Why this season could be the best coaching job of Dawn Staley’s career

How does a South Carolina team that lost five players to the WNBA last year — including three first-round draft picks — not just stay great, but go 36-0? Of course, Staley is a huge reason.

by Jonathan Tannenwald

Published April 5, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET

CLEVELAND — In this era of stars in women’s college basketball, South Carolina certainly has them.

Kamilla Cardoso is a dominant post player. Te-Hina Paopao is a great three-point shooter. MiLaysia Fulwiley is yet another freshman phenom.

So why are the Gamecocks, the unquestioned best team in the country, not seen in the same light as the rest of the women’s Final Four?

There might be a few reasons for that, including the dominance of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and Connecticut’s Paige Bueckers and the red-hot rise of N.C. State’s Aziaha James.

But there’s another person who speaks to just how elite South Carolina is, and why it remains the favorite to win a third national championship in seven years.

And she speaks in a North Philly accent, one that’s as immediately recognizable as ever.

Of course Dawn Staley is that reason, as she’s been for so long. Her presence is magnetic for everyone in the sport, from players to fellow coaches to media and fans.

‘The core value and the standard’

How does a team that lost five players to the WNBA last year — including three first-round draft picks — not just stay great, but go 36-0 this season? With nine wins over ranked teams? And in the ever-mighty SEC?

It has to be one of the great feats of Staley’s 24 years in coaching. But, perhaps surprisingly, Staley doesn’t see it that way.

“I think I’ve been consistent with how I approach things: I don’t change the core value and the standard,” she said Thursday, a day when she swept the Associated Press and Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s coach of the year awards.

“Personnel comes and it goes, and it’s different,” Staley continued. “And if I changed the way I coached every single year that I have something different, you’re figuring it out on the run. I know what different teams need. I know what different individuals need, and I start with the individual; I don’t start with the team.”

If Staley wouldn’t say it, plenty of other people in town jumped at the chance.

“It’s unbelievably impressive what she’s been able to do this season,” said ESPN analyst Andraya Carter, not just one of the stars of the network’s studio coverage but a former Tennessee player who faced Staley’s squads from 2012 to 2016.

Added Carter: “The buy-in from players that came in early and didn’t play a minute last season, that now have big roles. From freshmen, from veterans that transfer in that accept their roles. Her ability to get this team, all with new roles, on the same page is one of the greatest coaching jobs.”

The main thing

Carter’s colleague, Carolyn Peck, brought further perspective. In 1999 at Purdue, she became the first Black female coach to win a Division I hoops title, and she was that club’s only member until Staley joined it in 2017.

“They are able to see how, one, she develops players,” Peck said. “Number two, she is very up-front about being honest with them, and I think that’s what players want now. She also is a team builder and understands that when you come to South Carolina, you will get yours as the rest of the team gets theirs.”

Simplicity sells, even in a complicated age.

“She says it all the time: ‘Make the main thing, the main thing,’” Peck said. “And she allows them to also be themselves. I think that that’s huge.”

Paopao praised Staley for exactly that at South Carolina’s team news conference on Thursday ahead of its matchup Friday with the Wolfpack (7 p.m., ESPN), where those two and junior guard Bree Hall shared the podium.

“I think she’s done a great job adjusting to us,” Paopao said, which caused Staley to nod in a way that looked simultaneously approving and disapproving. So let’s just call it agreement.

“As a group, we’re, like, crazy,” Paopao said. “She describes us as day care, and I completely agree with that.”

The top of a wave

But the players know how influential Staley has been.

“A lot of people don’t realize about her, that she just pours into our life so much,” Paopao said. “She’s done a great job adjusting to us. And we’re just going to keep being who we are and just being the fun, crazy group that she loves.”

Staley, in turn, sees how her team has “created a bond” that “wasn’t forced by the coaching staff.”

It wasn’t the way Staley is used to, but it’s another sign of her coaching acumen that she has embraced.

“Obviously, we’d like to be a lot more disciplined, and we’d like to adhere to the standards that we’ve had throughout the years that we’ve been successful,” she said. “And we found success in that correlation. And then this team pretty much blows up all of that in one summer, and they figure out a way to work together.”

Here they all are, then, having already accomplished something special and now two wins away from immortality.

“It’s like I’m riding a wave,” Staley said, “and they are making the waves, and I’m just trying not to get in the way.”