The Women’s NCAA Basketball Tournament began in 1982. USC won it all in 1983 and 1984, and reached the national championship game in 1986. USC made three national title games in four years and ruled women’s college basketball before Stanford, then Tennessee, and then Connecticut forged bigger, more enduring college hoops legacies. USC was the original superpower in the NCAA Tournament era. The Trojans had some very successful years in the early 1990s thanks to basketball icon Lisa Leslie.
And then? Crickets.
USC has achieved very little over the last 29 years, but that walk through the desert wilderness is ending with this 2023 NCAA Tournament berth.
A new era of promise and potential is getting off the ground at USC. Coach Lindsay Gottlieb and assistant Beth Burns are figuring things out. Juju Watkins is coming to upgrade the offense.
There aren’t a lot of recent photos from USC women’s basketball NCAA Tournaments … because there aren’t many recent NCAA Tournaments in which the Women of Troy played.
You have to go back to 2014 for USC’s last NCAA Tournament, and you have to travel in a time machine to the 1980s to find the richest, most vivid images from USC’s NCAA Tournament history in women’s basketball: