Throughout the season, South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley shared her thoughts with The Undefeated, narrating a season that was unlike any other in college basketball history. In this edition, Staley discusses the importance of having two black coaches in the Final Four, his team’s battle against adversity in the NCAA tournament bubble and keeping Gamecocks on their way to winning a national championship.
‘We are making them talk about us‘
I want to be intentional about what I would like to see. Making history alongside [Arizona head coach] Postponing Barnes was something that crossed my mind – an advance that I hoped would happen in this tournament.
It is nothing against other coaches. We have seen them dominating this stage for years. What happens is that it seems that they are the only ones who can get here, they are the best coaches. They are the best representation of our game. When players only see Geno [Auriemma], and they only see Kim [Mulkey], or they only see Tara [VanDerveer] – if you look at the history of our game, these three coaches make up many of the appearances in Final Four. If that’s all you see, you can take a black child who lives to go to the Final Four and win a national championship, these are the only three schools that dominated the appearances in the Final Four.
Now, you change the narrative a little bit. I’m here, now Adia is here.
The plot will be: two black women, two former WNBA players, took their teams to the Final Four. It looks very different from any other Final Four in the history of our game. This is powerful. Representation is important.
I want to celebrate all the black women head coaches in the game today. I want to celebrate Coach Mox [Missouri State head coach Amaka Agugua-Hamilton] for getting up and making a controversial move not to play in the MVC tournament because she didn’t want to put her program in a place where they couldn’t get to Sweet 16. She knew that if they played well enough, they could get to a place where they could make history. [Ole Miss] Coach Yo [Yolett McPhee-McCuin] put her team on the map for being in the WNIT final. See Wright’s status and Katrina Merriweather. Katrina got a job in Memphis because of her performance in the NCAA tournament and beyond. What Joni [Taylor] did in Georgia, what SEC coaches did. See Adia and the work she did in Arizona. There are incredible stories all over college basketball.
We have a group chat of coaches of women of color who, whenever one of us does something, we have a topic where we congratulate ourselves for our success. We have to, we have to stand up to each other in this way, because people don’t lift us up in general. We get them to lift us up. We are making the narrative writers, the decision makers, we are making them talk about us because we are on the biggest stage of college women’s basketball.
The fact that it’s happening now makes it bigger, and it’s bigger than basketball. I hope, with these opportunities, we will see more black women in these positions, because when you give an opportunity, you see what happens. With each success, we rewrite the narrative and give hope to other black coaches out there trying to get rid of the label of only ‘recruiters’.
When people talk about black coaches, they often don’t talk about our real ability to coach and to be great coaches. The adjectives used for white coaches are different from the adjectives used for black coaches to describe them, their teams and their style of play.
For me, in particular, people talk about offense. ‘Our offense stops. Our offense doesn’t know what you’re doing. ‘You can watch all the games in America, women and men. People plot against us, they have to plot against us. So, for someone to talk about offense, I let them talk because the results are there.
We are a colorful team, which means that we are not one-dimensional. We do not administer a system. I do not manage a system. I didn’t grow up in the game running a system. Who at WNBA runs a system? Nobody. We look for incompatibilities.
So, I’m just going to follow what I’m good at, what I’ve been good at as a player. It worked well for me at the time and it is working well for me as a coach. So I don’t care what people say about our style of play. The proof is in the numbers, the proof is in the winning percentage.
‘And we’re not done‘
There is something about being dissatisfied with just getting there.
After our team defeated Texas at Elite Eight on Tuesday to advance to Final Four, Zia Cooke and I hugged each other on the central court. We hugged and she said, ‘And we’re not done yet.’ She didn’t say congratulations, she said, ‘And we’re not done yet.’ This is really cool for such a young person. I like to hear that. You know what it takes to win – to win the next game and the next. You know that it takes that kind of courage, that kind of knowledge, that kind of innocence of not knowing what’s in front of you. And you know what it took to get to that place. You need a little bit of both. If you let the expectations of victory appear in front of you, it can trigger something you don’t want, it can have a trickle effect by not letting them perform at their maximum level. It was comforting for me to hear that.
My feelings after the victory were just elation. I am very happy for our players. As coaches, you obviously want to be among the best and compete in a national championship, but reflect on the journey and on those who have been with you all season. Seeing their faces, our players, our coaches, our team – seeing their faces at that moment, is nothing more than pure joy. That is to see young people making their dreams come true. I did it as a player, twice as a coach. This is the first time. This is the first time that you have these raw and pure emotions. To sit and watch it for them, it is priceless.
One thing about this team, we are a resilient group. We’ve been like that all season. This team has been winning a national championship since last season. They had to deal with so much adversity. They had to deal with so much sacrifice that they were not going to let anything get in the way. We had a technical assistant who lost her mother while she was in that bubble. The other day, a player lost her uncle. They are family members, family-oriented people who, if we were not in this situation, would be at home. We would have flown them home and given them the opportunity to go home. But they said, ‘I’m going to stay here. I will compartmentalize. I will give you what I have. And then we will resume when we finish winning the national championship.
We are probably the epitome of compartmentalizers. We are incredibly strong people mentally. Athletes are just that. They have to be, because everyone has something going on. And if you can’t, if you don’t have enough mental strength to handle it, you’re going to break. You will break. We definitely had difficult conversations. But if we weren’t a united family, if we didn’t talk about the things that happen throughout the year, all those players and coaches would have gone home. They would have gone home in the blink of an eye. But they stayed. They stayed, and we helped them do that. But it is hard. It’s difficult.
I feel good where we are, in this mental space. You can see the focus on their faces. They just want to win. They feel very close to their goal and will do anything. You build for this place. You can’t just, as a team, not have gone through a few things and get here and have to deal with being in a hotel, 20 hours a day, and not feeling it. They are very focused on winning the national championship and nothing prevents that. They will not allow anything to get in the way of that. I will not allow anything to get in the way, in their way.