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Dawn Staley ‘is Philadelphia’: Stories from the city that loves her back

Dawn Staley ‘is Philadelphia’: Stories from the city that loves her back
NCAA Womens Basketball

Dawn Staley ‘is Philadelphia’: Stories from the city that loves her back

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The Athletic has live coverage of Iowa vs. South Carolina in the women’s national championship game.

CLEVELAND —After South Carolina beat Iowa Sunday afternoon for the national championship, Dawn Staley’s phone almost certainly was pinging with a congratulatory messages. Including many from the 215 area code.

Mike Flynn, her former grassroots coach from Philadelphia, said earlier this week that he had the perfect message to send his former point guard. He wants Staley to be ready for the ultimate Philly celebration after cutting down the nets in Cleveland.

More specifically: He wants her to get a Mummers costume ready.

“She’s a Philly girl. She hasn’t given it up,” Flynn said. “She’s an icon of the city.”

In the nearly 16 years since Staley took over South Carolina’s women’s basketball team in May 2008 — raising the program from consistent mediocrity to the sport’s gold standard at the moment — Staley has become a lot of things to a lot of people. Leader. Advocate. Winner. Three-time national champion.

Among her favorite titles, though?

Philadelphian.

Born in 1970, Staley was raised in the Raymond Rosen Projects in North Philly — a place that helped shape her as a woman, a player and now arguably the top coach in her profession. She roots hard for the Philadelphia Eagles and even once coached a game in her hometown team’s jersey. She also once repped a Yolanda Laney jersey from Laney’s Cheyney State days on the sidelines in a nod to Laney and legendary coach C. Vivian Stringer.

So when South Carolina takes the floor against Iowa and superstar Caitlin Clark on Sunday afternoon at Rocket Mortgage Arena, it will come as no surprise that some 400 miles east, the City of Brotherly Love will be rooting her on.

“You talk about Philly, you talk about tough-nosed, nose to the ground,” said Doug Overton, who was one year ahead of Staley at Dobbins Tech High School and starred for the boys’ team while Staley took the girls’ team by storm.

“She epitomizes that, and that’s the kind of regard we hold her at. She is Philadelphia.”

‘Dawn wasn’t scared’

Behind Staley’s home in North Philly, just around the corner, was a large field with a basketball court.

Yvette Phillips is about a decade older than Staley and also grew up in the Raymond Rosen housing development, a few blocks over from Staley, who was still in grade school. Phillips moved but regularly came back to visit her mother. Odds were she’d see Staley on that court.

Sometimes Staley would be alone, shooting jumpers and running after her own rebounds, Phillips said. Other times, she’d be playing pickup with the boys.

“They loved her,” Phillips said. “The guys were 5-10, 6-1; Dawn wasn’t scared. … She had an outside game, but I (knew) her from watching her going inside. She was like, ‘I don’t care who’s there.’ No matter (what) their height was, she would take anyone inside. With no fear.

“I was like, this lady is amazing. … She didn’t care.”

Staley spent many of her formative years playing against boys, whether on that court by her home or at what has now become the Hank Gathers Recreation Center, named after her late friend and another Philadelphia basketball legend.

She had big hands, her friend and fellow Philadelphia hoopster Marilyn Stephens remembers, which allowed her to handle the ball well. And her leaping ability was unusual for such a small point guard, Flynn recalled. That gave her the willingness to jump for rebounds against the boys — which in turn only made her more confident. She’d drive on them right into the paint, too.

“They’re doing that on cement and that’s every game,” said Bo Kimble, who along with Staley, Overton, Gathers and Dobbins star Linda Page (who once scored 100 points in a game) has his jersey retired at Dobbins.

“She came up the way I came up. It’s the last bucket of the game and you drive to the basket (and) they try to take your head off. … If you survive on the court in Philly, you can survive anywhere, and Dawn is a product of that.”

As Staley continued to play against boys, the lore of her as the spunky guard who could hang with anyone started to grow. Laney first met Staley while the former was home from college and Staley came by with Laney’s high school coach, the legendary Lurline Jones, to watch her play pickup. “Dawnie,” as Laney affectionately calls her, was just in eighth grade.

“I saw the way Dawn could handle the basketball, the way she could get to the hole freely and get a bucket,” Laney said. “With Dawn constantly competing against the guys, it made her tougher, it made her stronger, and she had to elevate her shot to get her shot up high so she could shoot over the guys.”

No wonder Staley eventually dominated middle school competition.

‘A genuine point guard’

As an eighth-grader at FitzSimons Junior High, Staley scored 25 points with 10 assists and 10 steals on June 12, 1985. She was playing in a summer league tournament inside Temple’s McGonigle Hall.

Temple men’s basketball coach John Chaney was in the gym — as he often was for hours upon hours a day — when the 5-foot-4 spark plug was lighting it up and made a crafty left-handed move, according to The Philadelphia Tribune. Chaney was stunned and asked someone to quickly find his assistant and tell him to get to the court immediately.

“I want him to see what I want in a point guard when he goes looking for players all over the country,” Chaney said, according to a 1985 Tribune article. “This girl is a genuine point guard, not one of those Toys ‘R’ Us point guards.”

He saw something — someone — special. And Chaney loved nothing more than hard-working, fearless, gifted guards who — if not from his city — embodied it in their play.

