South Carolina’s national championship is Dawn Staley’s final validation

DALLAS — Dawn Staley can’t stop smiling.

No, literally, she can’t stop smiling: With every step she takes on the confetti-littered floor of the American Airlines Center, a new someone asks for a photo. There are family and friends, coworkers and coaches, all here wanting to share with her in this moment. She complies each time she’s asked, grinning wide with a “South Carolina National Championship” hat perched on her head and the basketball net she just cut down draped around her neck. Staley waited 26 years for this moment. There’s nothing to do but smile.

With Staley leading them on the sidelines, the South Carolina Gamecocks won their first national championship Sunday. The title vindicated their shocking loss in the Sweet 16 last year after losing only one regular season game, as well as their defeat in the Final Four two seasons ago. For A’ja Wilson, named the NCAA tournament Most Outstanding Player, it validated her decision to join the school she grew up 20 minutes away from, even though the 6’5 basketball prodigy could have gone anywhere. (“A’ja’s new name is LeBron,” Staley said in the celebration, after Wilson had tweeted about wanting to be like him.)

Staley had been waiting much longer for her validation.

It was 1991 when Staley guided Virginia to the national championship game, only for her team to fall in overtime. Staley played so well she was named Most Outstanding Player even in a losing effort, but winning that individual trophy didn’t satiate her desire for the team award. That game came sandwiched between two more trips to the Final Four by Virginia, each one with Staley leading the way. All three times, Staley’s teams fell short.

Staley’s legendary career has guided her to many more accomplishments: three Olympic gold medals, starting in 1996; six WNBA All-Star appearances, from 2001 to 2006; two Atlantic 10 Coach of the Year awards and three more in the SEC in her past three seasons. Last month, she was named the next head coach of the Team USA women’s basketball program. But throughout her playing and coaching career, Staley still hadn’t redeemed her failure to win an NCAA championship. It nagged at her. It ate at her competitive spirit. Growing up Philadelphia, it held a special importance to her.

“The only two sporting events growing up were the national championship game, because that’s all they showed (on television), and the Olympics,” Staley said outside South Carolina’s locker room after the game. “And that’s what I wanted to be a part of.”

Now, Staley has won that, too.

For years, Staley couldn’t imagine herself on the sidelines.

“I never wanted to be a coach, and that’s the craziest thing about it,” she said.

But Temple University’s athletic director saw something in Staley and convinced her to coach their team, even as Staley continued her WNBA career. From 2001 to 2008, Staley led Temple to a 172-80 record before moving onto South Carolina.

Despite her initial hesitations, Staley has completely adapted to the job.

“With me being a point guard and facilitating and managing personalities for different people, and I did it at a high level, working with the very best, Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes,” Staley said. “They (both) thought they were going to get the ball every time down, because I made them believe that, knowing only one of them could get the ball at any given time.”

Her nerve and instincts showed Sunday, not panicking when South Carolina quickly fell down six points to start the game, or when Mississippi State made a second-half run and pulled to within four points. Both times, Staley let her team play on, and they rewarded her by answering back with crucial shots.

“I could have easily called a timeout,” Staley said. “Our team has been through that. They fought through adversity. I just wanted to see what they were made of.”

With 1:23 left in the fourth quarter, South Carolina led by 13 points, and that’s when Staley knew. She hugged her assistant coaches, and she began thinking about what this win meant. But she also kept the promise she gave to the ESPN broadcast earlier that day.

“I don’t cry,” she had said. “I’m from North Philly.”

Staley remembers the last time she cried on the court, a one-point loss to Stanford in the 1992 Final Four. She had to be helped off the floor after that game, so battered as her college career ended.

“I was just exhausted because I wanted it so much and I put so much energy and work into wanting to be a national champion,” she remembers. “That the emotion was to just cry and to let it out and not look back. Because I don’t think I cried after that moment. And 25 years later, no tears, just going to enjoy it.”

When she is given the microphone on the podium, she joyfully begins by saying, “God is all things. This doesn’t happen without him.”

When she finally walks off the court after the trophy presentation and net-cutting ceremony, with her team still celebrating behind her, she high-fives nearly every member of the South Carolina band.

When she reaches the tunnel, she remarks to no one in particular, “This is incredible.”

When she reaches the stage for the postgame press conference, the championship net she cut down still worn like a necklace, she pulls a different, smaller piece of net out of her wallet. It had been given to her by the only other African-American woman to win a national championship, Carolyn Peck, who won with Purdue in 1999.

“Carolyn Peck, a few years ago, when she was commentating, she gave me a piece of her net, her national championship net,” Staley explains. “She told me to keep it. I’ve had it in my wallet for years. She said, ‘When you win your national championship, just return it.’ I’m going to have to pass a piece of my net on to somebody else so they can share and hopefully accomplish something as big as this.”

When she’s walking back to the locker room later on, and an assistant coach crows, “WHAT ARE WE,” she responds by shouting back, “National champions!”

“I don’t know how to celebrate,” she says in the press conference. “I don’t know how to act. I don’t know what a national championship is supposed to look like. It feels incredible.”

It looks exactly like this.