When Cheryl Miller first touched the hardwood as a Trojan Horse, she powered the Troy women to a national championship.
Miller – a sophomore in 1983-84 – returned with everything he had to prove after winning it all. Expectations ran high and fans flocked to the Sports Arena to watch the Trojans.
Enter sophomore guard JuJu Watkins and the 2024-2025 USC women’s basketball team. Watkins couldn’t advance past the Elite Eight in Year 1, but expectations are sky-high, just like in 1983.
“We didn’t shy away from the word expectations all summer,” said USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb, entering her fourth season with the Trojans. ‘I don’t try to pretend they’re not there. It’s a matter of using it as a standard and saying this is where we want to go, but we’re not going to let the weight of the world weigh on our shoulders every day or take away our joy every day.”
Read more: Why USC’s JuJu Watkins is “your favorite basketball player’s favorite basketball player.”
Big Ten media and coaches picked the Trojans to win the conference in their first campaign from the Pac-12. Watkins – who averaged 27.1 points per game and connected on 34.6% of the team’s shots – is unanimously named the Big Ten preseason player of the year. And USC starts the year at No. 3 in the Associated Press Top 25, behind South Carolina and Connecticut.
Coming off a 29-6 record and their first Elite Eight appearance since 1994, the Trojans enter the season with a rare mix: returning veterans, seven freshmen, a bona fide star in Watkins and two graduate transfers from the Pac’s past 12: Former Stanford forward Kiki Iriafen and Oregon State Guard Talia von Oelhoffen.
Iriafen, the reigning winner of the Katrina McClain Award – which honors the nation’s best forward – averaged a double-double (19.4 points and 11.0 rebounds) last season. Von Oelhoffen, on the other hand, was an All-Pac-12 point guard who led Oregon State in assists with 5.0 per game – a mark that would have led USC.
“I literally spent most of my time here watching movies on how to quit [Iriafen and von Oelhoffen],” Gottlieb said of recruiting the graduate transfer duo. “Now it’s an incredible feeling.”
For Iriafen, an AP preseason All-American alongside Watkins, playing at Galen Center is a return home. She is from Los Angeles and played high school basketball at Harvard-Westlake.
“Being home is the greatest gift I could ask for,” says Iriafen, who graduated from Stanford with a design engineering degree. “I’m the oldest child, so it’s super special for me to be able to be with my siblings and my parents. Everyone who helped me get to this point – my high school coaches, my trainers and my family – can finally see me shine on the college stage.”
Senior center Rayah Marshall – one of two returning starters from last year – joins Watkins, Iriafen and von Oelhoffen on the Naismith Women’s Player of the Year watch list. All four averaged double-digit points last season.
Outside of Marshall and Watkins, however, the Trojans return just over a tenth of their minutes from last year, almost all of which came off the bench.
Read more: USC’s JuJu Watkins agrees to lucrative contract extension with Nike
The arrival of offensive options who play big minutes through USC’s former Pac-12 foes allows Watkins — who passed Miller for the program record for most 30-point games in a season — to improve as a facilitator rather than as a goalkeeper. -to is trusted. goal scorer at all times, Gottlieb said.
“[Her] the game continues to evolve,” Gottlieb said of Watkins. “She has it all. We never want to suppress her ability to be a bucket-getter – no one is better at that than her – but she really has a complete game. As her skills and pace have evolved, I just want her to make the right plays every time.
Gottlieb added that some of the seven freshmen will get immediate playing time when USC opens its campaign against No. 20 Mississippi on Monday morning in Paris — although she declined to specify who.
USC brought in one of the nation’s top freshman classes, the only program with three 2024 McDonald’s All-Americans: guards Kayleigh Heckel, Avery Howell and Kennedy Smith.
Heckel, a 6-foot-1 point guard, said teammates like Von Oelhoffen and Watkins help her adapt to the pace and complexity of college basketball. The Port Chester, N.Y., native, whose teammates have dubbed her “K-9,” added that she is counting down the minutes until tipoff against the Rebels.
“We beat each other up a lot,” she said. “We are happy to see some new faces.”
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
