South Carolina tops AP women's hoops preseason Top 25 poll - ESPN

Dawn Staley has South Carolina in a familiar place, sitting at No. 1 in The Associated Press preseason Top 25 women's basketball poll.

The Gamecocks received 23 first-place votes from a 31-member national media panel Tuesday. UConn, USC, Duke and Michigan round out the top five.

It is the fifth time in the past seven years that Staley's team has been ranked No. 1 in the preseason.

«It's a gift and curse,» Staley said. «I tend to not look at the number, but our players do. They look at it and feel like there's a sense of respect to being No. 1. They also know that it's pressure packed with the type of non-conference shcedule we have, we're going to be challenged. If we stand there at No. 1 at the end of our non-conference season that's something to be truly to be proud of.»

South Carolina will face five ranked teams in the first month of the season, including UConn, USC and Duke.

«It's a doozy of a schedule. something we have to do for us to actually keep having the roster we have,» Staley said. «Some of them are NIL games. some of them are games we just got to play because they are super competitive and we want to test ourselves.»

UConn, which lost to South Carolina in the Final Four last season, garnered six first-place votes and has been ranked in the top 10 of every preseason poll since 1994.

This is the third consecutive year that South Carolina and UConn have been 1-2 in the preseason poll, though the Huskies were on top a year ago. The two play each other on Nov. 24 in Uncasville, Connecticut.

Southern California picked up the other two first-place ballots. Expectations are high for the Trojans, who have a healthy JuJu Watkins back after she missed last season while recovering from a torn ACL suffered in the 2025