The road to Raven Johnson’s ‘Revenge Tour’ at USC started with 2023 Final Four fallout

Raven Johnson dribbled toward the 3-point line, right hand to left, between her legs as she contemplated her next move.

Black and white jerseys packed the paint as Johnson looked on. Her defender, Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, dared Johnson to shoot as she eyed the freshman point guard from a disrespectful distance.

Thirty-six consecutive wins brought her and South Carolina to this moment — the 2023 Final Four in Dallas.

The most prolific recruiting class in South Carolina history was playing in its final postseason, one win away from another national championship game.

Iowa’s Kate Martin pointed Johnson out to Clark, as if telling her teammate to guard the Gamecock guard more closely. But the scouting report noted Johnson as an inconsistent 3-point shooter (24%), and the Hawkeyes had USC’s dominant post players to worry about. So Clark flicked her right wrist in Johnson’s direction and remained parked in the middle of the paint.

Yikes.

Johnson stood still as if stuck in cement. She soon saw Brea Beal run toward her left side, turned and passed the ball Beal’s way. Johnson bailed on the open look and, thus, justified Clark’s strategy.

Media outlets, basketball fans and social media trolls clipped the interaction moments later. Johnson became the butt of a viral joke. Never mind the 28.5 other minutes she played, or the three 3-pointers she’d hit by game’s end.

USC lost 77-73, and the embarrassment was overwhelming. Johnson began to question:

Is this sport really for me?

“I was very much thinking about quitting basketball,” Johnson told The State. “I had to gain a love for the game again.”

Three hundred and sixty-nine days later, Johnson is back. Back at the Final Four, this time in Cleveland, with a new undefeated South Carolina squad looking to win it all. These players, this women’s basketball community helped Johnson regain her sense of self after she questioned her ability to soldier on. And she’ll be damned if she can’t repay them (and herself) with a national title.

‘Things happen for a reason’

Johnson’s mother Shekia Johnson isn’t afraid to tell it like it is.

She is blunt — sometimes borderline mean — when delivering criticism. But her frankness comes from a place of love and a desire to be honest. So when Raven told Shekia she was thinking about quitting basketball, Shekia wasted no energy crafting a sensitive response.

“ ‘If you let that one thing make you quit, then you’re weak,’ ” Shekia told Raven.

“Basketball is not for the weak.”

As proof, Shekia sent Raven motivational videos of other hoopers talking about how they overcame adversity to achieve greatness in their careers. One clip came from an interview with Chelsea Gray, a three-time WNBA champion and 2022 Finals MVP — also Raven’s favorite player. Gray dislocated and later fractured her right knee cap at Duke. But she persisted, and that’s exactly what Raven needed to do.

“That took a total part of me, and it made me mentally think of things, like who I am,” Raven said. “And the more I got closer to God, I just realized things happen for a reason. He puts his strongest soldiers in the battle. So I just think that situation happened at the right time. The right time in my life.”

‘She’s shooting her shot’

LSU’s Angel Reese sat in front of her locker Friday at MVP Arena in Albany, New York. To be Reese is to live life under a “spotlight,” she said, glowing in LED rays cast by TV news cameras crowded around her.

When asked about Raven, it’s Reese who lights up. A smile spread across her face as she nodded intently at questions about their relationship, eager to prop up her friend.

“I love Raven,” Reese said. “We’re like sisters. She just texted me yesterday, so we talk all the time.”

The night of last year’s South Carolina’s Final Four loss, several championship-bound LSU players reached out to Raven, Shekia said, Reese, point guard Alexis Morris and Kateri Poole among them.

“We’ve got your back,” they told her.

Morris offered a more poignant message: “ ‘Don’t let somebody do that to you,’ ” Shekia recalled. “ ‘Don’t ever let nobody make you feel that low or feel like you want to quit.’ ”

Morris and Poole called the way Iowa dared South Carolina’s guards to shoot “disrespectful” ahead of the national championship game. Final Four Most Outstanding Player Reese spoke about it afterward.

“Caitlin Clark is a hell of a player for sure, but I don’t take disrespect lightly,” Reese said. “And she disrespected Alexis (Morris) and my girls from South Carolina. They’re still my SEC girls, too. Y’all not gonna disrespect them either. I wanted to pick her pocket, but I had a moment at the end of the game that was in my bag.”

Raven and Reese have known each other for a handful of years, having gone through the USA Basketball circuit together. This past summer, they competed in the FIBA AmeriCup and won silver with Team USA. Knowing the Final Four had been an embarrassing moment for her friend, Reese used their time in Mexico to imbue confidence into Raven.

Reese has always seen Raven as a great basketball player. Now she’s glad Raven sees it, too.

“Nobody’s waving her off no more,” Reese said. “She’s shooting her shot, and I’m happy for her.”

‘It was bigger than just the loss’

The 2023 national championship was South Carolina’s to win — a parting gift for the beloved and wildly talented Freshies: Laeticia Amihere, Aliyah Boston, Zia Cooke, Brea Beal and Olivia Thompson. Every day during the NCAA Tournament, Raven told those seniors she wanted to make it happen for them.

It didn’t matter that she was a freshman. It didn’t matter that she had never been there before. Her love for her teammates would overcome all of that. It had to.

But the responsibility weighed on Raven, eventually crushing her at the worst time.

“After the game, obviously she was very, very hurt, as we all were,” Amihere told The State. “But I think she was more hurt that she wasn’t able to do it for us.

