Scott has followed South Carolina athletics for over 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter (this email) year-round and a column during football season that's published each Monday on GamecockCentral.com.
Scott Davis: Dawn Vibes
Something about this feels familiar.
It's the anticipation, the excitement you weren't necessarily expecting to feel but most definitely are feeling. It's the newness, the freshness, the unique joy of following a program that is on the way up.
When South Carolina hired former Gamecock Ashley Chastain Woodard to lead the softball program before the 2025 season, I watched her introductory press conference to announce the hiring and suddenly found myself telling a group of Gamecock friends something that would have once seemed unimaginable.
"Call me crazy, but I'm getting Dawn vibes here," I said.
Whoa.
That's a lot.
Dawn Staley, of course, is merely the greatest South Carolina athletic coach in school history. She's won three national championships here, and I'm fully expecting her to win more. She is arguably the most recognizable figure in women's basketball, and the only other contender is one of her former players, A'ja Wilson.
Chastain Woodard, on the other hand, returned to her alma mater after winning some conference championships at Charlotte. Was I really going there?
I was.
Something kept leading me there. Because Dawn, of course, wasn't yet DAWN (in all-caps) when she arrived in Columbia. She had a track record of winning, yes. But more than that, it was her charisma and indefinable ability to make a South Carolina fan base that hadn't been paying attention to her sport stop, look around, and take notice of her program.
I felt like Chastain Woodard had that same charisma.
Almost on cue – and despite her team being picked to finish last in the SEC in 2025 – her Gamecocks made an exhilarating run all the way to a Super Regional in her first season and finished one heartbreaking game away from a Women's College World Series appearance.
The team's 2026 season kicked off yesterday, and for the first time in my life as a Gamecock fan, there's palpable excitement for softball's return.
As I type this, I can look over at the GamecockCentral home page, where the site's "Top Stories" are listed along the side. At No. 1 is a story providing the inside scoop on this year's softball program.
Fans weren't paying attention to this program as recently as a year ago.
They are now.
New Team, New Expectations
Chastain Woodard's squad delivered one of the most improbable – maybe even shocking – runs last year that I can ever remember a Gamecock sports team providing. In the beginning, as the team fared better than any of us could have expected in a loaded SEC, the team's performance seemed like a nice, uplifting story.
Before long, you could genuinely sense the fan base beginning to wrap itself around the team – there was a level of investment in South Carolina softball that I'd never seen from Gamecock supporters before. By the time the Gamecocks lost a gut-wrenching contest to UCLA for the right to advance to the WCWS, there was outright devastation vibrating through Gamecock Nation.
Were we really this crushed about a softball loss? We were.
After that UCLA loss, I wrote in this newsletter, "We care about the future of the program. And now, that caring will burn on through a long offseason until we see the Gamecock softball team take the field again in 2026."
That long offseason has finally ended.
And with a new season comes an entirely different set of expectations than the ones that greeted Chastain Woodard's program just a year ago. "This time last year, we probably had less pressure because of what people expected us to do," Chastain Woodard said before the kickoff of the 2026 season. "Now it's the opposite. All eyes are on us."
The team lost key contributors like Sam Gress and other starters from last year's team, but there's excitement about many of its new additions, too.
And in college sports, replacing key contributors is Job No. 1, 2 and 3.
Just ask Dawn.
She watched A'ja Wilson leave after winning a national championship, then won another title. Then she watched Aliyah Boston leave after winning a national championship, then won another title.
Dawn is the toughest act to follow in South Carolina sports.
But if there's any Gamecock coach who might have that extra something special to make a run at doing it, Chastain Woodard looks like a prime contender.
And What About Dawn 1.0?
Speaking of Dawn, her women's basketball team is right in the mix of everything…again.
Coming into Thursday night's home game against Mississippi State, the Gamecocks were ranked third in the country and first in the SEC. If Chastain Woodard wants to know how to handle expectations, Dawn would be the first person seek out for a conversation.
Expectations? It's a testament to what Staley has built in Columbia that a season in which the Gamecocks are 22-2 and ranked third in the country has felt mildly underwhelming to a fan base accustomed to watching their team blow their peers off the floor for a decade running.
The team needed a strong fourth quarter to subdue a dreadful Texas A&M squad a few days ago, leading Dawn to say, "We're still winning basketball games. But it doesn't look good. And it really doesn't have to look good. As long as we're winning and we're figuring it out. We're always in constant motion and trying to get the best out of them on any given day."
I wouldn't bet against them in the postseason.
In fact, I always like the chances of a Dawn team that is flying slightly under the radar (which seems impossible for a team ranked third in America, but still).
When the Gamecocks fell short in the Final Four against Caitlin Clark and Iowa in 2023 and then lost Boston to the WNBA Draft, few were looking at Dawn's program to make a title run in 2024.
That team, as you may remember, capped a perfect season by winning a title in a rematch against Clark and Iowa. Handling expectations is what Dawn does.
And if Ashley Chastain Woodard's softball program starts giving us similar feels – well, springtime is sure going to be a lot of fun around here.
Tell me what you think about the 2026 softball season by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com. (Please do not reply to this email.)
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