Dawn Staley has been around the world. She’s seen a lot of things.
She’s lived a lot of life from her time coming up as a young hooper in the rough and rugged streets of North Philly to her coaching Team USA’s Women’s Basketball Team to yet another gold medal in the cozy confines of Tokyo last summer.
She’s done all of this while also being a Black woman stuck in a spotlight she never necessarily asked for. That’s what her journey has looked like. And while she’s been on her journey, she’s met countless others who have been on theirs as well.
And that’s why the South Carolina basketball coach is launching her new podcast, NetLifewith Just Women’s Sports. She’s ready to share the details on her journey and give other women in sports a platform to share theirs. She’s already kicked things off with an episode featuring Lisa Leslie.
Through sharing, she hopes, she can continue to elevate more women in sports. “I just feel like I have a story to tell,” Staley told For The Win.
We asked her why, after such a wild 2021, this was the right time to launch a pod. Below is our conversation. Enjoy. (This interview has been condensed and edited).
With the “Fab Four” freshmen, South Carolina basketball is in good hands.
When Bree Hall’s parents dropped her off at college, they didn’t cry. Neither did she. Everyone knew she was in good hands, and South Carolina had felt like home long before she stepped on campus.
“There was just so much confidence in where I was, there was nothing to cry about,” Hall says.
Hall was walking into a situation that would make any basketball player jealous. First, there’s the history of the Gamecocks women’s basketball program: a national title in 2017 and three Final Fours in the past seven years. Then there’s the present: a team with talented, experienced players like Aliyah Boston, Zia Cooke and Destanni Henderson, poised for a run at the national championship. And the future: at least seven more years of head coach Dawn Staley, whose value is priced at $22.4 million, but even that might be an undersell.
And if all of that isn’t enough to put a young hooper’s mind at ease, Hall and South Carolina’s three other freshmen can turn to a group chat affectionately named “The Fab Four.”
(AP Photo/Sean Rayford)
Staley eventually gave the moniker to South Carolina’s freshmen class, made up of Hall, Raven Johnson, Saniya Rivers and Sania Feagin. The nickname is a perfect description for the top-ranked recruiting class in women’s basketball this season, but when they started talking via text, the Fab Four wasn’t even the Fab Four yet. They were four high school seniors trying to weigh their options and pick the correct team and school.
Staley encouraged the players to talk even before they signed with the Gamecocks. The recruiting process can be an intimidating one. And unless a recruit has parents or siblings who went through the same thing, it can be isolating.
So Staley had a message for the recruits she hoped would one day become Gamecocks: Talk to each other, and help each other find the right fit, even if it’s not South Carolina.
“We all looked at our offers together and started doing pros and cons lists,” Rivers says.
Eventually, one school came out on top, and it was the same for all four of them.
“Next thing you know, we all committed at about the same time,” Rivers says.
When they did, the nickname came about, and Rivers, Feagin, Hall and Johnson renamed their group chat to reflect their newfound South Carolina identity.
Together they are Staley’s Fab Four, but separately, they are four individuals whose twists and turns led them down the same path.
RAVEN JOHNSON
There are two key pieces to Raven Johnson’s personality. The country’s No. 2-rated freshman (and No. 1 point guard) describes herself as a girly-girl who is also fiercely competitive. The first piece made her think she would hate basketball, and the second made her fall in love with the game.
“I was like, basketball is a boy’s sport. It’s too rough,” she says with a laugh. “But my grandpa told me, ‘You’re just not gonna do no cheerleading.’ ”
Raven’s grandfather took her and her twin brother, Richard, to the gym, where they played one-on-one. In that moment, Johnson’s competitive streak took over. She realized that she wanted to win, but not at just anything: She wanted to win at basketball.
“I was like, ‘Yeah, basketball is the sport for me,’ ” she says.
But Gamecock fans might want to keep an eye on the sidelines to see what kind of street clothes Johnson is sporting. Because before she was one of the Fab Four, Johnson had another nickname, and it’s one she still uses: Hollywood.
During one of her first AAU practices as a tween, Johnson walked into the gym fresh off of a shopping spree at Justice.
“I was wearing glittery shoes — I think they were Chuck Taylors — glittery pants and a matching jacket to go with it. I just thought I was cute,” says the Atlanta native. “They took one look at me and said, ‘Yeah, your nickname is gonna be Hollywood.’ ”
She’s not wearing Justice anymore, but Johnson still embodies her nickname, so much so that she even has it in her Twitter handle. Hollywood likes anything beauty-related, she says. Lately she’s upgraded from Justice to Fashion Nova and takes pride in mixing up her look.
