It Was Always About Dawn Staley

The numbers for the NCAA women’s basketball championship game are in:

Now, I’m not naive. I know a good portion of those viewers tuned in to watch one player: Caitlin Clark of the Iowa Hawkeyes. The reason tickets to the game averaged $500 was because of Clark. She’s gotten more media attention than any other player in college sports this year, and the only other basketball players on the college level who have been hyped as much by the sports networks in recent memory are Trae Young and Zion Williamson. There have been many great players in women’s basketball, but none have been as adept at grabbing headlines as Clark has been, with the insane shooting and passing that Trae displayed in college combined with Zion’s showmanship and utter dominance.

Just like pro basketball, college basketball is about the players. It’s the superstars that put butts in seats, and Clark is without a doubt a superstar. It helps that in her Elite Eight and Final Four games she had matchups against the second- and third- biggest names in women’s hoops in Angel Reese and Paige Buekers. South Carolina, despite lacking the big names it has had in the past like A’ja Wilson and Aaliyah Boston, has become a big name in and of itself, and its dominance as a team is what allowed Sunday’s game to be as big as it was. For the second-straight year, Clark was going up against a Gamecock squad that had entered the tournament undefeated and had steamrolled pretty much everybody in its path. This time, it was in the championship game instead of the semifinals, so the stakes were even higher. I’m sure many people making their women’s brackets had this game penciled in as their final, because this was the game everyone wanted to see.

And in the brightest lights in front of a sold-out crowd of people who spent a lot of money to be there, South Carolina coach Dawn Staley proved something I knew to be true all season: Clark isn’t the biggest star in the women’s game. Staley is.

South Carolina had lost all five starters from the team that went into the Final Four 36-0 last year. For any other team in any other sport, losing all of your starters would lead to a downgrade in play, usually a significant downgrade. Not for the Gamecocks. While rebuilding their roster, they maintained all of the qualities that made last year’s team so great, but they also addressed its biggest weakness, the weakness Clark and Iowa exploited to pull off the upset against them: a lack of three-point shooting.

Anyone who follows basketball understands how important the three-point shot is: it allows scrappy underdogs with size disadvantages to stay competitive for much longer than they would be, which is part of the reason we see so many upsets in the men’s game. South Carolina was not a very good three-point shooting team last year, and Iowa was, and that’s what made the difference in that Final Four game between them.

This year, South Carolina flipped the script. They attempted 14.2 three-pointers a game last year and hit just 31% of them. This year, they attempted 16.8 three-pointers a game and hit 39.5% of them. The confidence with which they launched threes on Sunday played a big part in their comeback from an early deficit and ability to create and maintain a lead over the Hawkeyes in the final quarters. It’s Dawn Staley’s willingness to adapt to the constantly changing environment of college basketball that makes her the best coach in the game today.

This championship is Staley’s third in the last seven years. With the number of underclassmen on her team, it’s almost a guarantee that she’ll pick up more over the next couple of seasons Her success with this team earned Staley her fourth Naismith Coach of the Year award and third straight. She also has two Naismith College Player of the Year awards, and the most incredible thing about the hardware she’s racking up is the fact that she’s the only woman ever to win both awards. She was also a 6x WNBA All-Star and coaching Temple while starring in the top woman’s league. There’s no doubt in my mind that she’s had a greater impact on the sport of woman’s basketball than any other person, and she deserves to be the face of the sport more than any player, even one as electric as Caitlin Clark.

Staley’s Gamecocks were one half of the most watched basketball game in five years, and they came out victorious, making history in the process. I know Staley and the sport aren’t finished making history, and after an amazing year, I can only feel excitement at the many more amazing years to come.