With the benefit of a few months away, some perspective and a bit of rest, Dawn Staley can now say that last season was quite sweet for her Gamecocks.
“Now that I’ve been through it? Now that we’re on the other side?” Staley asks, grinning. “I thought it was great.”
This was the most successful South Carolina team she had ever coached. She’d led other championship squads, of course, but never one like this: It cruised to an undefeated record en route to the title. Only two games all year were decided by fewer than five points. But this group had been a profound test for the 54-year-old. None of its achievements felt guaranteed. This was a young, fun-loving bunch that entered the year with little starting experience, earning the nickname “Dawn’s Day Care.” The team was constantly talking, always messing around, totally different from the serious group that had just graduated. Most had previously been role players. They required Staley to adjust her style in ways she hadn’t since her earliest days as a coach. When they opened the season with a win over ranked Notre Dame—“I thought it was an anomaly,” Staley says—it was in fact the first step in a historic run.
Now the Gamecocks must figure out how to follow that up. They return every roster member from last year save one. (Though it’s worth noting that one departure was big in every sense of the word: 6' 7" center Kamilla Cardoso was the No. 3 pick in the WNBA draft.) They will be bolstered by a strong recruiting class, headlined by local product Joyce Edwards, one of the most highly rated prospects in the country. It’s no surprise that they’re naturally heavy favorites to win another title.
The list of women’s programs that have pulled off the art of the repeat is tiny—USC, Tennessee and UConn—and it’s been nearly a decade since the last instance. The Gamecocks will try to crack that set with players who changed Staley as much as she changed them.
The day care is now a bit more grown up, accustomed to big stages and bright lights, a more cohesive unit. What’s next? Kindergarten? Elementary school? Not quite, the players say.
“Oh, it’s definitely a day care still,” laughs senior guard Te-Hina Paopao. “But I think we have a better grip on it now.”
The veteran coach has a list of areas she wants to see this group improve upon. The offense looks a bit inefficient. There are questions about who can dominate in the paint. Yet Staley feels significantly better than she did last fall. “We’re much further along than we were last year this time,” she says.
Staley expected last season to be challenging: South Carolina had just graduated the most successful class in program history, headlined by WNBA picks Aliyah Boston, Zia Cooke and Brea Beal. That group went 129–9 in its four years and won a championship as juniors. Staley anticipated struggles in replacing that talent. What she had not anticipated was the need for a total cultural overhaul.
The differences were obvious from the first preseason workouts in June 2023. Though she had a handful of freshmen and transfers, most in the group had already been with the program, and while none of them had starting experience, they had been around enough to know how things worked. But without the veteran influence of the recently graduated class, the remaining players were … noisy. They wouldn’t stop talking. (“Like, useless, senseless talking,” Staley offers.) It felt like they weren’t taking basketball seriously, perpetually five minutes late, neglecting to respond to text messages.
“I don’t think they were hard workers at first,” she says. The coaching staff responded by pushing the players harder. But that seemed to get them nowhere. And for all the uncertainty about how this group would look on the court, Staley was soon nervous about something that felt much weightier than a potential losing record.
“I felt like they were destroying our legacy,” Staley says.
That Gamecocks legacy is physically manifested around her as she speaks in the team offices. There are trophies everywhere. A signed photograph of Staley with former President Barack Obama leans against a window. Her dog, Champ, sits at her feet, the school’s winning tradition evident both in his name and in the fact that he’s nearly as recognizable around town as is his owner. When Staley was hired away from Temple in 2008, she inherited a flagging program, one that hadn’t made the NCAA tournament in five years. She took a long view and built from scratch: Staley began meeting with fans and people on campus, treating growth as a collaborative effort. The Gamecocks posted a losing record in her first two seasons but still boosted attendance by more than 50%. The rest of her plan soon fell into place. A decade and a half into her tenure, Staley had made South Carolina into one of the most successful programs in the country by every metric.
She worried last summer that her rambunctious group of youngsters might jeopardize that.
So the beginning of last season brought a reckoning of sorts. Staley decided to change her approach. “This was a challenge for her,” says associate coach Lisa Boyer, who has been with Staley since her Temple days. “She embraced it.” The game was changing, and the players were, too. “It’s a new generation of kids,” Boyer says. What if Staley adopted a younger, more fun environment? Maybe the best way to push the program forward was to meet the players where they were. She wouldn’t compromise on core pillars of team culture. She wouldn’t let up on the floor. But she decided she could be more flexible in certain areas. Maybe they could use their phones the night before a game. Maybe they could keep chattering away during workouts, with their coach learning to let it wash over her, like white noise. Staley had always considered herself a master of the pivot. This would be one of her biggest in years.
