John Chaney’s legacy extends deep into women’s basketball | Mike Jensen

Words that complete a circle: A Hall of Fame coach remembering how she got started, barely out of college, head coach at Cheyney State, when a season later this other coach drove down Route 1 from Philadelphia, taking over as Cheyney’s men’s coach, planting himself into her life, staying put for almost 49 years.

“His style became my own,’' Vivian Stringer wrote to the world the other day, releasing her thoughts for all of us who had asked for them after the death of John Chaney. “We thought alike. We taught alike. We practiced alike.”

When Chaney died on Jan. 29, you quickly sent messages up to Rutgers and down to South Carolina, and didn’t hear back right away. That was expected. Not just because the women’s basketball coaches at Rutgers and South Carolina are busy people.

For these two women, Vivian Stringer at Rutgers and Dawn Staley at South Carolina, this was absolutely a death in the family.

For Stringer, losing an older brother. For Staley, who never coached a game before sharing gym time with Chaney at Temple, maybe more of an uncle. The significance of this loss, and the presence of this one man in both their lives … it’s mind-boggling.

Consider this: The two most successful Black women’s college basketball coaches in history, no debate … Vivian Stringer, fifth-winningest Division I coach of all time, who has taken Cheyney State and then Iowa and finally Rutgers to the Final Four, and Dawn Staley, NCAA champion coach and now USA Olympic coach, in charge of the current No. 1 team in the nation, facing Connecticut on Monday night … both got started alongside John Chaney.

If you’re tempted to chalk this up to cool coincidence … not so fast.

In homage, Stringer began about 1,000 words of clear, concise thoughts with the Oscar Wilde quote about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, explaining whom she had most strived to imitate and emulate for the last 48 years.

Not a person, the person.

“Both epic and enlightening,” Stringer wrote of their hours of conversations.

You knew this from covering Chaney at Temple. The bond with Stringer, probably the most important with another coach of his own career, never broke. You heard about the time Chaney decided to film a practice, how Temple’s coach kept saying “she” and “her” moving pieces around the basketball court even when his Owls players were the pieces being moved, how at the end of early-morning practice, a Rutgers women’s assistant came in and picked up the video.

For Staley, coming along later on, the instant respect she got from the already legendary men’s coach at Temple … if you think that happens everywhere, it does not. Chaney’s desire to treat women’s hoops as an equal did not go unnoticed. At one point, maybe during the winter break when Chaney practices could seem to exceed the hours in a day, men’s players would ask in advance for any Owls women’s players in their own locker room to come out to the court, since the sight of a women’s player would cause Chaney to stop his own practice on a dime.

Leaving personal money on the table from an apparel deal so the women would get their share? Sure.

In 2017, Staley was in town to get the John Wanamaker Award after her Gamecocks won the NCAA title. Chaney was receiving a lifetime achievement award. They were together before the award ceremony, then each talked about the other to the gathering.

Chaney spoke that day in the Crystal Tea Room at the top of the Wanamaker building about how his summer basketball camp with Sonny Hill was one of the first to have boys and girls, pointing out that it was an overnight camp, which worried them: “We managed to get through it without a lawsuit. "

He talked of some of the other great local women’s players such as Yolanda Laney and Marilyn Stephens, said the counselors would take on the girls, how, in his memory, Staley was already a handful, first time he saw her, this little guard from the Raymond Rosen Projects. “Foul her, foul her,’' Chaney remembers yelling. “You’ve got to stop her some kind of way.”

You get to a point in life when you’re somewhat successful, Chaney then said, and you forget the things that got you there.

“She never forgot,’' Chaney said. “Never. "

And it’s been a rare conversation with Staley in recent years when the name Chaney didn’t come up. The day after South Carolina won the 2017 title, an arrangement of flowers was delivered to the women’s basketball office, the roses in the prominent spot in the basketball lobby, from a man in Philadelphia.

“You done good! So proud of you!” was the message from Chaney, who said this was a trade, “Flowers for a cap for me. " He added a P.S. from Temple’s retired basketball secretary Essie Davis, who loved Staley’s “fierce red heels. "

The next day, standing outside that lobby, those flowers visible, Staley told how Chaney used to wander by her Temple practices and all of a sudden he was putting in a press break, taking half an hour. That break? She still uses it. Put the point guard in the worst spot on the floor to bait the defenders, then go another way.

She always talked about how Chaney raised her as a coach. “He gave an example of how you put your team in a position to win. "

That relationship, as special as it was, was probably No. 2 in impact.

“Coach Chaney arrived at Cheyney State a year after me, in 1972,’' Stringer wrote in her remembrance, explaining that Chaney was the first coach, “male or female” who took the time to teach and mentor her, breaking the game down to its finest points. She’d study his practice tapes “and would try to finish his sentences.”

In the gym, they often practiced together, combining the whole thing.

“One day, I would lecture both teams, and other days he would lecture both teams,’' Stringer wrote.

Ten years together, before Chaney left for Temple and a year later Stringer took the Iowa job. Speaking up for causes? Stringer saw it up-close before most of the world knew the name Chaney.

“John didn’t just say inspirational things, he did inspirational things on a daily basis, whether the cameras were on or off,” Stringer wrote about how she saw her friend take heat for causes greater than himself, how he always commanded all the attention in a room, how his career in basketball hadn’t been “an easy nor smooth one.”

(Kindred spirit? A four-sport college athlete at Slippery Rock, Stringer once had sued her school district in high school because she wasn’t being allowed to be a cheerleader because of her race.)

There was no decision in her coaching career, Stringer explained, that she ever made without discussing it with Chaney.

“John set the bar high,” Stringer wrote. “I accepted the challenge to follow in his footstep ...”

Now 1,046 wins in, Stringer used the words “forever indebted to him.”

The combined impact, and the hole left even in women’s basketball … as much as Chaney’s own achievements — again, it’s mind-boggling. It’s one thing to say from the outside that certain doors need to be opened. Chaney was the guy at the door, demanding these women, future Hall of Famers themselves, come right in and sit next to him.

Friday, speaking on a USA Basketball media Zoom call, Staley was asked about Chaney.

“A lot of people when someone passes, ’Rest in Peace,’” Staley said. “A lot of people texted me and they were like, ‘May he Rest in Peace.’ And I said, ‘Heaven won’t get off that easy.’”

Nothing John Chaney did was peaceful, Staley added. “Because he had to make an impact. Doing it peacefully wasn’t his way.”

Nope, never was. That message, as much as any, impacted these women who paid close attention.

“I hope his family knows,” Stringer wrote, “I am forever indebted to him for all that he instilled in me.”