South Carolina’s Shane Beamer: Dawn Staley’s success proof ‘you can accomplish everything we want to accomplish’

If you want to be reminded of the power of hiring the right coach, look at South Carolina. When Dawn Staley took over Gamecocks women’s basketball in 2008, it was just another program. South Carolina had been to the NCAA tournament twice in the preceding 17 seasons.

Here it is, 2023, and Staley’s Gamecocks are favored to win their second consecutive NCAA championship and third in the past seven seasons. They are 32-0 this season, 27 of those wins by at least 10 points, and take a 38-game winning streak into their NCAA first-round game Friday against Norfolk State (26-6).

“She has taken a women’s basketball program that nobody even thought about, and they are the premier program in all of women’s college basketball,” South Carolina football coach Shane Beamer said. “Nobody thought that could be done here and she’s done it.”

The lesson to Beamer, who began his third spring practice in Columbia on Tuesday, is obvious. Staley has proven that South Carolina is a campus where “you can accomplish everything we want to accomplish.”

Beamer almost surely would consider this damning by faint praise, but he has taken only two seasons to make Gamecocks football relevant again. Relevance isn’t his goal. But it’s a milestone, if only because it seems to be a force of habit to underestimate his program.

In 2021, South Carolina was picked to finish sixth in the SEC East in the league’s preseason poll; the Gamecocks finished tied for fourth (7-6 overall, 3-5 in the league). Last fall, the Gamecocks were picked to finish fifth; they were third (8-5, 4-4), including a 63-38 rout of No. 5 Tennessee and a 31-30 victory at archrival No. 7 Clemson that broke the Tigers’ seven-game winning streak in the rivalry.

South Carolina brings back veteran quarterback Spencer Rattler and All-SEC wide receiver Antwane Wells Jr., but now comes the hard part. To win an SEC East championship, South Carolina must overtake Georgia, winner of the past two national championships. Beamer, 45, grew up around success. His father Frank won 238 games and seven conference championships at Virginia Tech. But having Staley on campus has given Beamer a literal front-row seat to observe the best coach in her sport.

“Every single week, every single game, they get their opponent’s best shot and they keep withstanding it,” Beamer said. “This year’s team, I see how unselfish they are, how they pull and care for one another.”

You couldn’t grow up in Blacksburg (or anywhere in the state) in the early ’90s and not be aware of Staley’s basketball prowess. She played point guard and led Virginia to three consecutive Final Fours (1990-92). She played on three Olympic gold-medal teams. She took the head-coaching job at Temple in her native Philadelphia in 2000 during her professional playing career and continued to play well enough to make the WNBA All-Decade Team in 2006.

She’s pretty much a unicorn, and Beamer’s pretty much not dumb. You can measure the unscripted time on a college football coach’s schedule with a stopwatch, but in each season, Beamer has carved out time to catch at least one of Staley’s practices. Last month, he sat in on practice the day before the Gamecocks played then-unbeaten and third-ranked No. 3 LSU (23-0).

Beamer observed as the team watched video. He watched practice from a courtside seat. Beamer wanted to know how Staley organized her practice. To hear him tell it, coaching football and women’s basketball isn’t apples and oranges. It’s more like Honeycrisps and Galas.

“How you present information to the players and how you teach things (they) can take from it,” Beamer said. “At the end of practice, Dawn threw in something new. I think it was something like, ‘We really haven’t run this set offensively, but I just wanted to introduce it to you. We’re going to need it tomorrow or at some point. As the season goes, we’re going to need this.’ That stood out to me. Whether that was true or not, she kept it fresh with her players. Late in the season, she was able to do something like that.”

The No. 1 Gamecocks easily defeated the No. 3 Tigers 88-64 before a crowd of 18,000 at Colonial Life Arena. South Carolina has become the hottest ticket in women’s hoops. Beamer has gotten calls from NFL stars Stephon Gilmore and Deebo Samuel, former Gamecocks looking for tickets to see Aliyah Boston & Co. do what they do.

Beamer’s relationship with Staley is a two-way street. At the home loss to Georgia last fall, Beamer caught grief for yelling at South Carolina women athletes to get off the field. They had been brought onto the playing field between quarters as part of a Title IX celebration, an event Beamer professed to know nothing about (in his defense, football coaches live in caves during the season).

Two days later, Staley tweeted, “Hey, @CoachSBeamer, sorry I’ve been under a rock the last few days but we know you have done nothing but support our programs since the day you became @GamecockFB head coach! All hands on deck to get a win on Saturday!”

At 7:10 a.m. EDT Tuesday, Beamer tweeted a video of Williams-Brice Stadium at dawn to proclaim his excitement at the arrival of spring football. It may be his favorite day of the year. Coaches love spring practice because they can focus on teaching and development rather than the stress of winning a game on Saturday.

As luck would have it, Beamer didn’t schedule a practice on Friday at 2 p.m., when the top-ranked South Carolina women play for their 39^th consecutive victory.

Expect ESPN to deliver a shot of Beamer in the stands. He’ll be rooting, of course, but maybe he’ll pick up something he can use, too.