How South Carolina’s Joyce Edwards turned rejection into a good thing

Joyce Edwards sat nervously on the bleachers in the gym in Colorado Springs, Colo., flanked by the best under-17 girls basketball players in the country. A year earlier, she had been in this same position, waiting to hear whether she had made Team USA’s under-16 squad, but she didn’t make it past the first cut. A year later, a year older, a year stronger, certainly things would be different, she reassured herself as she listened to the team director rattle off other names. Certainly, she could get through the first cut and be considered one of Team USA’s 18 best prospects. Certainly, it would be different this time.

But she waited. And waited. Her name didn’t come.

With about a dozen other players, she got up, left the gym, returned to her dorm, packed her bag and headed to the airport to catch a flight back home.

Now, it’s hard to imagine that Edwards — the No. 2 player in the 2024 class, the Gatorade national player of the year and the gem of South Carolina’s 2024 signing class — ever went to a tryout in which she didn’t make the team (let alone not be the star).

In most achievement-based settings all of her life, she has thrived. Academically, she’ll enter South Carolina’s honors college this fall to study environmental sciences after graduating high school with a 5.08 GPA. She has usually moved up an age group or two athletically. As a seventh grader, she was a starter on her school’s varsity basketball team and on her school’s soccer and volleyball teams as a freshman.

But for Team USA, she hadn’t made the cut.

“Those were the first times I ever heard, ‘No, you didn’t make it,’” Edwards said. “I cried a little bit because I never heard that word before and I never experienced that.”

Joyce Edwards bodies her way in for the three point play!

The future @GamecockWBB player has 12 points and five rebounds as @usabjnt is up 58-20 in the third quarter:@wachfox I @JoyceEdwards24 I @CamdenGBB pic.twitter.com/Go03mfwVnz

— amanda (@amanda_1815) June 18, 2024

So in spring 2023, when the invite came for Edwards to try out for the under-19 team, her first thought was: Why bother? She would be the youngest player in camp, going up against players like Cotie McMahon and Kiki Rice, who had just finished their freshman seasons in college, and soon-to-be college stars Hannah Hidalgo and Maddie Booker. Meanwhile, Edwards would be entering her senior year of high school.

When Edwards told her parents — mother Rasheedah and father Charlie — that she wasn’t sure she wanted to accept the invitation, they both pushed back. Think of the week less like a tryout and more like an opportunity to change your perspective, they told her. If she went to compete and study what older players did to excel, rather than to make a team, she would learn something. And if the goal was to learn, then there was no way she could “fail.”

“A lot of times, we think of ‘no’ as a bad word, but it’s not,” Rasheedah said. “It just means it’s not your time. You can’t let it define you. You can’t let it change who you are or how you feel about yourself. … ‘No’ can be a stepping stone to something greater.”

Edwards entered that training camp focusing on what she thought the coaches were looking for in terms of the total team and where she could fill in any gaps. In previous camps, she felt she had exerted herself too much in the early sessions and her game declined later in the week. Now, she maintained a level play for the full tryout.

And not only did Edwards hear her name called when the under-19 team was announced at the end of the week, but she also was named a top-five player at the under-19 World Cup in Spain that May.

Amid this summer of Team USA success and a change in perspective, Edwards was also mulling her college decision. Initially, she acknowledges, she didn’t think she would go to South Carolina. “I felt like they were always stacked,” Edwards said. “I felt like they didn’t need anybody else.”

Edwards wasn’t entirely wrong. During her sophomore year of high school at nearby Camden, the Gamecocks won their second national title with a starting five who would all go on to be drafted into the WNBA. During her junior year, South Carolina spent the season ranked No. 1 until it fell to Iowa in the Final Four.

Before her under-19 experience, when Edwards watched the Gamecocks, she thought: But why would they need me? But after spending time with the older players in Team USA and playing her game based on the needs of that team (and seeing how both she and the team thrived), she realized she instead should look at South Carolina through a new lens.

What gaps could I fill? How much could I learn? Could I connect my success to getting better instead of hearing yes?

In November, as South Carolina embarked on an undefeated season in which its eighth- and ninth-best players would be starters anywhere else, Edwards announced her commitment to the Gamecocks.

“The older I got, the more I realized I wanted to be in an environment like that because iron sharpens iron,” Edwards said. “And the competition that you get in practice, playing with all those great players, it’s just going to make you better.”

Dawn Staley, a three-time Olympian and 2020 Olympic team coach, has said she approaches her program much in the same way she approached Team USA — it’s about putting the puzzle together and understanding that great players are going to sacrifice for the team. It’s why Laeticia Amihere, who started just four games at South Carolina, was drafted in the first round of the 2023 WNBA Draft. And why electric players like rising sophomores MiLaysia Fulwiley and Tessa Johnson — who led the Gamecocks in assists and scoring, in the 2024 national title game — came off the bench for South Carolina for the majority of this season.

Dawn Staley hugs Joyce Edwards after the latter led Camden High School to a South Carolina state title. (Ken Ruinard / USA Today)

Edwards, who won a gold medal with Team USA’s under-18 team in Colombia over the weekend, knows that without her perspective-changing experience with the national team, she might not have been headed to South Carolina this fall.

“It opened my eyes,” Edwards said. “It came at a good moment.”

And, just as the national team has compiled the best players in the country, so too has South Carolina this fall. The defending champs enter the 2024-25 season with all but one of their players having been ranked as one of the 30 best in their recruiting class, with nine Gamecocks being top-15 recruits. Edwards, the No. 3 player in the Class of 2024, isn’t even the highest-ranked recruit on the roster (that’s Raven Johnson, the No. 2 player in the 2021 class).

Edwards’ versatility is an obvious fit for Staley at South Carolina. At 6-2 with handles, she can play the one through four, but she also has enough length and athleticism to defend most centers. As a senior at Camden High School, she averaged 31 points a game while shooting 72 percent from the floor, doing most of her damage with efficiency from inside and midrange. South Carolina’s front court will look different with Kamilla Cardoso departed to the pros, and Edwards stands to benefit from the minutes left open there. But with the Gamecocks returning four starters, Edwards’ opportunities to break into the starting lineup might be limited.

But she’s OK with that. She didn’t pick South Carolina because she thought it needed her. In fact, she chose South Carolina, in part, because it didn’t need her. She chose it because its depth would be something that would challenge Edwards every day in practice, give her a new stepping stone to find, and because, she understands, she might hear “no” in Columbia, too.

And now, she knows, that’s not always a bad thing.

(Top photo of Joyce Edwards and Me’Arah O’Neal: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)