“She realized that maybe not going super hard on us was probably what was best,” says junior forward Chloe Kitts. “A lot of coaches don’t do that. She hadn’t really done that in the past. But she adapted to who we are.”
The players took note. If some of their early silliness had come across as childishness, they were all mature enough to know that it meant something for a coach of this caliber to compromise, and they bought in. Staley was essentially offering to meet them halfway—and they were ready to do their part. The pivot built trust.
“She took kind of a cultural risk, a good risk,” says sophomore guard Tessa Johnson. “It was just like a relationship piece in the fact that she was letting us be ourselves.”
The group’s makeup prompted Staley to make other adjustments. Her most successful teams traditionally had centered on defense and featured a heavy presence in the paint. That was still key here. But the offense was unlike anything seen in recent years in Columbia. It shot more from outside and used more ball movement. It took more three-pointers than any Gamecocks squad Staley had coached. It recorded more points per play, and it logged more assists. South Carolina had frequently beat opponents by slowing them down. This team pushed the pace. It was an entirely new look.
Staley had long shown a knack for adapting on the fly. “She’s always evolving,” Boyer says. This was still a strikingly big set of changes. “I think that’s a reason why we won,” Kitts says. “We had a coach who understood us.”
When they first took the floor last year, they had no firm expectations. “We had no idea what type of team we were going to be. We didn’t know what kind of run we were going to have,” says Paopao. “But our theme last year was love. That’s all you felt throughout this program. Everyone genuinely loved each other.” The group seemed closer, top to bottom, than any she’d ever coached, Staley says.
The Gamecocks started winning as soon as they started playing. They never stopped.
“We don’t know what it’s like to lose,” Johnson says. “So we’re not going to plan on it.”
Yet it’s hard to go back-to-back. Even when returning a supermajority of an undefeated championship team. Even when bringing in top recruits. Even when big cultural questions were answered the year before. The last women’s program to repeat was UConn with its string of four in a row from 2013 to ’16. If that doesn’t seem like very long ago, it’s been long enough to usher in a new era of recruiting and program building, with increased parity in women’s basketball alongside structural changes around transfers and NIL. It’s harder than ever in some respects to sustain a high level of success.
Amid that changing landscape, Staley has cemented herself as an icon of the sport. Her decorated playing career—a six-time WNBA All-Star and three-time Olympic champion—has given way to an even more impressive run as a coach. Part of that is her knowledge of the game, and part is a knack for building community that proved vital early at South Carolina, a quality that makes her “a mom away from mom,” says junior guard Raven Johnson. Part is the ability to pivot that she displayed last season. And part is her resistance to taking shortcuts. Staley builds players up over years, not months, a style that feels somewhat anachronistic in a time when athletes can leap from one program to another for more playing time or bigger platforms. But for Staley? The players buy in long-term.
“There’s a process of letting them know they’re not there yet,” Staley says. “They build up the endurance to handle that.”
That’s evident in a player like sophomore MiLaysia Fulwiley. She was a top recruit in her class. Staley first offered her a scholarship in seventh grade. Her first college game garnered this effusive reaction from Magic Johnson on social media: “I just saw the best move in all of basketball including the pros like LeBron, Steph, KD, Victor and Joki´c. Everyone must see the coast-to-coast, behind-the-back move by freshman guard MiLaysia Fulwiley from South Carolina. WOW!!” But none of that guaranteed a starting position. She instead spent the year coming off the bench.
Which was just fine, Fulwiley says.
“I know that Coach trusts me,” she says. “I just follow her lead and believe in her. She met me where I was last year, and that makes me feel way more confident this year.”
This season will present some new challenges. Roughly a third of the roster will be eligible to turn pro in the spring. “How do we prevent this team from getting big heads?” Staley says. “How do we keep them focused on the team while also increasing their stock in the WNBA draft?” And while the only player the Gamecocks lost is Cardoso, her absence will be keenly felt, and they’ll have to reinvent portions of their offense without such a singular presence in the post.
But this group is confident in its ability to make adjustments. And even after a career of pivoting, growing step by step, Staley is struck by how much she has learned from that process.
“We probably needed—I probably needed—some spicing up,” Staley says. “Because it was so regimented, right? It was so routine. I think it was helpful to me to have a different type of challenge that distracted me from the actual game.”
So she enters one more year with this group of players, who pushed her in a way she had never been pushed and rewarded her by winning in a way she had never won.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as With a New Dawn Staley Untapped, South Carolina Will Attempt a Repeat.