“I can go from wearing a dress to sweats and a cute little crop top,” she says. “I can wear pretty much anything as long as my hair is done and my face looks cute.”
SANIYA RIVERS
One of the first Christmas gifts Saniya Rivers remembers getting was a Fisher Price basketball hoop. The sport, she says, is in her blood. Her older sister, Nanna Rivers, played at North Carolina State, her dad played for a few years at Elon and her mom was a standout at UNC-Wilmington.
Rivers grew up in Wilmington, the town where Michael Jordan famously didn’t make his varsity team. So Rivers has been attached to basketball since the beginning, and it to her.
The No. 4 freshmen in the country received her first scholarship offer — from South Carolina — when she was in eighth grade.
Rivers was playing AAU for a team that coaches didn’t really have their eyes on, but she was tearing it up. On the last day of the tournament, Rivers was playing in the championship game and recognized Staley sitting in the front row.
“We ended up losing, but I got a phone call later that night with the offer, so that was big,” Rivers says.
For Rivers, South Carolina is step one in a plan she’s had since about the time she received that first offer. She has a love-hate relationship with her hometown. She’s received great support from people, but she’s also dealt with others trying to bring her down.
“All I’ve ever wanted growing up was to make it out and go to college and make it to the pro leagues,” Rivers says. “I want to give back to my city when I make it.”
SANIA FEAGIN
For Sania Feagin, the choice to go to South Carolina wasn’t something she needed to think about; it was something she just knew was right.
“I put my trust to the Lord, and he guided me to where he felt was best for me,” she says.
Feagin grew up with faith and family as the cornerstones of her life. And through the two, basketball came naturally. When she was a young kid, her parents — who both competed collegiately — would play in various rec leagues, and when they finished, Feagin would run onto the court to get as many shots up as she could before they packed up and went home.
“I was ball-happy,” she says of her first days playing. “I would get it and just take off. I wanted to score.”
And basketball didn’t go away when they left the gym. Some of Feagin’s favorite memories are of playing in her driveway with her entire family — parents, siblings and even cousins. They’d play knockout, war, or adults-versus-kids matchups. And even with a family full of collegiate athletes, they knew when to turn the competition off.
“Those games were always just fun,” Feagin says. “It was never doing nothing too much. We just had a good time.”
When she’s with her family, Feagin keeps things relatively low-key. Outside of basketball, one of her preferred hobbies is babysitting her 1-year-old nephew.
“When I was taking care of him before I came to school, he was so small, and he would cry all the time,” she says. “He couldn’t even crawl. Now, he barely even cries. He’s running around. He’s a handful.”
BREE HALL
When she was six, Hall remembers playing sports with the kids in her neighborhood. It didn’t matter what the game was because she loved them all. But when she picked up a basketball, parents and local coaches noticed. Hall was just having fun, but to those adults, she had a future in the game.
So as she grew, her dad, Bryan, started taking her to the gym to run drills. Unlike her fellow freshmen, who grew up with basketball players for parents, Bryan was just a helping hand and cheerleader for his daughter, the No. 14-ranked freshman this season.
“He was absolutely not a basketball player,” Bree says with a laugh. “He was that guy at the Y or the nearby gym that you would call, like, your local LeBron, but he never even played in high school.”
South Carolina first piqued the Ohio native’s interest when she was a sophomore in high school. Her AAU teammate, Zia Cooke, had committed to the Gamecocks, so Hall visited the school.
“I watched them play against UConn, and they ended up winning,” Hall says. “And [Henderson’s] family was there, and they sat me down and gave me some good advice about the recruiting process and about how this was probably the place for me.”
THE FUTURE OF SOUTH CAROLINA
Once the Fab Four officially committed to South Carolina, the fun started.
They texted about serious things, like the COVID-19 pandemic that had marked all of their high school careers, but mostly the chat remained light-hearted.
“Before we had that group chat, we didn’t really know each other,” Hall says. “But before we got to campus, we were all so excited, talking about what colors we were going to have in our rooms and where we could get our nails and hair done.”
Hall, Feagin and Rivers live together, while Johnson lives with sophomore Kamilla Cardoso, her former AAU teammate who, as a transfer from Syracuse, is also new to the team.
Last year, the four freshmen watched as South Carolina made its way to the Final Four and lost a nail-biter to Stanford. They all agreed that watching the Gamecocks was surreal and found themselves switching back and forth between cheering on their future teammates and trying to analyze where they might fit in on the court.
