MARCH MADNESS
Dawn Staley first Black coach to win three D1 basketball titles
South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley is the first Black coach, man or woman, to win three Division 1 titles with their win over Iowa in the NCAA final.
South Carolina’s head coach Dawn Staley was brought to tears and hardly able to speak after her team beat Caitlin Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes in the NCAA Championship on Sunday.
With this victory, Staley has become the first Black coach - male of female - to win three Division 1 basketball titles. She was already the first Black coach to win multiple titles after her 2017 and 2022 wins.
In 2017, when she won her first title, Staley cut off a piece of the net to give to Carolyn Peck, who was the first Black woman to ever win a championship. Peck gave Staley a gift as well - a piece o the white nylon she saved from when she won that title with Purdue in 1999. This was just one example of many in which Staley kept sentimental souvenirs from her victories and shared them with others.
When Staley’s South Carolina team beat UCONN in 2022, she cut off part of the net herself and wrapped it around her neck as she danced to “Just Fine” by Mary J. Blige.
Now that she’s won her third title, Staley plans to take this net, too, and split it up to send to Black male coaches of women’s basketball teams as well as Black college basketball journalists - two groups she says are underrepresented. She asked for them to contact her by email or phone since it will be harder for her to find them.
“I felt a great deal of pressure to win because I’m a Black coach,” Staley said. “Because if we don’t win, then you bring in, just scrutiny. Like, ‘You can’t coach, you had enough to get it done but yet you failed.’ You feel all of that, and you feel it probably 10 times more than anyone else because we’re at this platform. It really makes me emotional. It does. Because I am their hope. I am the person that they strive (to be because of) where I sit winning national championships. That’s what they want to do.”
After winning her third title with South Carolina, Staley made sure to give a shoutout and big thanks to Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, who’s played a huge role in bringing national attention to the sport of women’s college basketball.