commitments during the summer, but these are the exception. Maddy McDaniel is the only recent recruit who committed to the Gamecocks during the summer. 

Most recruits are focused on their AAU teams over the summer, not official visits. The visits pick up in August, September, and October, when class is in session (and there are football games to show off). The commitments come after the visits.

(We are also seeing more recruits skip the November signing period and wait until the spring, but we’ll get back to that later.)

You might be saying, “But two top-ten players South Carolina was recruiting committed elsewhere last week (Kate Harpring, North Carolina, and Jayla Jordyn Jackson, Maryland), a third eliminated the Gamecocks from her finalists (Jacy Abii), and the top-ranked recruit (Saniyah Hall) already committed to Southern Cal.”

That means South Carolina is still in the running for six of the top ten players in the Rivals and ESPN rankings for 2026. Additionally, some 5-10 players outside the top ten are still considering South Carolina.

There is a tendency to view basketball recruiting through the same lens as football recruiting. A typical football signing class has 25 or more players. A basketball class is rarely more than five (and big classes typically have high attrition, which can be counterproductive; save this note for later, too). One player can make the entire class.

If a program seriously recruits about 20 players in a class, and signs five, that means you miss on about 75% of your targets. That’s a lot of rejection, and it’s normal.

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Now for the items I told you to wait on.

The 2026 class is particularly unpredictable for everyone. Just when it felt like we were starting to get a handle on how NIL impacted recruiting, we’ve added revenue sharing to the mix.

There are small programs spending more revenue sharing money on women’s basketball than Big Ten or SEC programs. Many programs are promising NIL money to supplement revenue share money, but those are empty promises. The NIL money has to be approved by the College Sports Commission, and to date, that has been a quagmire.

With NIL, we have already seen more top recruits skip the November signing period and sign in the spring. Don’t be surprised if that trend continues to grow in this class while recruits wait for programs to sort out all the issues with revenue share and NIL, essentially saying, “Let someone else be the guinea pig.”

I’ve heard stories about programs offering impossible NIL money and hoping the recruit doesn’t know better. Don’t be surprised if a lot of disappointed freshmen enter the transfer portal next spring because they were promised more than could be delivered.

We’ve already seen that signing players and retaining players are two different things. Look at UCLA, which lost its entire fourth-ranked 2024 class after one season, and top-ranked Southern Cal, which retained just one of its three 2024 five-star recruits.

So while South Carolina would ideally sign a big, four- or five-player class for 2026, it doesn’t matter if you can’t keep them all. 

Which leads to the final point: transfers matter too. As one insider told me when I said people were upset about South Carolina’s recruiting progress, “Why? Dawn Staley only recruits the elite players she wants, and then she goes and picks whatever else she needs in the portal.”

It’s not quite that simple, but it’s not wrong either. 

We think of the 2024 national championship team as home-grown, but the two most important players (Kamilla Cardoso and Te-Hina Paopao) were transfers. Even in 2023, the Freshies’ senior year, the starting point guard was a transfer, Kierra Fletcher. Before the portal and loosened transfer rules, the 2017 team had transfers Allisha Gray and Kaela Davis.

So don’t panic. At least not for a couple more months.