Staley participated in Chaney’s weeklong basketball camps — one he created, according to the Post and Courier, so boys and girls from underserved communities could attend for a minimal rate and learn the game from giants like Chuck Daly and Stringer.

“You had all these great basketball players, men and women, standing around and looking down at her while she’s instructing them. I think she was in her first year of high school,” Chaney said in the 2020 article. “But you could see she was born to lead.”

Chaney and Staley were counterparts at Temple when she coached the women’s team from 2000-2008, overlapping before Chaney retired in 2006 after 24 years overseeing the Owls. In her early days, he often popped by her practices, and once enthusiastically offered tips on a press break that Staley incorporated for years.

When she won her first national championship at South Carolina in 2017, Chaney sent flowers and a card, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer: “You done good! So proud of you!”

Shortly after Chaney died at age 89 in 2021, Staley coached against UConn. To honor him, she wore a black blazer over a white button-down shirt with a massive collar and a loose black tie.

“He is a perfectionist,” Staley said, according to the Associated Press. “He put his team into positions to win basketball games that no one else thought they should have been in. For that reason, he’ll always be one of the best mentors that I’ve ever had.”

‘Oh, damn! This girl is special’

After Overton graduated from Dobbins Tech, he played point guard for La Salle University, then lasted 11 seasons in the NBA.

Staley, now 53, was always one of Overton’s more reserved schoolmates, not saying much in the hallways, he recalled. But she always had a big smile and gave great hugs. On the basketball court? She became a must-see prospect.

“We actually had a boys gym and a girls gym. (Girls) games were at 3 p.m., which was the same time we had practice,” Overton said. “But she was so good, we always left practice to go watch her games. I ended up seeing her whole career.”

Every member of the Dobbins boys team told coaches they would rather start their practices late — after the girls games — than run the risk of missing out on seeing Staley in action. Staley was small but different from any of her competitors. Overton knew this from her pickup days, when his friends told him he should consider himself lucky he didn’t have to play against her.

“For three years of high school, I got home every night at 8 p.m.,” Overton said, referring to the boys team’s late practices. “She was just so good on the court and so dynamic. … Just captivating to watch.”

And everyone in Philadelphia, it seemed, wanted to watch her play. She arrived at Dobbins just as Gathers was ending his iconic high school career, making those tiny, stuffy gyms at 2150 W. Lehigh Ave. the place to be in the mid-1980s. As many as 550 fans packed the bleachers and balconies. When those were full, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, they’d stand on the window sills or climb the P.E. class rope to get a better view from near the ceiling.

“We always drew a crowd,” Staley told the Inquirer in 2016. “Girls’ basketball was packed in our gym. It was a beautiful thing.”

She led Dobbins to three consecutive Philadelphia Public League championships and was named USA Today’s National High School Player of the Year as a senior.

Carolyn Monson, who taught business classes there for 30 years and is now the school’s alumni association president, remembers those high school games. But also how little Dawn Staley — who attended Dobbins largely because of its computer tech program — became one of the biggest stories around school.

Monson said: “When Dawn Staley was (at) Dobbins — oh my goodness.”

Staley also starred on the grassroots circuit — so much so that shortly after Flynn, one of the most prominent coaches in the area, had to compete against her, he poached her to join his Philadelphia Belles.

“Our strategy to play Dawn was to double her whenever she had the ball, make her give up and then deny her to God’s death,” Flynn said. “Because if she had the ball, she would take everybody off the dribble.

“I was like, ‘Oh, damn. This girl is special.’”

‘How can you not be proud?’

Not long after Staley got the South Carolina job in May 2008, she and Flynn sat together at an Outback Steakhouse in Hampton, Va., when he shared a prediction with his former player.

‘“Dawn, do you understand you’re about to become the face of women’s basketball?’” he remembers asking. “You’re gonna be the voice of the game. You’re gonna be the face of the game.’”

Fifteen-plus years later, Flynn is still right.

The girls gymnasium at Dobbins is now named in her honor, the boys gymnasium named after Gathers. There is a mural painted inside of the school with artwork from her days as a player. “Dawn Staley Lane” now runs on Diamond Street, between 23rd to 25th, in front of the rec center where people inside share tales about watching a little girl with handle play here decades ago. When Staley came back to Dobbins in 2017, following her first national title with the Gamecocks, everyone at school that day wanted to catch a glimpse of their hometown hero. If she’s in town, fans are showing up.

“They come from everywhere: ‘Dawn’s in the city? She’s coming to Dobbins? We’re going to be there,’” Monson said. “The whole North Philadelphia area, we all come back for her.”

Staley has done so much for women’s basketball that perhaps it was only fitting that Laney nicknamed her “Title IX” when the latter was in high school after a school district dispute about the Catholic League and Public League, which ultimately kept girls from competing for the city title. The thought process behind the nickname? Staley was so dominant on the court that the powers that be would have to change their minds. 

“It shows how a young girl … can come out of the projects and have such an influence on the world,” Stephens said. “And it started in Philadelphia, which is the City of Brotherly Love and a mecca of basketball.”

Recently, Staley became the country’s highest-paid Black woman coaching basketball.

“When you read in writing that Dawn Staley … is No. 1, and she’s from your neck of the woods? If you don’t feel proud and happy for her, what the hell?” Kimble said. “How can you not be proud of her success?”

(Phot of Dawn Staley: Tim Nwachukwu / Getty Images)



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