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SEC Sports
South Carolina's Dawn Staley reveals she declined Alabama coaching job before joining Gamecocks
Taking the South Carolina job was a full-circle moment for Staley's family
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Years before taking over the South Carolina women's basketball team, Dawn Staley declined the head coaching position at Alabama, she revealed in her new book, "Uncommon Favor." She liked the idea of coaching in the SEC but felt that particular move didn't feel right. Meanwhile, waiting for South Carolina helped her family come to a full-circle moment.
"Alabama came after me first in 2005," Staley wrote. "I visited the campus. I liked the athletic director. But I couldn't see myself living in Alabama."
At the time, Staley was coaching at Temple. The year Alabama approached her was the year the Owls went 16-0 in the regular season, becoming the first team in A-10 history to go undefeated.
Staley guided the program to six NCAA Tournament appearances, but eventually she felt she needed to go somewhere else if she wanted to win a national championship. When the South Carolina position opened up a few years later, Staley said her interest piqued.
"I was drawn to the fact that USC was part of the SEC and its storied legacy in women's basketball," Staley wrote. "Pat Summitt was in this league, Andy Landers, Melanie Balcomb, all these legendary coaches. I was looking to refine my skills, rise to compete with the best. The cherry on top was that my parents were originally from South Carolina."
Staley saw this as the perfect opportunity to help her mom, Estelle, to reunite with her siblings. She shared the story of her mom moving her to Philadelphia when she was 14 years old because of racism.
One day, Estelle was sent to the butcher by her mother to pick up meat for dinner. The butcher, a white man, gave her spoiled meat and Estelle refused to take it. He was not happy she stoop up to him and yelled at her to never come back.
"This was rural South Carolina in the fifties. Not far from where I live now," Staley wrote. "My grandma knew what it meant for a Black child to publicly defy a white man. She knew the danger, the threat now looming over her family like a rancid fog.
Estelle's mom packed her bags and sent her to Philadelphia to live with her sister. The irony of Staley succeeding in South Carolina didn't go unnoticed. Last month, the city of Columbia unveiled a statue honoring Staley right next to the University of South Carolina Pastides Alumni Center.
"Time is a funny things, isn't it? That I find myself thriving in the very state that drove my mother into exile is an irony I never forget," Staley wrote. "That she was able to return to her home, her place of belonging, when I came to work at South Carolina was a full-circle moment made possible by social progress, the civil rights movement, myriad changes seismic and small, but also, in large part, by faith."
