The Routine Before the Routine
Every team has a pregame ritual. South Carolina’s is more unusual than most.
Twenty minutes before every tipoff, the Gamecocks’ forwards drift toward midcourt — not for extra shooting, not for defensive walkthroughs, but to play volleyball. With a basketball. In a gym built for an entirely different sport.
It is, by any measure, a strange sight. It is also, by the account of everyone involved, one of the most important twenty minutes of their day.
The origin story is appropriately murky for something that grew organically. After an informal poll of the participants, the consensus points to Adhel Tac as the likely founder — though Tac, sidelined since February with an injury and unavailable for comment, cannot confirm or deny her place in pregame volleyball history. Joyce Edwards and Maryam Dauda believe they were doing it occasionally as far back as last season. When Tac pushed for it to become an every-game tradition this year, it stuck. Madina Okot, who joined the program last offseason, arrived to find it already established.
“I’m new here, so I just found them doing that, and I joined in,” Okot said. “I like it. I’m enjoying doing that.”
Culture in the Strangest Places
When Alicia Tournebize arrived in January as a mid-season addition, the volleyball circle was among the first things she encountered as a Gamecock. For someone stepping into a new program mid-year, it could have been an awkward moment — an insider’s tradition she wasn’t sure how to approach.
Instead, it worked exactly the way good team culture is supposed to work. She was immediately welcomed in, no questions asked.
“When I came here, I was like, oh, okay, they warm up like this. Okay, no problem. But it’s a good way to warm up, too,” Tournebize said. “I feel like it’s fun and it allows us to connect together in a different way, so it’s good.”
That observation — connect in a different way — is the most revealing thing anyone said about the tradition. The volleyball circle isn’t just physical preparation. It is relational preparation. It creates laughter, competition, and shared experience in the twenty minutes before the intensity of a game takes over. For a team built on collective identity rather than individual stars, that kind of informal bonding is not incidental to the culture. It is part of its foundation.
The physical overlap between basketball and volleyball also makes the drill functionally useful — height, wingspan, and quick feet translate cleanly between the two sports. But the volleyball circle clearly serves a purpose that goes beyond athleticism.
The Hierarchy Nobody Disputes
Of course, a drill involving competitive athletes in close proximity is not going to stay gentle for long. Within the volleyball circle, a pecking order has emerged — one that its participants are happy to litigate at length.
Okot’s credentials are legitimate. She grew up in Kenya playing volleyball before basketball became her primary sport. She arrived at this tradition not as a basketball player dabbling in volleyball, but as someone for whom volleyball was the original game.
Edwards’ credentials are equally serious. A three-sport star at Camden High School who played basketball, volleyball, and soccer, she earned all-state recognition in volleyball specifically. She is not someone who stumbled into this drill without a foundation.
Okot confidently declared herself the best volleyball player in the circle. Edwards was having none of it.
“Madina thinks she’s the best volleyball player, but I am the best volleyball player,” Edwards said, with the confidence of someone who has the résumé to back the claim.
The debate remains unresolved. It may never be resolved. That is probably by design.
“When you see us doing that,” Okot said diplomatically, “you’re able to tell who played volleyball before and who did not.”
The Honest Assessment of Maryam Dauda
And then there is Maryam Dauda.
To her credit, Dauda has not attempted to misrepresent her volleyball abilities. Her relationship with the sport has been straightforward and consistently negative since the moment she was introduced to it.
“I only played one year in eighth grade, and I hated it,” she said. “I never wanted to touch a volleyball again.”
She has technically honored that commitment — the pregame drill uses a basketball, not a volleyball, leaving her middle school pledge technically intact. It is a loophole that speaks to both her commitment to her teammates and her creative accounting.
Her teammates, for their part, have not extended her the courtesy of polite silence on the subject.
“Maryam, Lord bless her, sometimes she’ll be struggling,” Edwards said. “But she is trying.”
Okot offered a slightly more measured assessment: “I feel like she had a little bit of skills in volleyball but she didn’t keep it up. She looks like sometimes she doesn’t have fun doing that.”
Dauda confirmed the accuracy of all of it without hesitation. What she lacks in volleyball aptitude, she has made up for entirely in self-awareness — and in the kind of cheerful, unguarded willingness to be the butt of a joke that is itself a reflection of how comfortable this group is with each other.
Her contribution to the circle, as she sees it, is specific and valuable.
“I’m good at tipping the pass up at you,” she said. “But I’m not a volleyball player. … Not me.”
Tournebize, who came in with no volleyball background either, at least had the cover of being new. She acknowledged — somewhat theatrically — that she would need “many years” of practice to reach the level of Okot and Edwards.
“Yeah. Okay. That’s fair,” she said, pretending to be insulted. “You can tell, like, just like seeing that they’re good. They’re good.”
What the Volleyball Circle Actually Is
It would be easy to file this story under quirky sports feature and move on. But the volleyball circle is worth examining for what it actually represents within the context of what Dawn Staley has built in Columbia.
South Carolina is not a program held together by one transcendent talent. It is a program held together by genuine collective investment — players who, by every available account, actually like each other, trust each other, and find ways to reinforce that trust in environments far removed from the scoreboard. The pregame volleyball circle is one of those environments. Nobody assigned it. Nobody scripted it. It grew because it worked, because it made people laugh, because it created twenty minutes every game day that belonged entirely to the group.
That Dauda — who openly hates volleyball and has hated it since the eighth grade — shows up and tips the pass up at you anyway, says something real about what membership in this program means. You do your part. Even the part you’re bad at.
Especially that part.
