FEELING COCKY

For three seasons, Florida State's offense ran through guard Ta'Niya Latson—and the Seminoles were pretty good. But the nation's leading scorer in 2024-25 was in search of a bigger challenge. There was one obvious place to find it: South Carolina

- BY Michael Rosenberg

The game had not yet begun, but Derek Latson was pretty sure his daughter's season was over. Ta'Niya Latson had done so much in her three years at Florida State. She led the nation in scoring. She was named first-team All-ACC three times and a second-team All-American. Now here she was, leading the sixth-seeded Seminoles into a second-round game against third-seeded LSU, which raised the question: Who were they kidding?

“I knew they were outmatched,” Derek says. “I knew she was going to do what she had to do, but I just knew that it was probably gonna be it.”

Ta’Niya scored 30 points that day. Her team lost, 101–71, anyway. Three days later, she put her name in the transfer portal. Ten days after that, Connecticut ran Dawn Staley’s South Carolina team off the floor in the NCAA championship game, largely because the Huskies had more players who could create their own shots.

Staley and Latson were such an obvious match that even if they hadn’t expressed interest in each other, a mutual friend would have tried to set them up on a blind date, which is kind of what happened: Gamecocks guard Raven Johnson played high school ball with Latson in Georgia. Her pitch to Latson: “Let’s go win a championship.”

Johnson did not have to explain why they could. In the last four years, the Gamecocks have won as many games in the Final Four (five) as they have lost in the months leading up to it. Over the last six seasons, they are 202–13 overall.

Derek told his daughter, “You’ve got to get somewhere for you now.” Ta’Niya considered a few other schools in a lists-are-fun-so-why-not-make-one? sort of way. But UConn was too far from home. While Tennessee has been reestablishing itself as a superpower, the Lady Vols lasted only one round longer than Florida State last year. She did not give herself a chance to fall in love with Texas or LSU. She didn’t visit any schools—not even South Carolina.