Dawn Staley’s Uncommon Journey
Coach Dawn Staley has just released her eagerly awaited memoir, Uncommon Favor: Basketball, North Philly, My Mother and the Life Lessons I Learned from All Three. We can’t wait to read it. We have so much respect for Coach Staley and all she has accomplished, both on and off the court. Here’s a selection from our efforts to capture some of those achievements.
On a September afternoon in Springfield, Massachusetts, Dawn Staley stepped to the microphone to remark on her enshrinement into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, class of 2013. Flanked by fellow stars Teresa Edwards and Katrina McClain, she described the honor of carrying the U.S. flag in the 2004 Olympics. She also invoked the many people who had influenced her during her career—the boys at the Raymond Rosen housing project in North Philadelphia, who gave her no quarter; coach Debbie Ryan at the University of Virginia, who introduced her to the world beyond the Philly courts; coach Tara VanDerveer, who taught the extraordinarily talented members of the 1996 Olympic team how to lean on each other; her mother, Estelle, who always stood at her side.
But the speech ranged well beyond nostalgia for a remarkable career. Staley also thanked two athletic directors—Dave O’Brien at Temple, who had encouraged her to try her hand at coaching, and Eric Hyman, who convinced her to leave Philadelphia to coach the University of South Carolina Gamecocks. No longer the skilled young player who learned from others, she was now the teacher and coach, nurturing new generations of women. “I knew I had made the right decision to coach when I started to care more about my players than the win,” she said.
Not that she was done with winning. She concluded with a promise to her South Carolina players. “Stick with me. We’ll be national champs.”
Staley would become not only an outstanding coach, but a prominent example of Black female resolve. When she took the South Carolina job in 2008 she assumed plenty of responsibilities, among them the need to build a team largely from scratch and to navigate the fraught racial divides of a Southern state and its privileged, predominantly white flagship university. But South Carolina was a top-tier school in the venerable Southeastern Conference (SEC), with an athletics department eager to invest in a women’s team. She could see the possibilities, and she believed in challenges. “Sometimes you have to take steps that make you uncomfortable, to understand where you are and where you want to be,” she later explained.
There were also plenty of people ready to welcome her. “I was always a fan,” recalled Britanna Wilson. “But then when Dawn Staley came aboard, it was different. And I went up to her when she first came, not even realizing that she didn’t really know me, and I just put my hands on her shoulder. I was like, ‘I’m so glad you are here.’”
Staley approached coaching with the same focus and tenacity that had fueled her playing career. She connected with her players on multiple levels, guiding them step-by-step through the physical and mental process of growing from talented recruits into major contributors. “She sees the best in everybody, and she’s able to enhance what they do and take them to the next level,” explained Debbie Ryan, who had coached Staley at Virginia. Staley also helped players understand how their specific talents fit into her vision of team play, a strategy that centered more on defense than individual scoring.
Step by step she put together a powerhouse team, attracting top talent from South Carolina and nearby North Carolina as well as elsewhere in the country. In 2014, she convinced the nation’s top recruit, Columbia native A’ja Wilson, to join the Gamecocks. That next year’s team delivered the best results yet – winning the SEC tournament title and reaching the Final Four.
The combination of a winning program and Staley’s extensive outreach began to build a strong women’s basketball culture at the school and in surrounding communities. “I think one of the first things Dawn did was really get out into the community, letting them know more about the program and getting herself out there, getting her coaches out there,” noted longtime fan Nessie Harris. “And then when she started bringing those players in, the excitement just took off.”
Attendance by “FAMS”—as Staley called her team’s fans—told the story. In 2013-14, the team averaged 6,371 fans a game. A year later, the Gamecocks nearly doubled that number to 12,293 and knocked Tennessee out of the top attendance spot, which the Lady Vols had held since the early 2000s. The next year, Gamecock attendance rose again, to 14,364, which included frequent sellouts of 18,000-seat Colonial Life Arena.
In 2017, the Gamecocks made good on Staley’s Hall of Fame promise and brought home the national championship.
It was Staley’s first national title—the closest she had gotten as a college or professional player was an overtime loss to Tennessee in the 1991 NCAA championship. She wore her victory net around her neck for more than a month. But then she cut it into pieces. Two years earlier, Carolyn Peck, the Purdue coach who became the first Black woman to coach her team to a title, had sent Staley a piece of her 1999 championship net, urging her to keep up the tradition. “When you think about the battles that Marian Washington, Marianna Freeman and coach C. Vivian Stringer have been through . . . they did it for the love of the game and the opportunities that they provided for us,” Peck later said. “There are plenty of other young coaches that are watching what Dawn Staley did and that gives them energy. It gives them motivation that they’ll do it too.”
Staley did as Peck asked—and more. She mailed pieces of her net to every Division I Black female coach. “I struggled to pick just one other coach,” she told them. “I don’t want to count Black women as National Championship coaches by one every few decades; I want us to do it so often we lose count!”
Photos: Dawn Staley by Barbara Lau; A’ja Wilson, Tiffany Mitchell and Rebekah Dalman by Richard Shiro; 2024 national championship celebration by Morry Gash.
