South Carolina Coach Dawn Staley Puts The Finishing Touch On Greatness

This was supposed to be Caitlin Clark’s weekend, the moment when women’s college basketball’s greatest scorer was rewarded for making believers of new fans and confirming to current fans that this game was an awesome spectacle of talent, grit and determination.

And so from the beginning of the game to the end of the game, even after the South Carolina Gamecocks beat Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes 87-75 to claim the National Championship, the cameras still followed the red-rimmed eyes of Clark into the dressing room. It was hard to let go of a story like Clark’s, who is not only a great scorer but also a great teammate who dished out assists that made her whole team perform better.

Clark made all of women’s college basketball better and more popular as Iowa-UConn semifinal that Iowa won in order to get into the final was watched by 14.2 million people, a record not just for women’s basketball, but for any basketball broadcast on ESPN. So, there’s no overstating Clark’s role in boosting her sport.

Yes, Caitlin Clark is a hard story to let go of . . . unless, of course, another story emerges that offers an even better angle on what constitutes the finishing touch on greatness.

And that story is called “perfection,” which is hard to achieve in any life endeavor, including big-time college basketball. And the main protagonist of this story is Dawn Staley, who has achieved perfection. In this year of the solar eclipse, Staley and her Gamecocks have achieved a total eclipse of their competition. Not an easy thing to do. Perfection is so difficult that the though the Miami Dolphins achieved this distinction in their 1972 Super Bowl winning year – more than 50 years ago – people are still talking about the accomplishment.

After winning this Championship on Sunday, Staley praised Clark for “lifting up our sport,” but surely Staley must get credit for lifting her sport to a realm few achieve.

Going 38-0 is not an easy thing to do, especially after losing all of your starters from the previous year. Not necessarily an easy thing to do after carrying the “burden” of losing to Iowa in last year’s Final Four and having to face them again.

“It was emotional for me because of how it ended last year,” Staley said after this year’s Championship. “It’s heavy, it’s heavy. You carry the burden of every single one of your players, all the coaches and staff members that put so much into our team. And it’s a heavy load to be undefeated, to finish the job.”

Staley’s Gamecocks finished the job in dominant fashion, denying the Hawkeyes a second shot at the basket for most of the afternoon and gobbling up rebounds on their offensive end. And while Iowa clearly had no answer for South Carolina’s six-foot-seven center Kamilla Cardosa, who finished with 17 rebounds and 15 points, a pair of blocked shots and a boatload of intimidation, the South Carolina win was very much a team effort.

Although she and her coaching staff thought their pre-season ranking at number six in the country seemed “too high,” Staley has now won three national championships, not to mention Olympic gold medals as a player and a coach. She has entered the Pantheon of greatness, not only because of her record but because she demonstrates a keen grasp of leadership lessons that include:

The result, as ESPN’s Ryan Ruocco called it, was “perfection with a touch of sweet redemption!” That’s hard to argue with—and that is the story of the 2024 women’s college basketball season.