When South Carolina’s season ended in the Final Four a year ago, no one was quite sure what the 2023-24 version of the Gamecocks would look like, including those still on the roster.

The senior-laden squad saw four of its top five scorers graduate, headlined by star center Aliyah Boston, who went No. 1 overall to the Indiana Fever and became the WNBA’s Rookie of the Year, and Zia Cooke, who led the team in scoring and was picked 10th overall by the Los Angeles Sparks. That left some major holes to fill for a suddenly very young team, and when they assembled for their first summer workouts, as Ashlyn Watkins explains, all the questions that were being asked externally existed internally, too.