When they got to campus, fitting in with their teammates socially was a breeze. The Gamecocks like to listen to music together, have movie nights and occasionally break into ultra-competitive rounds of UNO.
“It’s not just on the court,” Rivers says. “Cards get thrown. It gets ridiculous.”
But transitioning from high school and even AAU ball to college basketball proves to be a lot more difficult than fitting in with a new group of friends.
But you don’t go to South Carolina expecting to easily slide into playing time.
“I’m going to be honest, high school and college are two different types of ball games,” says Johnson, who won four straight state championships at Westlake High School. “You have one or two players on the team who are really, really good, but in college the pace is different. You got more players, the whole team is good.”
Many skills players could pull off in high school suddenly don’t work in college. Rivers, for example, said she’s in the process of changing her shot because she noticed it getting blocked too much during preseason practices.
Until Johnson went down with a knee injury, she, Rivers, Feagin and Hall — four five-star recruits who had their pick of programs — were all fighting for a sliver of game action.
Because even before signing the best class in the country, South Carolina was already stacked. The Gamecocks not only returned their starting five, but also their sixth and seventh players off the bench. And they added the 6-7 Cardoso, one of the most sought-after transfers in the offseason.
So yeah, this is a whole different ball game, but it’s one the freshman class is ready for. They all know what coming to a program like South Carolina means. It’s not about instant college stardom, but the opportunity to play for a legendary coach and to compete with some of the country’s best players.
“I enjoy it because nothing is going to come easy,” Feagin says. “I know I’m going to have to work hard. Like for me, going against Aliyah [Boston] in practice every day is going to push me. Because she is bigger, stronger and more experienced than me. So that is going to make me a better me.”
Before long, Feagin will play the role of Boston for a new recruit. So will Rivers, Johnson and Hall. For now, they’re a group of talented freshmen. But soon, South Carolina basketball will belong to the Fab Four.
The NBA season ended just a few days ago but for fans who want their basketball fix, the Olympics will help.
The NBA season ended just a few days ago, but for fans who want their basketball fix, the Olympics will help provide necessary excitement.
When the United State’s men’s national team begins to play against other top competition from around the world, the men’s team will be coached by Gregg Popovich. He is a five-time NBA champion leading the San Antonio Spurs and has served as head coach for Team USA since taking over for Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski back in October 2015.
Also on the coaching staff for the United States is Steve Kerr, who won five NBA titles as a player and has also already been crowned champion three times as a coach. Kerr played for Popovich for several years when he was a professional player.
Others on the coaching staff are Lloyd Pierce — who was head coach of the Atlanta Hawks until this past season and was recently hired as lead assistant for the Indiana Pacers — as well as Villanova men’s basketball head coach Jay Wright.
Meanwhile, the United States women’s basketball team is led by Dawn Staley, who has held the position since 2017.
(Chase Stevens/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)
She played professional basketball for more than a decade both domestically and internationally and is now the head coach for South Carolina’s women’s basketball team. She was recently considered a candidate for the head coaching position with the Portland Trail Blazers.
Her staff includes Dan Hughes (who recently retired as head coach of the Seattle Storm), Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve and former George Washington women’s basketball head coach Jennifer Rizzotti — who recently took over as head coach of the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun.
Men’s basketball at the Tokyo Olympics is set to begin Sunday, July 25, and Team USA’s first game is against France at 8 a.m. ET.
Women’s basketball at the Games begins Monday, July 26, and Team USA’s first matchup is against Nigeria at 12:40 a.m. ET on Tuesday, July 27.
A former Notre Dame player is not holding back on players getting snubbed from the Olympics.
With the Tokyo Olympics a month away, folks are gearing up to see if the U.S. women’s basketball team wins its seventh straight gold medal. The Olympic roster features some of the most prominent players in the sport. Among the snubs from the team is former WNBA MVP Nneka Ogwumike, who was averaging 16.4 points through five games for the Los Angeles Sparks this season before being sidelined with a knee injury. When asked about Ogwumike, who was expected to have recovered in time for the Olympics, U.S. coach Dawn Staley said the following:
“Breaks my heart that Nneka isn’t on this team. Having to make a decision today, if we had to make a decision a month from now I’m sure she’d be healthy. This was one of the things she wanted to do.”
That explanation wasn’t good enough for two-time WNBA champion and Notre Dame product Devereaux Peters. She was livid about Ogwumike being left off the roster for the third time in as many opportunities. In fact, she took to Twitter and unleashed quite a scathing rant about USA Basketball (Warning: Thread features NSFW language):
Okay so let's talk about bum ass USA Basketball….I'm going to preface this by saying I am happy for the players that made it and I have no issues with them whatsoever. They work their butts off for that opportunity and each of them deserves their moment…..
