Tiffany Mitchell

Classroom

Tiffany Mitchell has among the highest GPAs on the team at 3.602 and has been a great example for younger players in learning how to balance academics with their athletics demands. She works well with her professors around her various team-related absences, staying on top of her assignments at all times. Mitchell was a 2014-15 CoSIDA Academic All-District selection, routinely making the Dean’s List and the SEC Winter Sports Academic Honor Roll.

Character

Mitchell always had had a solid internal sense of herself with outstanding character at its core. She consistently models her excellent character, and as her role on the team expanded during her sophomore year, she developed into a leader by example. In her junior season, she began to embrace a more outward leadership role, organizing her teammates on and off the floor. Mitchell has not lost her humor, her quickness to laugh or her penchant for mischief, but there is now also a maturity and a gravity to her that makes both her and her teammates better players and even better people.

Community

Mitchell does a good job of incorporating community service into her crowded schedule. In addition to the service she performs through her sorority, she also speaks at local elementary schools and has been involved with the Special Olympics and Relay for Life. The best part about Mitchell’s service is not the volume of hours but her complete investment in the people she is helping. Her infectious, playful personality is engaging, and she never loses track of the personal connection in the time she spends with people.

Competition

Mitchell is the most decorated women’s basketball player in Gamecock history during the program’s most successful era. A two-time All-American, she became the program’s first SEC Player of the Year as a sophomore and repeated the feat as a junior as the first woman to earn the award outright in back-to-back years since 2005 and 2006. In 2014-15, she became the first Gamecock to be named a finalist for all three national player of the year awards—the Naismith Trophy, Wooden Award and Wade Trophy—and earned the Dawn Staley Award as the best guard in the nation. Tiffany reached the 1,000-point plateau for her career, becoming one of just 19 Gamecocks all-time to do so while also amassing at least 200 career assists. In powering South Carolina to its first NCAA Final Four, she averaged 14.2 points and 4.2 assists in the 2015 NCAA Tournament. As a junior, she scored in double figures a team-high 30 times and ranked sixth in the SEC in scoring, second in field-goal percentage, third in free-throw percentage and 10th in assists. Her field-goal and free-throw percentages were both among the top 50 in the nation. This year, Mitchell is a Naismith Trophy semifinalist, Wooden Award finalist, ESPN All-America Third Team and All-SEC First Team.