WNBA Legend Dawn Staley

WINNING CHAMPIONSHI PS AND MENTORING THE FUTURE OF WOMEN’S HOOPS

BY HOWARD MEGDAL

There’s a very shortlist of people who have won two NCAA women’s basketball championships as head coaches: UConn’s Geno Auriemma, Tennessee’s Pat Summitt, Notre Dame’s Muffet McGraw, USC’s Linda Sharp and South Carolina’s Dawn Staley.

While Dawn Staley is part of that group, her legacy is already reaching well beyond a stat that she acknowledged wasn’t on her radar. Instead, thinking about what’s next is what drives Staley. From her tenure as head coach for USA Basketball’s 2020 gold-medal winning national team to her South Carolina Gamecocks, now defending champs and eyeing that rare thing, a back-to-back set of titles, she’s a leader of women’s basketball in virtually every measurable way. Staley makes it a point to enjoy it all a little more now with this level of success and the wisdom that comes with it.

“I'm just still very much in it,” Staley said in that May interview. “As I get older, I'm starting to enjoy the journey a lot more than when I was younger. When you're young, you always think you’ve got time. You always think it could happen. And then when you get older, you realize how hard it is. And you realize that these things don't come by very often.”

It’s notable how different, from the outside, Staley’s two South Carolina titles are. In 2017,the Connecticut Huskies were the overwhelming favorites to win it all. South Carolina was relegated to a sideline story, even with the best player in the country in then-junior A’ja Wilson, and especially after fellow future WNBA big Alaina Coates was lost for the season due to injury. But the Huskies fell to Mississippi State in the national semifinals, and two days later, Staley’s Gamecocks beat Vic Schaefer’s Bulldogs to win it all.

"WHEN YOU'RE YOUNG, YOU ALWAYS THINK YOU’VE GOT TIME. YOU ALWAYS THINK IT COULD HAPPEN. AND THEN WHEN YOU GET OLDER, YOU REALIZE HOW HARD IT IS. AND YOU REALIZE THAT THESE THINGS DON'T COME BY VERY OFTEN.”

DAWN STALEY

“That 2017 team, we had the talent, but it took us a while to get the chemistry and really understand how to play together,” Staley explained. “And then you fast forward to 2022 when we had the talent, we had chemistry, we had the desire, we had the adversity, we had all of those things and those young ladies wouldn't be denied. So I mean, they give you some incredible experiences that are just that special.”

The thing about Staley isn’t so much that she succeeds herself; it’s that she’s always bringing everyone along for the ride. The night her Gamecocks won, and relatively easily, over Auriemma’s Huskies — their first championship meeting and the first time in 12 tries anyone has beaten UConn in a title game — Staley’s point guard, Destanni Henderson, rose to the occasion, scoring 27 points and dominating the game.

Several WNBA talent evaluators believe it helped her get drafted by the Indiana Fever, who utilized her often during her rookie season. That night, sitting in a room surrounded by reporters, Henderson considered Staley's impact on her life.

“I feel like it was a journey that led me to this moment,” Henderson said from the winners’ podium in Minneapolis. “I feel like she just — again, it was easy to trust her. It was easy to trust the process. I had to believe and had to buy into my role, and I feel like it was really worth it. She's a great coach. You just really have to buy in and trust the process and great things will happen for you.”

Head coach Dawn Staley of the South Carolina Gamecocks reacts during the national championship trophy presentation after defeating the UConn Huskies 64-49.

Brittney Griner #15 and head coach Dawn Staley of Team United States celebrate a win against Team Australia during the second half of a Women's Basketball Quarterfinals game at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.

Staley often describes herself as a “dream merchant,” so I asked her what that meant to her during our conversation. “It's my job to be their dream merchant to get them there,” Staley said. “And then, not just getting there because they came here with the potential, the talent and potential, they came to South Carolina with it. I'm not pulling credit for any of that. But what I will take credit for, and that's our entire staff, is for staying power. Getting here and staying here because that's hard.”

That’s just what her South Carolina team did in 2022, a preseason number one that never relented, never lost that top spot and finished their season by hoisting trophies into the air in front of their delirious fans at the Target Center in early April.

She said her team doesn’t really understand their place in history yet, and she’s too busy to spend time thinking about it just yet, either. She does, however, love what success has allowed her to do — to speak on what matters to her, and have it amplified. She’s noticed what winning does for how loud the volume gets when she weighs in on the matters of social conscience — but points out that it is her social conscience. It isn’t about matching her words to a moment to be noticed.

“I'm only doing what feels natural for me to do,” Staley said. “Like, it's not unnatural for me to speak on certain things. I think it's a natural progression in the game for coaches who are successful.”

But what Staley is changing is the paradigm of which coaches get to speak on what. Geno Auriemma, she pointed out, gets asked all the women’s basketball questions. C. Vivian Stringer, the recently retired Black head coach of Rutgers? Staley noted Stringer’s questions were more narrowly tailored to issues of race. Her profile is different; she points out.

“I'm in a space of … taking the temperature of our game, and where we can go with it, and also the Black coaches, or the Black issue thing,” Staley said. “So I'm in a space that not very many coaches have been … but it's still very natural. I don't say things for the good clicks, or to get likes. I'm only speaking from my experience.”

An experience unlike any other seems to call for a full-circle moment. There’s a ton of conversation about the WNBA, a league Staley dominated in her playing days, and no team in her hometown of Philadelphia, where she is revered. Would she consider an ownership stake in a Philly expansion team?

“That's a cool question,” she said. “Yeah, actually, that I would because, you know, the game has given so much to me.”

These days, it is less a question of what Dawn Staley can do and more about where and how she wants to succeed. Wherever it happens, she brings everyone she can along with her. But it’s no longer limited to where Staley can be found. Her impact travels wherever there are people she’s guided to their dreams.

A few weeks after that title win, I stood with Destanni Henderson, now on the floor at Barclays Center, a young professional point guard with the Fever preparing for her game. Henderson said she hears Staley’s voice whenever she takes the court.

“A lot of the things she taught me, I’ve been applying to these games,” Henderson said. “I can’t thank her enough for molding me into the player I am today.”

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