WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden honored 2024 NCAA basketball champions South Carolina and Connecticut on Tuesday on the White Home, celebrating the 2 powerhouse applications’ most up-to-date nationwide title runs.
South Carolina went 38-0 on the best way to its newest ladies’s title. It was coach Daybreak Staley’s third championship with the Gamecocks since 2017. Biden cheered South Carolina for ushering in an period of surging curiosity in ladies’s sports activities.
South Carolina’s title recreation in opposition to Iowa drew extra viewers than this 12 months’s males’s championship, averaging 18.7 million viewers on ABC and ESPN and peaking at 24 million viewers.
“I believe it is honest to say everybody, everybody watches ladies’s sports activities now,” Biden stated. “When new followers look ahead to the primary time, when younger women see their idols, they see the ability of your instance.”
Later, at a separate celebration for the College of Connecticut males’s crew, Biden marveled on the success of the Huskies’ squad, which included 4 first-round picks within the newest NBA draft. UConn coach Dan Hurley’s crew went 37-3 in successful its second straight title.
“Clearly, you will need to have one thing within the water up there,” stated Biden, who additionally famous that 11 athletes who competed on this summer time’s Paris Olympics had UConn ties.
South Carolina’s unblemished 12 months got here even after Staley misplaced all 5 starters from her 2023 crew that was defeated within the Ultimate 4. The Gamecocks had been dominant all through their historic season, main the nation in scoring protection, margin of victory and blocked pictures.
For UConn, it was the college’s sixth males’s nationwide title. The Huskies joined the 2006-07 Florida Gators and the 1991-92 Duke Blue Devils as simply the third crew to repeat since John Wood’s UCLA dynasty of the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s.
Hurley this summer time turned down a proposal to teach the Los Angeles Lakers and signed a six-year, $50 million deal to stay at UConn. He stated his focus is now on successful a 3rd consecutive title. No males’s program has achieved a three-peat since UCLA gained seven in a row between 1967 and 1973.
It was the primary White Home go to for South Carolina. Staley and the Gamecocks didn’t go to the White Home following championships in 2017 and 2022. Vice President Kamala Harris paid a go to to the crew whereas she was in Columbia, South Carolina, earlier this 12 months.
Staley, a three-time Olympic gold medalist and coach of the U.S. ladies’s basketball crew in Tokyo three years in the past, just lately served as a member of the presidential delegation to the Paris Olympics.
A number of distinguished present and former South Carolinian politicians attended Tuesday’s ceremony for the Gamecocks, together with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, Democratic Rep. James Clyburn, and former Columbia mayor Steve Benjamin, who’s now a senior adviser to the president.
Biden joked that the South Carolina officeholders may have some fierce competitors if the favored Staley had been to provide politics a strive.
“All of these of you who maintain public workplace in South Carolina, you higher hope she retains teaching and would not run,” Biden stated of Staley.