— Devereaux *casual fan* Peters (@MsPeters14) June 21, 2021
Peters was not even the closest person to Ogwumike to speak out about this. Sparks coach and general manager Derek Fisher made his feelings known, as did Ogwumike’s sister and teammate, Chiney:
✔️WNBA MVP & Champion in 2016 (last Olympic year) ✔️6x All-Star ✔️4x All-WNBA ✔️4x WNBA All-Defensive Team ✔️2x FIBA World Cup Gold Medalist ✔️ No. 1 pick & ROY ✔️Euroleague Champion ✔️WNBPA President ✔️oh, and she is one of few who went to every Team USA camp the last 5 years pic.twitter.com/iEzDduj4Kj
It’s nice to see an Irish alumnus stick up for players in her sport that she feels are getting duped. Even if you don’t agree with Peters using vulgar language to get her point across, you can’t deny that she’s a fighter. Especially these days, there never can be enough female sports figures afraid to speak their minds.
Oregon’s 6-foot-7 center will travel to Columbia, SC to compete for the 12-person squad looking to qualify for the 2022 World Cup.
Oregon Ducks women’s basketball is already on the map, and Sedona Prince is attempting to go global.
The 6-foot-7 center accepted an invitation to the upcoming 2021 USA Basketball Women’s AmeriCup Team trials. Prince is one of 20 collegiate athletes to accept invitations to the trials, which are set for April 18-21 at the University of South Carolina.
“The AmeriCup is a national level competition with some of the best players in the Americas,” said Jennifer Rizzotti, chair of the USA Basketball Women’s Junior National Team Committee in a press release. “We need to bring the best players available and that’s who our committee has worked to identify. Because we are unable to bring WNBA players, we will rely on the best-returning college players.”
This isn’t the first time Prince has worn the Red, White, and Blue. She won a gold medal with Team USA at the 2018 FIBA Americas U18 Championship, and she was a bronze medalist at the 2015 FIBA Americas U16 Championship and the 2016 FIBA U17 World Cup.
In her first season at Oregon, Prince averaged 10.4 points and 3.9 rebounds per game while shooting 54.5 percent from the floor. It was her first active season as a college player after missing 2018-19 due to injury and sitting out 2019-20 because of NCAA transfer rules.
Prince had hoped to compete with the Ducks earlier, but the NCAA rejected her case to participate in 2019-20. So she had to wait yet another season to see the floor in Eugene. Once Prince was able to actually play for Oregon, her presence was felt. After some earlier leg injuries, Prince dominated the last half of the year.
Her efforts culminated with a career-high 22 points in a second-round upset win over 3-seed Georgia in the NCAA tournament.
Prince was also an internet sensation when she went to her Instagram to point out the disparities over the “weight room” that consisted of a few dumbbells in comparison to what the men were afforded. Her post went viral and prompted the NCAA to act appropriately.
USA National Team head coach Dawn Staley, who is also the coach at South Carolina, will serve as head coach of the USA AmeriCup Team and will be assisted by University of Arizona head coach Adia Barnes and Rizzotti, 2021 USA National Team assistant coach.
Ten nations from North, South and Central America and the Caribbean will take part in the 2021 AmeriCup, held June 11-19 in Puerto Rico. The top four finishing teams will advance to compete in one of four 2022 FIBA World Cup Qualifying Tournaments in hopes of earning one of the 12 spots in the 2022 FIBA World Cup field.
“What we now know is the NCAA’s season long messaging about ‘togetherness’ and ‘equality’ was about convenience and a soundbite”
Dawn Staley put together a basketball career as good as anyone over the last few decades. She was twice national player of the year in college, won two Olympic Gold medals, had six All-Star seasons in the WNBA on her way to being voted one of the top 15 players in the history of the league by fans and is in multiple halls of fame.
After her playing career she turned to coaching, dominating at Temple before taking over South Carolina and building it into one of the country’s top programs and winning the national title in 2017.
The paragraph that sticks with me here — that makes me more sure than I was before that NCAA President Mark Emmert should shuffle away and disappear forever — is this:
What we now know is the NCAA’s season long messaging about “togetherness” and “equality” was about convenience and a soundbite for the moment created after the murder of George Floyd.
She’s absolutely right, of course. I’ve been writing about the NCAA’s hypocrisy for a long time, but even I’m shocked by this. I didn’t think the organization would fail to at least pretend it cared about the women’s game. The NCAA has always chased the money, but it at least knew there was a charade to uphold for the sake of public perception.
