Two black head coaches will face each other in the SEC women’s basketball tournament title game for the first time with Dawn Staley and Joni Taylor

The final of the SEC women’s tournament on Sunday, between South Carolina’s runner-up and Georgia’s runner-up, will mark the first time that two black coaches have faced each other in the conference championship game.

The Gamecocks’ Dawn Staley will compete for her sixth SEC tournament title, having won in 2015, ’16, ’17, ’18 and ’20. Georgia’s Joni Taylor will go after her first; it would be the fifth for the Bulldogs, with the previous four under coach Andy Landers. Taylor was named coach of the year in 2021 on Tuesday.

It will also be the first final of a black women’s coach conference at any of the current Power Five conferences. The ACC women’s tournament dates from 1978, the SEC to 1980, the Big Ten to 1995, the Big 12 to 1997 and the Pac-12 (formerly Pac-10) to 2002.

Along with Staley, the black head coaches who won women’s league tournament championships between the current Power Five conferences are Carolyn Peck, who won the Big Ten in 1998 and 99 with Purdue, and Cynthia Cooper-Dyke, who won the Pac-12 in 2014 with Southern Cal.

Kansas coach Marian Washington won the Big Eight women’s tournament championship six times between 1979-93, before the league merged with the Southwest Conference to form the Big 12 for the 1996-97 season. Rutgers coach C. Vivian Stringer won the Big East tournament title in 2007, when that league was considered one of the major conferences. Stringer, whose number 24 Scarlet Knights is third in the Big Ten tournament, and Washington, who retired in 2004, are two of the most successful black coaches in the history of college hoops. Stringer is in the Naismith Hall of Fame, and both she and Washington are in the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.

The final of the SEC women’s tournament in Greenville, South Carolina, will be at 2:00 pm Brasília time on ESPN2. If Georgia wins, Taylor, who played for Alabama, would be the second ex-SEC player to win the league tournament as a head coach. Holly Warlick, who played for Lady Vols, won as a Tennessee coach in 2014.

Three other former female SEC players made it to the SEC final as head coaches, but did not win the title: Carol Ross of Florida (played for Ole Miss), Pokey Chatman of LSU (played for LSU) and Nikki Fargas of LSU (played Tennessee).