South Carolina returns to the top of women’s basketball poll

Coach Dawn Staley has South Carolina back where her team started the season: first in the Associated Press women’s college basketball poll.

Gamecocks regained first place on Monday, receiving 29 of the 30 first-place votes from a national media panel.

Gamecocks will be tested immediately; they visit No. 2 UConn on Monday night in the 60th showdown between the first two voting teams.

South Carolina, which originally fell from first place after losing to the State of North Carolina, appears to have two consecutive wins over UConn after defeating the Huskies for the first time in eight attempts last season, 70-52.

“It’s less pressure, but more hunger,” said Staley on Saturday. “Hitting someone at home is a little easier than hitting the road. And I just hope that we can get that off the list and continue what UConn used to do with us: join these victories and not look back. “

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These same two teams met five years ago in another competition. The positions were reversed and the Huskies remained in first place with a 12 point win.

UConn moved up one position to No. 2 on Monday after then-No. 1 Louisville lost at home to No. 4 in the state of North Carolina last week. The Cardinals fell to third place and Wolfpack remained in fourth. They lost to North Carolina unrated on Sunday.

No. 5. Stanford, Texas A&M and Baylor each rose one position, while UCLA, Maryland and Arizona completed the top 10. Arizona visit No. 11 Oregon on Monday night.

The state of Mississippi left the poll for the first time since 2014, ending a sequence of 125 consecutive weeks in the Top 25. This was the fifth longest active sequence. The Bulldogs, who have been on all polls since November 24, 2014, did not play last week when their game against Tennessee was postponed because of problems with COVID-19 under the Lady Vols program. Bulldogs have not played since January 28 and have fallen in the last three competitions.

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Missouri was ranked 25th.

Here is other information from the poll:

HISTORIC MARK

Monday marked the 800th college women’s basketball survey in AP history. No team was more in it than Tennessee, with 745 matches. The late Pat Summitt had 618 of them when he was in charge of Lady Vols. The team was disqualified only 14 weeks while she trained. UConn is second on the list, with 554, all subordinate to Geno Auriemma.

According to research historian Mel Greenberg, who started the research in 1976, Kim Mulkey is the active leader with 663 research participations of her time as a player at Louisiana Tech, an assistant coach there and a principal coach for Baylor. Mulkey is second only to former Tennessee player and trainer Holly Warlick in most matches of all time. Warlick had 693 votes.

GAME OF THE WEEK

Oregon at UCLA, Friday: a big Pac-12 showdown with the Ducks visiting the Bruins. UCLA suffered a severe defeat in Washington state on Friday night.

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More college basketball AP: https://apnews.com/Collegebasketball and https://twitter.com/AP_Top25