Yet here we are. Hemal Jhaveri put together an exhaustive list of all the ways the NCAA has made it clear they view women’s basketball players as second-class citizens. Please read it.
Let me intercept your lousy logic before you can even get it out there: Nothing about the difference in revenue generated by these events justifies any of this. There’s plenty of money to go around, and creating equal opportunities for athletes is supposedly one of the guiding principals of the NCAA. It’s supposedly one of the reasons players in the men’s tournament can’t get paid; that money supports other sports!
But of course that’s just a convenient justification. The truth is plain for all to see. The NCAA thinks women’s basketball players should just be happy they even get to have a tournament. That’s the clear message here.
College athletes are waking up to the exploitation inherent in this system, edging every closer to dramatic action. Meanwhile, the NCAA slow plays all the various movements to get athletes the rights to their name, image and likeness. It also continues to make absurd arguments as the Supreme Court prepares to consider the matter of compensating college athletes:
The NCAA reply brief to the Supreme Court in Alston is infuriating. Arguing agst increased compensation for educational benefits for FB MBB WBB athletes bc fans might care less about college sports is a hell of a message. Your role is to entertain the fans we value, more than you
Only an organization fighting imminent change it is powerless to stop could flail and fail as badly as the NCAA has in recent days. It’s a clear sign that the power brokers in college sports are hanging on and getting out what they can while they can.
Question: Any chance of getting Dawn Staley as the coach? — Deirdre Childress Hopkins from Facebook. Answer: First off, it’s great to hear from you, Deirdre, and thanks for the question. My colleague Marcus Hayes wrote recently that the Sixers should interview Staley because of her accomplishments as a player and a coach. I would hope that if the Sixers interview her that it just wouldn’t be for public relations reasons and that they would truly be considering her. I have been on record saying that I think the Sixers need somebody with NBA head-coaching experience, who can push Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid and I still think they will go that way. That doesn’t mean that somebody like Staley wouldn’t work and she would be a fascinating hire. There is always a chance the Sixers could go this route, but I don’t think it will happen.
Indiana Fever forward and former Notre Dame captain Natalie Achonwa has won this year’s Dawn Staley Community Leadership Award.
Indiana Fever forward and former Notre Dame captain Natalie Achonwa has won this year’s Dawn Staley Community Leadership Award. The award, of which Achonwa was announced as the winner Friday, goes to a player who has shown great community leadership. Achonwa continued to show leadership in the statement she released after the announcement:
“It is important for me to optimize the benefits and privileges I receive from being a professional athlete. A big piece of that is using the platform I’m awarded to connect with people, promote a level playing field, and inspire others to make positive change.
Through the ups and downs of my own personal journey, I have found that it is the little things that make the biggest difference. If we all focus on challenging the status quo of our own circles, and build from there, we can tackle the world and keep moving forward.”
On the Fever’s Twitter account, Irish coaches past and present were only too pleased to have the opportunity to congratulate their friend:
— Indiana Fever ⛹️♀️🏀 (@IndianaFever) July 24, 2020
Achonowa spoke at Indianapolis Public Schools during March to talk about mental health and ending the stigma. In 2019, she won the WNBA Community Assist Award for raising awareness of similar issues. For her latest award, the WNBA will make a $10,000 donation in her name to the Madame Walker Legacy Center.
Stephen Curry will join a star-studded cast for the Jr. NBA Leadership Conference.
After addressing the graduating class of 2020, Stephen Curry has turned his attention to the Jr. NBA Leadership Conference. The Golden State Warriors point guard will join the NBA’s star-studded virtual conference as a speaker.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver is scheduled to kick off the event with opening remarks. Curry will join ESPN analyst Doris Burke, Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle, former Sacramento Kings assistant coach Lindsey Harding, Los Angeles Clippers coach Doc Rivers and South Carolina women’s coach Dawn Staley as contributors to the NBA’s event. Former United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy is also slated to speak. ESPN’s Jay Bilas will serve as the host of the conference.
The event will conclude with a virtual basketball clinic that will include a demonstration of drills that participants can work on from home.
The fourth annual Jr. NBA Leadership Conference powered by @UnderArmour will take place on Friday, May 15 🔥 The free virtual event brings together coaches, administrators, players and parents‼️
Over the past three years, the Jr. NBA Leadership Conference has been held alongside the Draft Combine in Chicago. The fourth annual conference will be available to stream on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the NBA app on May 15 at 12 p.m. EST.
