Sapakoff: Dawn Staley’s diversity of Haley and USC reflects the difficult path ahead | South Carolina

The 2020 internship was set for a high-level display of extraordinary leadership skills. New Orleans and a likely second national championship for the South Carolina women’s basketball program first by Dawn Staley, and later Tokyo, where the former US Olympic team’s flag bearer would take a favorite American team to the medal of gold.

Coronavirus and the general reaction to George Floyd’s death on Memorial Day at the hands of the Minneapolis police changed all that.

Instead of engaging with powers like Oregon, UConn and Australia, Staley, who never gave up on an important fight, faced Donald Trump, Nikki Haley and even his own athletic department in South Carolina.

The 50-year-old Philadelphia native shouldn’t have to do the heavy lifting alone.

White coaches – in South Carolina and elsewhere in college and professional sports – should also speak up.

Higher.

The college’s athletic departments should have diversity meetings that include progress reports.

A month.

Meanwhile, Staley is clearly reinforcing an activist role. She is determined to see the words turning into action and is impatient. But she is finding that progress is still a difficult path.

Like most social change apps, this one starts at home. Staley last week in a Facebook Live appearance with The State newspaper in Columbia emphasized that she wanted “more people who looked like me in decision-making positions” at USC.

This is an expected refrain from an attentive black coach. Staley also pointed out that she is one of the two black coaches on the team (athletic trainer Curtis Frye is the other) and that there are two black administrators in the athletics department: Charles Waddell, special assistant to athletics director Ray Tanner; and Maria Hickman, Senior Associate Director of Athletics for Academics and Student Development and Director of Diversity.

But taking a look at Hickman’s professional qualifications, this was anything but typical of an active trainer in the same department.

“Do I think she’s doing a great job? Yes, ”said Staley. “I think she is well versed in diversity and inclusion? No. And I expressed that to her too. We need someone else who is knowledgeable in this to take our university and sports department to the next level. “

Staley has a bigger view.

“So I’m starting here in the athletics department at the University of South Carolina,” she said. “And I hope that from there we can branch out to our communities. And I hope that from there we can branch out into our state and be leaders and have model programs that others across the country can model and be successful in. ”

“I would never be a suit.”

Staley could probably run for governor and win.

But she knows her role, basketball coach. When I asked her last year about maybe eventually becoming a sports director, she shuddered at the idea of ​​corporate management.

“Never,” she said. “No. No, no, no. I’m not a suit. I would never be a suit.”

Not that Staley is afraid to do politics.

She defeated Trump in a Players Tribune first-person story about Floyd’s death published on June 1 and entitled “Black People Are Tired”.

“Trump is the president of the United States and, if he is not unifying,” she wrote, “he is not helping.”

Staley and Haley clashed on Twitter on July 8, after the former SC governor and UN ambassador tweeted support for Kelly Loeffler, a US senator from Georgia and co-owner of the WNBA Atlanta Dream. Loeffler was lobbying Dream to abandon plans to support Black Lives Matter.

Haley: “@KLoeffler’s pride in facing the crowd that wants sports to be about uniting people, not dividing people based on political agendas.”

Staley: “The final split is contained in this tweet. We must and we will win. “

Subtraction by division

Of course, hitting a president with more or less 50% support from Americans is not so unifying when you’re trying to unify.

In the same way that accusing a former division governor tends to cause division.

Unification and politics mix as well as garnet and orange.

A productive conversation about race rarely works well, Staley must know, in the open circular firing squad that is social media.

In addition, it would help if more people understood that TV “news” programs in the United States are entertainment productions based on maintaining an echo chamber or fueling point-to-counterpoint conflict.

The diversity of college sports remains a difficult path, more difficult with the financial conflicts related to the coronavirus that will force job and program cuts and limit hiring, perhaps over a period of several years.

Know that Dawn Staley has a proven ability to bring together a community and a state around her.

She made Haley, a Clemson graduate, a Gamecocks female basketball fan.

Their discussions (if not real friendship) were part of the basis for Haley’s decision to push the Confederacy flag from government property shortly after the 2015 Emanuel AME murders.

Just part of a past life facing challenges, adjusting and adjusting again.

Follow Gene Sapakoff on Twitter @sapakoff