“... You never see Raven sad. You never see her in that state where she just doesn’t have her energy. So just to see that, I knew it was bigger than just the loss.”

Social media, of course, exacerbated the problem. The trolls. The direct messages calling her — a McDonald’s All-American and Naismith High School Player of the Year — “trash.”

“I was very depressed,” Raven said. “I lost a lot of confidence.”

Amihere, Shekia and coach Dawn Staley told Raven to get offline, delete social media and focus on herself. And when they got back to South Carolina, Amihere took Raven to church.

“ ‘We’re going to be reading our Bible. We’re gonna go to church. We’re gonna do our devotionals. Because you need to understand who you are,’ ” Amihere told her.

“ ‘A lot of people have an opinion of who you are because of basketball, but they don’t know you at all.’ ”

Since Raven arrived at South Carolina, she and Amihere have been close.

They liken theirs to a pseudo mother-daughter relationship, Amihere being “Mom” and Raven being “Daughter.” They’re two-thirds of a trio made complete by center Kamilla Cardoso, also known as “Auntie.”

Raven and Amihere’s friendship grew especially deep after Raven suffered an ACL tear in her left knee two games into the 2021-22 season. Amihere enrolled early at South Carolina in January of 2019 to rehab the second ACL tear of her high school career. They bonded over shared injury trauma.

Reigniting her faith in God helped, but Raven still struggled with how to move forward in her career at South Carolina without the Freshies.

“ ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna do once you guys leave,’ ” Amihere remembered Raven confiding in her.

“ ‘Yes, you do,’ ” Amihere told Raven. “ ‘You know exactly what you’re gonna do because you’ve done it. Even in the midst of us all being seniors and leaders, Raven, you’re the point guard. You lead on the court.’ ”

This would be Raven’s team next year, Amihere and Staley reminded her. She had already proven herself an elite playmaker, posting the fifth-best assist-to-turnover ratio in program history at 2.37. But USC would need more from her in 2023-24.

Thoughts of quitting basketball became muddled memories, and determination flooded her consciousness.

Time to get back in the gym.

‘She’s ready’

Raven went home for a week during the summer, where she worked out with childhood friend and NBA star Anthony Edwards. She called her Westlake High School coach, Hilda Hankerson, and told her to get out the shooting machine.

“You’ve got to fight for what you want,” Shekia told Raven. And fight she did. With a smile on her face. Because she had people behind her.

Raven and Chloe Kitts spent the rest of summer break in Columbia, just the two of them, training to play with USA Basketball and in the next college season. They’d hit the gym, grab a bite to eat and spend the rest of the day watching movies. Together they built muscle mass and confidence.

Kitts empathized with Raven’s post-Final Four struggle. After graduating early and joining USC in December of 2022, Kitts had a hard time adjusting to college basketball. “A little depression phase,” Kitts said, is almost like a rite of passage, but it gets better if you “trust the process.”

It’s clear every time Raven shoots the ball this season at an improved clip of 45.2% from the field and 35.2% from 3. She plays with unrivaled speed. She makes decisions without hesitation. She forces opponents to play up on her.

She’ll never give them a reason to wave her off again.

“That pissed her off for months,” Kitts said. “It still does…. She’s been in the gym ever since then. And she just wants to get her lick back.

“She’s ready.”

Take the Sweet 16 game against Indiana, which USC won 79-75, for example. She went 3 of 3 from the outside, solidifying the victory with big shots down the stretch, including a 3-pointer with 55 seconds remaining.

No second guessing. No bailout pass. Just confidence.

“I was open, and all I could think was, ‘Let it go,’ ” Raven said afterward. “I don’t want to lose. Just going from last year. Nobody can sag off me this year, and I take that very personal.”

“Some players need that in their lives,” Staley said, reflecting on Raven’s growth since that fateful day in Dallas. “They need that type of friction in their lives to make them work a little bit harder, to meet the moment when they need to meet the moment. But certainly I know it’s a feather in her cap knowing that she was able to knock down that shot.”

“There’s pain behind what she said,” Staley said the next day, “but she replaced it with work ethic.”

‘Revenge Tour’

The 2023-24 season is Raven Johnson’s “Revenge Tour.”

“ ‘Revenge Tour,’ to me, it’s like an apology to myself from last year,” Raven said in September. “Because I know I could have done better. And we had high expectations to win a national championship. We didn’t get that expectation. So this year, it’s fuel to the fire. And it’s a ‘revenge tour.’”

She later added: “I got something for everybody, every team that comes up.”

So far, she’s made good on her promise, leading this young Gamecocks squad to an undefeated season and a spot in the national semifinals. After 36 games, the tour’s still far from over.

“I don’t think people have seen the best of us yet.”

Ahead of South Carolina’s 2024 NCAA Tournament debut, Amihere texted Raven and Cardoso a Bible verse.

Psalms 21:11 Though they plot evil against you and devise wicked schemes, they cannot succeed.

“There’s so much pressure about people having negative connotations on you guys, but those words cannot pierce through,” Amihere said, offering her interpretation of the Scripture. “Because if you’re meant to do something, you’re gonna do it.

“… Hopefully, it goes through to them.”

Looking back on the 2023 Final Four with a year’s worth of hindsight, Raven has a refreshed perspective.

“I think that was the best thing that ever happened to me,” she said. “Life gets you here, life gets you down, life gets you high, low. I just say it’s how you handle it.

“And I think I handled it very well.”