One year after a heartbreaking loss in the Final Four to eventual champion Stanford, the No. 1 South Carolina found redemption, earning the program's second national championship with a 64-49 victory over 2-seed Connecticut on Sunday at Minneapolis' Target Center.
The eighth program to win multiple national titles in NCAA women's basketball history is the Gamecocks, who went 14-0 against teams ranked in the AP top 25 this season.
South Carolina is the 12th team to go wire-to-wire as the top team in the AP poll.
South Carolina has 35 wins this season, which is the most in a single season in program history, and seven of them were over national championship-winning coaches, including two over Geno Auriemma of Connecticut.
The South Carolina coach is 2-0 in NCAA national championship games after leading her team past Mississippi State in the title game.
After going 11-0 in his previous national championship appearances, Auriemma was handed his first loss in the title game.
The 11 titles tied for the most in Division I basketball are not enough for the Huskies to win their first title since they took home four straight from 2013-16. The program has been without a title for five straight NCAA tournaments.
The national player of the year, Aliyah Boston, finished with 11 points and 16 boards, which allowed the Gamecocks to demolish the Huskies on the boards. Destanni Henderson came out with a career-high 26 points to go along with four assists, two rebound and a tough defensive effort against the national player of the year.
The game was tied at 3 when Henderson hit a 3 22 seconds into it.
South Carolina jumped out to a 30-12 lead early in the second quarter off a Henderson 3, after scoring 13 of the game's first 15 points. After falling behind by as many as seven, the University of Connecticut used a 15-5 run to get back into the game. Azzi Fudd, the top-ranked recruit in the country, played just five minutes in the first half for the University of Connecticut because of a stomach bug.
South Carolina went ahead by 16 midway through the third after a Zia Cooke layup. The first 10 minutes of the game were dominated by the Huskies, who made their first 3s of the game to make it 43-37. The final three points of the frame and six of the first eight of the fourth were scored by the Gamecocks to cushion their lead.
With 3:18 to play, Fudd and Bueckers made it a 10-point game, but they wouldn't be able to pull any closer.
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