While the college basketball world was fixated on Dawn Staley’s blockbuster moves — the Jordan Lee transfer, the Oliviyah Edwards flip from Tennessee — South Carolina’s head coach was quietly working a recruitment that nobody saw coming. And she closed it in the most perfect setting imaginable.
The Visit That Changed Everything
The Justine Loubens recruitment didn’t begin with a viral commitment video or a breathless national recruiting report. It began with a plane ticket and a perfectly timed visit to Columbia, South Carolina.
Loubens visited Columbia in late February, during the week of the Missouri game — and it turned out to be a good week to be in town. South Carolina clinched a share of the SEC regular-season championship with a win over Ole Miss, and then won it outright against Missouri.
Think carefully about what Staley orchestrated here, whether intentionally or not. A young French professional basketball player, 18 years old, considering a leap across the Atlantic to compete in the most physically demanding women’s college basketball conference in the country — and her visit falls in a week where South Carolina clinches a championship. Not a regular-season win. A championship. Colonial Life Arena in championship mode, with one of the loudest and most passionate fanbases in the sport at full volume, celebrating something that most programs will never experience at all.
That’s not a campus visit. That’s a recruitment masterclass.
Who Staley Was Quietly Pursuing
Justine Loubens hails from L’Isle-Jourdain, France, and arrives with four years of eligibility beginning with the 2026-27 academic year. She was not a name that dominated recruiting Twitter or generated breathless countdown clocks. She was a professional player operating below the radar of most American recruiting analysts — precisely the kind of prospect that Staley’s increasingly international recruiting network is uniquely positioned to identify before anyone else does.
Most recently, Loubens played in France’s premier women’s professional league — the Ligue Féminine de BasketBall — with La Rouce Vendee, averaging 6.5 points and 2.5 rebounds while shooting 63.9% from the field across 24 games. In 2024-25, she played 22 games for Centre Federal BB Paris of France’s second-tier league, averaging 7.9 points, 2.3 rebounds and 1.5 steals per game.
She was not coming out of a high school gym. She was coming out of professional basketball, already hardened by competition levels that most 18-year-olds have never encountered.
The Alicia Tournebize Connection Was the Unlock
Understanding how Staley found Loubens requires understanding how she found Tournebize first. When Tournebize committed in December and joined the Gamecocks on January 1, Staley didn’t just add a 6-foot-7 center to her roster — she opened a direct pipeline into the French women’s basketball system. Tournebize and Loubens weren’t strangers. They were teammates, friends, and fellow competitors on France’s junior national teams. The two played off each other well at the U18 EuroBasket last summer, and their relationship predated any conversation about South Carolina.
The recruitment timeline almost certainly ran through that connection. Tournebize knew Loubens. Staley knew Tournebize. The network did the rest.
There is also a broader philosophy at play here that validates the entire strategy. Former Arkansas head coach Mike Neighbors articulated it memorably at SEC Tipoff: “I learned if you’re going to have one, you’d better have two or three. Because with one, they tend to feel lonely. You’d better have two or three.” Staley didn’t just recruit Loubens — she recruited her into a situation where she already had a teammate, a friend, and a fellow French professional player waiting for her in Columbia. The comfort factor was built into the pitch before the conversation even started.
The Signing — and Why Nobody Saw It Coming
By the time Loubens officially signed on April 29, the college basketball world had already moved on from South Carolina’s roster construction storyline. The big moves had been made. The rankings had been updated. The Gamecocks were sitting at No. 1 in The Athletic’s post-portal top 25 and were ESPN Bracketology’s top overall seed. Everyone assumed Staley was done.
It turned out that South Carolina wasn’t done recruiting after all.
The announcement landed quietly, without the fanfare of the Edwards commitment or the Lee signing. But the official statement from South Carolina Athletics made Staley’s evaluation of the 18-year-old unmistakably clear: “We’re excited to bring Justine into our Gamecock family. She is one of the best shooters coming out of France, and her experience playing for her club and national teams have helped prepare her for the SEC battles to come.”
The Bigger Picture
What makes this recruitment particularly revealing is not just who Loubens is — it’s how she was found, when she was brought to Columbia, and what Staley showed her when she arrived. A championship-clinching week. A program that had already successfully integrated one French professional player. A pre-existing friendship waiting in the locker room.
South Carolina is set to open the 2026-27 season on November 2 in Paris against Maryland, which means Loubens and Tournebize will make their homecoming together before the Gamecocks even play their first home game of the year. That detail didn’t happen accidentally either.
Nothing about this recruitment happened accidentally. That’s the point. While everyone else was watching the headlines, Dawn Staley was working the phones, building the network, and closing the deal that nobody knew was in progress — right there in plain sight, during a championship-clinching week in Columbia, South Carolina.
