At South Carolina, Coach Dawn Staley is building a legacy bigger than one player

Sunday’s NCAA Women’s National Championship game was everything basketball fans hoped it would be: a thrilling, nail-biting, back-and-forth battle between the Iowa Hawkeyes, featuring Wooden Award Player of the Year Caitlin Clark, and the undefeated South Carolina Gamecocks.

It was the perfect culmination to an incredible, historic season, the kind of game that would’ve been scripted if the past five-and-a-half months had played out on a movie screen instead of the TV screens and highlight clips of real life.

Yet weeks before South Carolina cut down the nets following their 87-75 victory over Iowa, we were already knee-pad-deep into a discourse about what is to come, about how to maintain the momentum that’s been generated during this whirlwind of a season.

Generally, the conversation is centered on Clark, the superstar guard who Gamecocks coach Dawn Staley said was “one of the GOATs of our game,” despite never winning a championship during her college tenure. And many people — analysts, commentators, sportswriters, podcasters — wonder who the next Caitlin Clark will be.

Clark is, after all, a generational talent who was must-see TV this year. And thanks to an eager media machine that happily chopped Clark’s name, image, and likeness into a million individually monetized bites and served them back to us, one by one, we saw her. A lot. So we know that Clark’s on-court performance is the stuff of highlight reels and think pieces and sure-to-come documentaries.

But for those who’ve been around, who’ve seen the sport grow to a point where Clark can step in and grow into the icon she’s become, we also know that Clark isn’t solely responsible for the current interest in women’s basketball, nor can she be solely responsible for maintaining it into the future.

For that, we need well-built programs and well-coached teams, led by people who will raise up the next generational talent. Across youth leagues, high school teams, and AAU programs, we need people who will inspire girls to pick up a basketball, to join a team, to buy into a culture of mutual respect, support and shared goals—even if they can’t hit 40 in a game, even if they’ll never put up nearly 4,000 points over the course of a college career.

And for that, I don’t think we need another Caitlin Clark. I think we need more Dawn Staleys.

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Dawn Staley is building on the lasting impact of Pat Summitt

I remember watching the NCAA women’s finals in 1997. I grew up in Kansas City and spent my springs rooting for a University of Kansas men’s team that made light work of the Big 12 but was often disappointing the tournament —their March, my Madness.

Admittedly, I’d never paid much attention to the women’s game, never scrambled to fill out a bracket or lamented that it was already busted halfway through the first round. But I’d met a new friend that year — it was my freshman year of high school — so when she invited me over to watch Tennessee take on Old Dominion, I went.

Sophomore forward Chamique Holdsclaw was the undisputed star of that game, thrilling as she sliced through defenders and put up 24 points, more than a third of Tennessee’s final 68. It was the second straight title for the Lady Vols, their fifth under legendary coach Pat Summitt. Indeed, it was Summitt, and the program she’d created, that kept me interested.

As Tennessee went on to capture a third consecutive title in 1998, and even after Holdsclaw graduated, becoming the first pick of the 1999 WNBA draft, I kept going back to Tennessee, kept watching to see what else would happen in the house that Pat Summitt had built. In the process, I watched other teams and rooted for other players, the lens through which I viewed the women’s game growing ever wider.

This is the kind of lasting impact that Dawn Staley is building, that she already has. This season, with this team, was the proof.

Staley knows how to build a culture at South Carolina

Staley herself said that her 2023-24 roster was the “most unlikely” to reach the sport’s pinnacle to demolish all competitors during an undefeated, championship season — just the tenth in women’s college basketball history to do so.

Though sophomore guard Raven Johnson and senior center Kamila Cardoso (an estimated top-five WNBA draft pick) received significant minutes in last year’s Final Four loss to Iowa, the Gamecocks returned none of the starters from that team. There were seven graduating seniors on the 2022-23 roster, including Aliyah Boston, the 2021-22 National Player of the Year. Only four of South Carolina’s returning players for the 2023-24 season averaged at least ten minutes per game last year.

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So in many ways, Staley and her team, staff and players alike, had to start from scratch. They had to determine roles and leaders, and they had to build new chemistry, forge new bonds. It’s the part of the process you don’t see in the final box score, even though it impacts those scores all the same. It’s how you build a successful program, not just a winning team.

This, of course, is where Staley excels. This culture building and trust earning is how she transformed South Carolina women’s basketball from an SEC throwaway into a perennial powerhouse. It’s why she was named the Associated Press Women’s College Basketball Coach of the Year for the 2023-24 season, the second season in a row she was bestowed that honor. It’s also why players who could average 30 points per game at other schools gladly sign up to be role-players at South Carolina. They believe in Staley and are willing to view basketball through her lens; they know that their individual stars will rise as the team’s fortunes do.

It showed in Sunday’s championship, when, after struggling early, Staley turned to her bench, the deepest in the sport. Freshmen MiLaysia Fulwiley and Tessa Johnson delivered clutch offense, combining for 28 points and shifting the energy in Cleveland’s Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse to South Carolina’s favor. Staley also decided to put Johnson on Clark, and her lockdown D held Iowa’s star to only seven points. Taken together, it was too much for the Hawkeyes to withstand.

Caitlin Clark is great, but don't discount Dawn Staley's legacy

But in the era of Caitlin Clark — of nation-leading totals in points and assists, of sold-out arenas and traveling, proselytizing mobs — we haven’t talked about Staley’s efforts as much as we should.

Because we want to know that the future of women’s college basketball is secure, we instead lament the passing on of a woman so secure in her own talent that she broke the NCAA women’s scoring record on a logo three off the dribble, with a defender’s arm duly, futilely, stretched in her face. We also praise the little girls around the country who fight to wear the number 22 on their rec and AAU teams, who hoist up deep threes to their coaches’ chagrin, who see Clark’s impossible skill and impossible swagger and say, boldly: "I want to be her."

But when we don’t talk more about Staley, a superstar in her own right, and we don’t speak to her role in secure the future of women’s basketball, we diminish her importance to other little girls — and young adults, and grown women — who were also watching this incredible, historic season.

If women’s basketball is going to build on this moment and grow bigger, deeper, wider into the future, we need those girls, those women. We need the people who will see Staley in head-to-toe Gucci on the sidelines, coaching a team that’s only lost three games over the last three seasons, and say: "I want to do that. I want to be her."

In the end, they are the ones who will create the space for the next Caitlin Clark to come in and do what they do best, capturing the world’s attention as they go.

Andrea Williams is an opinion columnist for The Tennessean and curator of the Black Tennessee Voices initiative. She has an extensive background covering country music, sports, race and society. Email her at adwilliams@tennessean.com or follow her on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @AndreaWillWrite.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Caitlin Clark is a star, but we need SC's Dawn Staley to grow the game