The return of the USC Trojans as a prime ladies’s basketball program within the nation seems to have some severe endurance as coach Lindsay Gottlieb and the Trojans picked up one other five-star recruit on Friday. Saniyah Corridor, the No. 2 prospect within the Class of 2026 on the Top247 recruiting rankings, introduced her determination to signal with USC going into her senior 12 months.
“I’d simply say it felt like dwelling,” Corridor stated throughout her announcement on ESPN. “All of my teammates, the women there are simply so enjoyable to be round. Undoubtedly Lindsay, simply the coaches there, they’ve excessive assist. However she’s positively there to assist me and I’ve constructed a relationship there and she or he’s an awesome coach.”
Corridor, a 6-foot-2 ahead, stars at SPIRE Academy in Ohio and not too long ago led USA Basketball’s U19 squad to a World Cup gold medal — incomes MVP honors in that match.
Now, she is going to make the transfer out to Los Angeles in 2026 to affix a loaded Trojans roster that features JuJu Watkins and Jazzy Davidson as fellow former five-star prospects on the Trojans roster. Whereas subsequent season might be a problem to stay on the prime with out Watkins as she recovers from a torn ACL, the 2026-27 USC group figures to be top-of-the-line within the nation.
USC was one of many dominant ladies’s basketball applications all through the Eighties and ’90s, with Cheryl Miller main the Trojans to 2 (then WCAA) nationwide titles in 1983 and 1984, after which Lisa Leslie persevering with the legacy of nice bigs in Southern California within the early ’90s. Nonetheless, after Leslie’s departure in 1994, USC spent almost three many years as an afterthought in ladies’s faculty basketball, making simply 5 match appearances in 27 years earlier than Lindsay Gottlieb took over.
Gottlieb has led the Trojans to a few straight match appearances, together with back-to-back Elite 8s as a 1-seed, and she or he’s began to carry stars again to the Galen Heart. Maintaining Watkins in L.A. made USC a vacation spot once more, they usually’ve parlayed that into Davidson and now Corridor, driving a wave of recruiting success that they hope can result in snapping their nationwide title drought quickly.