To keep South Carolina on top, Dawn Staley had to change

COLUMBIA, S.C. – Just a few weeks before South Carolina began its campaign to defend its national title, fifth-year Te-Hina Paopao laughed during practice with teammates on the sideline as coach Dawn Staley stood nearby and relayed feedback to players executing a full field exercise.

Staley didn’t notice or mind Paopao that Monday in October (but since it’s Staley, it’s fair to assume it’s not the first). A year ago, Staley would have characterized it as Paopao’s lack of focus. The constant chatter would have felt like a disrespect to the game and the fact that she had allowed distractions into this sacred space. But today, Staley doesn’t see it that way at all. Instead, she understands it as a necessary part of what this team needs and, more importantly, how she had to adapt to her players. It’s now part of the way they win games, even if it wasn’t the way they won games in the past.

That adaptability could be Staley’s greatest asset as the No. 1 Gamecocks, who are riding a 40-game winning streak, return most of last season’s roster and enter a season in which they are the first could become a program that repeats itself as national champion. since UConn won four in a row from 2013 to 2016.

Dawn Staley after @GamecockWBB‘s win over NC State:

“That’s why we put together the schedule the way we did, because we want to challenge ourselves. It may end in a loss somewhere down the line, but we are working on playing in March and April into November and December.” pic.twitter.com/javEiTvTun

— Matt Dowell (@MattDowellTV) November 10, 2024

Staley has set the bar high at South Carolina. Time and time again, she has asked players to step outside their comfort zone. But last year she had to do that too… even though she fought against it at first. A year ago, around this time, when her players wouldn’t stop chatting, she had looked toward the north side of the gym, where huge banners representing South Carolina’s first-round WNBA Draft picks hung. She would remember what it had been like to coach the players who helped Staley transform the program into the gold standard, and she feared: Is this team going to tear down everything we’ve built?

But then? That team accomplished something none of the players on the wall ever did: go undefeated and win a national title. Over the course of that streak, last season’s team also taught the Hall of Fame coach an unexpected lesson: Even in her mid-50s, after winning almost everything, there’s still a lot more to learn.

“This game will stretch you. It gives you what you need,” Staley says. “In an uncanny way, I’ve always gotten something I needed, when I needed it.”

When she was a player, successes and losses often reinforced Staley’s sense of what it meant to respect the game: to be focused and remove distractions. When she was cut from the 1992 Olympic team, the crushing defeat fueled her drive to return in 1996 (and two more Olympics after that). When she started coaching at Temple in 2000, she was still playing in the WNBA, and the game allowed her to learn how to balance herself and see the game differently.

When South Carolina – then an SEC bottom dweller – hired Staley in 2008, she came in with the intensity and expectation that the players would have the same drive and chips on their shoulders as she did. But they didn’t. During Staley’s first preseason in Columbia, associate head coach Lisa Boyer pulled Staley aside to tell her that the only thing the players could hear was her volume, not her words.

If Staley wanted to get through to them, she had to turn around. She didn’t have to lower her standards, but she did have to change her approach.

The game gave her the chance to evolve. And she did. South Carolina, which had been to the Sweet 16 just twice in its history, won its first national title nine seasons after Staley took over.

Last season, Boyer reminded her of that pivot 15 years earlier and had her thinking that maybe the competition gave her a chance to do it again, to expand herself as a coach. This time it wasn’t about changing the way they communicated, but about allowing players to communicate in the way they needed to, to cede ground in a way they never had before to to help this group go further than ever before. Staley, who describes herself as an old-school coach who likes to define things strictly as right or wrong, suddenly realized she had to step into the gray area for South Carolina to reach its full potential.

“She changed her coaching,” Paopao said. “She had to get things across quickly before we started to lose focus. We were good for about six to eight minutes…. And she knows that. She knows our attention spans are short.”

Staley chose her battles. She allowed the talking, singing and joking as long as the players were more disciplined in all other ways on and off the field. If they were late to team events or missed classes, she enforced time off from basketball. They were not allowed in the gym or weight room. Staley called it PTO.

Amid the constant noise of the players, Staley saw something clearly: This team was becoming one of the closest she had ever had. What she had once seen as a distraction she wanted to eliminate was unexpectedly what brought players together.

“I enjoy the challenges of the work, I really do. And I think I’m pretty good at it. But some things you can’t win,” Staley says, referring to losing the battle against her players in their chatty folly.

The mark of great coaches is their ability to adapt over the years. Often the focus is on an evolution on the field or how they adapt to new rules, not how a coach fundamentally – and quickly – adapts to his own players.

“They really can’t do anything about it. It’s who they are. As long as we get what we need from a competitive, practice and core values ​​perspective, I’ll let them be who they are,” Staley said. “That’s why I coach, so that our players can become who they are much faster. … Who am I to impose my traditional view of life and basketball on them? To put them in a box they don’t fit in?”

It is with this vision that a stretched and twisted Staley has returned for her 25th season on the sidelines. The Gamecocks remain largely the same personality-wise, even if their game now looks a little different without 6-foot-1 Kamilla Cardoso, who is in the WNBA, but they already have wins over Michigan and top-15 NC State .

This year feels different for Staley, even if the roster and results are largely the same. South Carolina keeps winning, and the chatter in practice is still there. Paopao says they’re “not as bad” as last season, but she’s not entirely sure. Maybe it’s just that Staley doesn’t fight it that much, she wonders.

This year, Staley wouldn’t dream of that.

“My heart is always with young people and I want them to grow and learn, but it is a challenge,” she says. “I needed (the class) purely because they wanted us to know, ‘It’s cool, we got you. We have you, but we will be us.” That was refreshing.”

(Photo: Jacob Kupferman/Getty Images)