The Women’s NCAA Tournament began in 1982. USC quickly established itself as a national power in the era of the Women’s NCAA event. The Men’s NCAA Tournament began in 1939, so it has established a much larger and deeper history compared to the women. However, we are seeing right now the evolution and growth of women’s basketball in a way which applied to the men’s game in the early 1980s. Think about it for a second: The 1979 men’s championship game between Larry Bird of Indiana State and Magic Johnson of Michigan State was seen as a major growth point for college hoops. The Caitlin Clark-Angel Reese women’s national championship game between Iowa and LSU last year — following Clark’s win over No. 1 South Carolina in the Final Four — could have marked a similar growth point for women’s college basketball. If the women’s game is now where the men’s game was in the early 1980s, how fitting it is that we should look back at USC’s first women’s basketball national title in 1983. With the Trojans having a No. 1 seed at the 2024 Women’s NCAA Tournament, there’s a need to preview the 2024 USC team’s March Madness bracket, but there’s also a need to look back at the start of the USC women’s basketball dynasty in the early 1980s:
USC women’s basketball’s run to the 1983 national championship
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