Maryland basketball agrees to a two-year series with defending champion South Carolina

The Maryland women’s basketball team will play defending national champion South Carolina at Xfinity Center in November, the team announced Thursday.

The Gamecocks will visit College Park on Nov. 13, the first of a two-year series between the teams that will continue with a game in Columbia, South Carolina, in November 2018.

“This is a great series for our team and for our program,” coach Brenda Frese said. “We want to play the best and we want to give our fans the opportunity to watch the best basketball in the country.”

South Carolina beat Mississippi State, 67-55, to win the program’s first NCAA title earlier this month. The Gamecocks also won their third consecutive SEC tournament in 2017 and finished with a 33-4 record.

Maryland’s lone meeting with the Gamecocks was in 1997, a 74-60 Terps victory.

It will be the second straight year Maryland hosts the defending national champions, having lost to UConn, 87-81, in College Park last December.

Maryland will play the Huskies again next year, traveling to Connecticut for the final game of a three-year contract the teams agreed to before the 2015 season. Mississippi State snapped the Huskies record-setting 111-game winning streak with a 66-64 overtime win in the Final Four, ending UConn’s hunt for a fifth consecutive national crown.

The Terps’ regular-season strength of schedule ranked 128^th in the country in 2016-17, causing a disparity between their top-five rankings in polls, No. 16-ranking in RPI and No. 3-seed in the NCAA tournament.

The Terps went 32-3 last year, winning a share of their third straight Big Ten regular-season title with a 15-1 conference record and clinching their third Big Ten tournament in a row.

Maryland’s season ended in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in the Sweet 16 with a 77-63 loss to No. 10-seed Oregon.