Dawn Staley, Barack Obama share touching moment at Team USA vs Team Canada friendly

Barack Obama and Dawn Staley attended Wednesday night’s USA vs. Canada basketball game. The two iconic figures shared a bit of a touching moment courtside during the game.

Obama, the 44th President of the United States and whose love for basketball is well-documented, embraced Staley, a three-time NCAA Championship-winning head coach for the South Carolina Women’s Basketball team, who appeared to be filming the entire interaction. It certainly would be a unique perspective if she were to post the photo or video.

Check out the two’s interaction below:

coach dawn staley and barack obama pic.twitter.com/kImjQ1CkIf

— who is @goaltend (@2MANYBRIDGES) July 11, 2024

The two were attending the USA Basketball Showcase inside the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas on Wednesday night. It was an exhibition between the USA and Canada ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

Dawn Staley on South Carolina’s 2023-24 season: ‘We just really got lucky’

Staley evaluated the Gamecocks’ latest, title-winning season in an interview on ‘Bernstein & Holmes Show’ on 670 The Score on Wednesday. She said they were, in fact, lucky because of how rare their kind of success usually is, especially considering how far they had to come chemistry-wise during the offseason after several departures.

“You know, when you’ve been around the game as long as I’ve been around the game, it doesn’t happen very often like this or it probably never happens to a lot of people,” Staley said. “We just really got lucky. We got lucky.”

“We lost all of our starters. We returned some talent – no doubt about it. Talent doesn’t always say you’re going to win the last game of the season. What our talent was able to do is create some chemistry,” said Staley. “Like, it wasn’t easy. I think our players decided that they wanted to win for each other. We didn’t do any, like, team bonding or life skills or anything like that. We did some life skill stuff but it was more of just them. We wanted them to spend some time with each other.”

After all that work with one another, though, South Carolina realized what they could be from the very start. From then on, it was about keeping that alive for one another for the rest of the year.

“When the season started, I do think our game in Paris against Notre Dame really gave our players some confidence to know that they’re really good,” Staley said. “It was all on their doing too. Like, once they saw that they were good, they didn’t want to be anything but good, but great.”

However, it wasn’t always as easy as it looked in becoming the 10th undefeated team in their sport’s history. They may have won by nearly 30 points per game but they had to create their own luck sometimes. That included the best example of that which Staley recalled from earlier in their postseason run.

On3’s Sam Gillenwater contributed to this report.