TAMPA, Fla. — South Carolina guard Raven Johnson had just turned 10 when Connecticut’s Breanna Stewart won her first of four national championships.
She remembers watching that game with her family in the living room of her Atlanta home. She watched in awe the three subsequent years, when Stewart led the Huskies back to the mountaintop.
Johnson imagined herself following Stewart’s path to global stardom.
“I want to be in moments like this,” Johnson told her parents and anyone else who’d listen back when she was a preteen. “I want to win back-to-back-to-back national [championships].”
Johnson has won at every stage of her basketball career.
So, of course, winning multiple times on college basketball’s grandest stage felt attainable.
But it’s surreal — even now as a two-time national champion — that Johnson, the “conductor” of the Gamecocks’ special senior class, finds herself banging on the door of another title and South Carolina’s third in four years.
“It’s literally crazy,” Johnson said Saturday. “It felt like yesterday when I was talking like that.”
Johnson has been talking about winning championships with South Carolina before she even stepped foot on campus. And she started working toward that goal a year before her first game.
Johnson would figure out what recruits Dawn Staley was targeting and would reach out.
“She described herself as Big Bird,” Staley said of Johnson. “She was going to be the last one to commit. She was going to get all her troops lined up and then Big Bird’s going to bring it all home.”
Johnson helped get Sania Feagin and Bree Hall to sign on with her as part of South Carolina’s 2021 high school recruiting class.
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“Raven consistently said, ‘We’re going to win championships,’ ” Staley said. “And you’re thinking like an 18-, 17-year-old young person really doesn’t know what she’s saying because it’s hard on the other side of this.
“And although I went with it — I did in the moment because in recruiting you want to believe young people — and I’ll be damned if it ain’t come true that she’s got championships on her résumé. And she’s putting us in a position of winning a third in her class, which is quite incredible.”
For the second time in four years, South Carolina is squaring up against Connecticut in the national championship game Sunday in Tampa, Fla.
The Huskies are hoping to end a nearly decade-long title drought, while the Gamecocks are in pursuit of winning back-to-back titles — a feat that hasn’t been accomplished since Stewart was in college.
South Carolina’s trek back to the national championship game hasn’t been easy.
The Gamecocks have lost as many games this season as in the past three seasons combined.
One of South Carolina’s three losses was to the Huskies, who delivered a 29-point beating in Columbia, S.C., that snapped the Gamecocks’ 71-game winning streak at home in February.
But on Sunday, South Carolina has the chance to make history and check off its last box of revenge for this season.
“UConn, they’re literally the standard of women’s basketball,” Johnson said. “They have 11 national championships. … And then the way they’re playing right now, it’s honestly great basketball. … This one would mean a lot.”
