Women's Hoops Guru

By Mel Greenberg

Dawn Staley officially goes into the won-loss record book Sunday as the new coach of South Carolina when the former Temple mentor’s Gamecocks face Penn State in a season opener for both teams at the Nittany Lions’ Bryce Jordan Center.

“We’re going in with a young basketball team trying to find our identity and it will be a good environment to be in for me as a coach with our first game. What better way to do it than on the road,” Staley said in a phone call from Columbia, S.C., on Thursday.

Sunday’s affair will be a bit of a WNBA reunion.

Staley and Penn State’s Coquesne Washington crossed paths back in the day as rival point guards.

“I think we are students of the game,” Staley said. “We both played point guards. We did good jobs running our basketball teams. It’s a great story because we both love the game, we want to be around the game and it’s the best way to for us to continue our competitiveness that we have.”

Washington, who would like to see Penn State end a nasty little 12-game losing streak from the close of last season, is in her second year after serving as an associate head coach at Notre Dame.

Although Staley did not go against Penn State during her time at Temple, she has a history of a past rivalry with the Nittany Lions back in her days as an all-American at Virginia when both teams were battling for No. 1 in the weekly rankings in the early 1990s.

Staley made national news last spring, leaving Temple after an eight-year run to take a $150,000 pay hike to $650,000 and try to revive South Carolina’s worth in the Southeastern Conference.

“I think I’m in a tougher spot than I was with our Temple team back in 2000,” recalled Staley in stepping into the coaching profession after turning down the Owls when she was first approached by school officials.

“We will take it game by game, and that’s the way we did it at Temple,” Staley continued. “We want to play in the postseason. We still want to win our conference. It would be an incredible feat to do that. And we’ll slowly but surely work our way toward that.”

Staley’s new team was picked 10th in the SEC preseason poll.

“For now, we’re playing an underdog role,” she added.”It’s a tough league to play in but that’s one of the reasons I came here to take on a challenge of coaching in a league like this.”

Ironically, South Carolina is the 17th game on Tennessee’s schedule, a number circled because Vols Hall of Fame coach Pat Summitt needs 17 career wins to reach 1,000.

However, with national player of the year Candice Parker and four other starters from last season’s NCAA champions departed, Tennessee is not likely to be 16-0 prior to its game with the Gamecocks.

Staley seems to have everybody on board with her vision down South.

Soon after practice opened last month, football coach Steve Spurrier’s wife Jerri(CQ) led the players and coaching staff through a rugged 30-minute ab workout.

“Although they won’t admit it, I think it was their favorite part of the preseason,” Staley wrote in her blog of her players’ reaction to the drill.

Staley has also turned heads in Columbia by getting doors opened on recruiting visits by such highly prized high school sensations as Kelsey Bone, a 6-foot-3 post player out of Stafford, Texas.

“We’re recruiting some of the same people we were at Temple,” Staley related. “Certainly we’ve gotten inside some doors. But it doesn’t mean we’ve gotten (recruiting targets) yet to pull the trigger. But in due time. When we get an entire year of people knowing where South Carolina is and what we have to offer, we’ll be catching up to where we need to be.”

Freshman Miranda Tate, out of Chicago, got released from her Temple commitment to follow Staley to South Carolina.

Staley feels if any business was left unfinished at Temple, it was the inability to get the Owls to the next level into the NCAA tournament’s Sweet 16.

Prior to her arrival in 2000, Temple had not enjoyed winning records in a decade.

The graduate of Dobbins Tech High expressed confidence that Tonya Cardoza, her good friend and former Virginia teammate, will succeed in moving Temple forward.

Cardoza had previously been a longtime assistant at Connecticut.

“Tonya’s going to have some great days,” Staley said. “Her kids are going to play hard for her. But she’s going to have some days in which she’ll see why she’s there. It is not going to happen overnight.

“She brings a different kind of experience with the national championships at UConn, so hopefully she’s the one who can get the program where I envisioned it,” Staley said.

South Carolina will see No. 2 Stanford and No. 1 Connecticut in December, games that were already on the schedule.

The Staley coaching staff consists of longtime associates Lisa Boyer followed her from Temple, while Carla McGhee, who also served a year at Temple, and Nikki McCray, are Tennessee alumns who were teammates on past Olympic squads.

“Maybe we’ll learn a few secrets to beating Tennessee by having them with us,” Staley jested.
Cynthia Jordan, Staley’s first Temple recruit, is also involved, while basketball operations director Angie O’Neal was a manager when Staley was at Virginia.

Staley spent last summer as an assistant to Anne Donovan with the gold-medal winning United States squad in the Olympics. Having previously earned three Olympic gold medals as a player in a long association with USA Basketball competition, many feel Staley is the favorite to become the next head coach for the London Games in 2012.

But first, the criteria must be altered from the current requirements that the position be filled from the WNBA head coaching ranks.

There’s no rush because the United States will not be involved in qualifying competition next summer.

A USA spokeswoman said that first the new members of the governing body must take office before changes occur.

She also noted that she had seen requirements change in every four-year span since she joined the organization in the mid-1990s, so it would not be unusual for another revision to occur to make Staley eligible.