Scott Davis: Dawn Staley's dreamwork makes the team work

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What were you doing in May 2008?

I was living in – ahem – a trendy loft in downtown Greenville, drifting into an early midlife crisis and trying to grow my limp hair out into a swingin’ ‘60s shag. I hesitate to admit this to you, but I was driving a convertible. I was also wearing boot-cut jeans. And I wasn’t even paying that much attention to University of South Carolina sports. Things had gotten that weird for me.

It was a weird time of transition for Gamecock athletics, too. The Steve Spurrier Era was chugging along but hadn’t progressed nearly as far as most of us thought it would have by then. The Dave Odom regime had just ended with a thud for the men’s basketball program, and we didn’t yet know what we had with Darrin Horn (not much, as it turned out). Ray Tanner’s baseball team was an eternal bright spot but hadn’t ascended Mount Olympus yet.

If you wanted to tune things out, you could.

Then, late that spring, former South Carolina athletics director Eric Hyman introduced Dawn Staley as the new women’s basketball coach for the Gamecocks. Here’s the part where I must shamefully admit to you that even in the best of times back in those days, I paid little attention to the women’s programs. I only had so much bandwidth to devote to this stuff, I assumed, and my mind wasn’t all that locked into USC sports in general right that second – I had hair to grow and a convertible to drive.

Still, something compelled me to watch the press conference announcing Staley’s arrival. I was intrigued – she’d been a gold medalist as a player in the Olympics, even carrying the US flag at the opening ceremony of the 2004 games. She’d played in the WNBA, won the Naismith College Player of the Year award twice during her collegiate days at Virginia, and had won steadily as the head coach at Temple.

Something about her exuded competence. You wanted to believe in her. You did believe in her.

I started following the women’s basketball program with somewhere close to 100% more enthusiasm than I’d ever shown, largely based on my interest in Staley. Her charisma – on the court, in interviews, on social media, at press conferences, everywhere – made me proud to be associated with her, even though it was only as a fan, and proud that she represented my alma mater.

Let’s see what Dawn can do, I thought back then.

Everything, as it turned out.

The World is Watching

It’s hard to believe, but 14 long years have passed since that day back in May 2008. In that time, Dawn Staley has added a national championship and multiple Final Four appearances to the South Carolina trophy case, plus enough SEC title plaques to fill an 18-wheeler.

This is in a sport where the Gamecocks had been an also-ran for decades, and where fan support previously verged on the nonexistent.

“She has built our program from the ground up,” South Carolina AD Ray Tanner said back in October when he announced a seven-year contract extension for the coach. It’s true, but it would probably be even more accurate to say that she built the program from the abyss up. Staley first had to fill in the massive hole in the earth that represented South Carolina women’s basketball, then build it from the ground up.

She hasn’t just won. She’s made us care, too.

More than that, she’s become a part of the Gamecock family in a way that almost no other coach in my lifetime has done. For whatever reason, it seems like we know her.

The rest of the world wants to know her, too. As noted in a Philadelphia Inquirer story this week, even when opposing fans want to cast Staley as a villain, they end up finding themselves dazzled by her instead.

On Sunday, ESPN will bring its cameras to Colonial Life Arena to broadcast College GameDay from the South Carolina campus before the Gamecocks’ marquee matchup with Tennessee. The game will be broadcast nationally on ABC.

And after easily dismantling Auburn 75-38 Thursday night, South Carolina stands atop the polls at No. 1, where they’ve remained for much of the season.

That’s quite a climb from that day 14 years ago, when fans like me were tuning in and thinking, “Maybe I’ll give this thing a shot.”

We did. And somewhere along the way we realized we cared.

And that we couldn’t stop caring.

Doing the Work

You’ve heard that old saying a thousand times: Teamwork makes the dream work.

It’s one of those cliches that becomes a cliché because it’s true, but in this instance, we can flip the phrases around to better describe what happened here. This team works because Dawn put in the dreamwork.

She had a vision of what was possible at South Carolina from the moment she arrived. She never wavered on that vision even during some challenging early seasons.

And she didn’t just have a dream – she put in the time and the effort and the blood and the sweat and the tears to make the dream work. A large part of that dreamwork was convincing this fanbase to dream big with her. We started to want this to happen almost as much as she did, and in some ways, it’s almost like we all willed it into motion together.

Making people care is the very first job a coach has when he or she takes over a college program. If enough people care, you have a chance. What you do with that chance is up to you…but you have a chance.

The stark reality is that some coaches make you care more than others do. We don’t know why, we just know it when it happens.

Quite simply, Dawn made us care. Her players – with their infectious enthusiasm and the gleeful abandon with which they played the game – made us care. Pretty soon, all of that collective caring transformed Colonial Life Arena into the nation’s hotbed for women’s basketball.

It started with a dream.

And with a coach willing to work hard enough to bring the dream to life.

Now the world is watching the team that plays in Columbia, South Carolina, in front of the game’s best fans.

I doubt I expected to see this on that day long ago, back in 2008.

But I have seen it with my own two eyes.

And I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Tell me your memories of watching Dawn Staley build a program at South Carolina by writing me at [email protected].