In a breakthrough yr for girls’s basketball, Daybreak Staley has been, appropriately, on the forefront. On Monday, the wildly profitable coach on the College of South Carolina will lead the Gamecocks on a grand stage in Paris when South Carolina performs Notre Dame in a historic season opener.
Staley guided the Gamecocks to its third consecutive Remaining 4 within the spring, and final month she was courtside on the WNBA Finals to cheer on former South Carolina star and two-time league MVP A’ja Wilson lead the Las Vegas Aces to the championship over the New York Liberty.
It was the second title in a row for the Aces, whereas Louisiana State minimize down the nets in March, however each occasions felt like a convincing victory for the whole sport. This yr’s NCAA Ladies’s Basketball Event broke the report for in-game attendance whereas additionally reaching new highs in tv viewership. The nationwide semifinal sport through which Staley’s Gamecocks have been upset by Iowa drew a median of 5.5 million viewers, ESPN’s third-largest viewers for a girls’s faculty basketball sport. Practically 10 million viewers tuned in for the title sport between LSU and Iowa, making it essentially the most considered girls’s faculty basketball sport on report. The WNBA Finals, in the meantime, set a 20-year excessive for TV viewership, drawing a median of 728,000 viewers over the course of a four-game sequence that additionally gave the league some overdue cultural caché. The video games had all the thrill and electrical energy befitting a championship spherical, replete with celebrities resembling LeBron James, Mark Wahlberg, Aubrey Plaza, and Jason Sudeikis sitting courtside in Vegas and Brooklyn.
For a sport that has lengthy fought for respect and mainstream recognition, 2023 has felt like one thing of a revolution. “Ladies’s basketball is bursting on the seams,” Staley instructed me in an interview final week. “It’s a very long time coming.”
Monday’s Aflac Oui-Play sport, which can be broadcast on ESPN, represents yet one more milestone as the primary common season NCAA basketball sport (of each women and men) to be performed within the French capital. Staley sees it as proof of the sport’s burgeoning recognition—and monetary energy. “I’ll let you know this: It might not have been a thought if the organizers didn’t suppose they might make some cash,” Staley mentioned.
“It’s not going to be on ESPN for nothing,” she added. “They understand it’s a helpful asset.”
Staley has by no means shied from speak about cash in faculty sports activities, typically drawing consideration to the big disparity between the lads’s and girls’s competitions. She has been amongst a refrain of coaches to name for girls’s faculty basketball to barter a TV rights deal just like the highest males’s sports activities. ESPN at the moment pays $34 million yearly for a package deal that features rights to the NCAA girls’s basketball match and virtually 30 different collegiate championships, whereas the rights for each the NCAA males’s basketball match and the School Soccer Playoff are negotiated in separate offers valued at tons of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} a yr.
In 2021, a report commissioned by the NCAA to look at gender equities concluded {that a} stand-alone TV deal for the ladies’s basketball match might be value greater than $100 million in the marketplace. “We want any individual to guess on us,” Staley mentioned, “and I do know that they’ll get a return on their funding.”
A star in faculty and the professionals, Staley, 53, boasts a taking part in profession as adorned as her legendary run as a coach. As tenacious as she was diminutive, the five-foot-six level guard was a two-time nationwide participant of the yr on the College of Virginia, a six-time all-star within the WNBA and a three-time Olympic gold medalist who carried the flag for Workforce USA on the opening ceremonies of the 2004 Summer season Video games in Athens. As a coach, Staley has been a serial winner, engineering turnarounds at two flagging collegiate packages: at Temple, which she reworked right into a perennial NCAA Event participant after being employed in 2000, and at South Carolina, the place she has constructed a juggernaut and gained two nationwide championships since arriving in 2008. Staley earned one other Olympic gold in 2021 as coach of the US girls’s crew in Tokyo.
Staley’s rise to the highest distinguishes her from a training subject in girls’s faculty basketball that continues to be overwhelmingly white. She is, as GQ put it in 2021, “crucial Black lady in faculty basketball.” And her lengthy profession as each participant and coach makes Staley a cross-generational icon—a hyperlink between the ascendant fashionable sport and an period when skilled alternatives for feminine hoopers have been scarce.
“For those who have been high of the highest of the sport,” Staley recalled, “the subsequent neatest thing was going abroad to play and the largest factor was to play within the Olympic Video games. We performed to play on the subsequent stage.”
Staley was on the bottom flooring of the Nineteen Nineties girls’s basketball growth. After ending her profession at Virginia in 1992, she bounced round abroad, suiting up for groups in France, Italy, Brazil, and Spain earlier than resuming her profession in the US, the place a pair of fledgling girls’s basketball leagues launched within the center a part of the last decade. Staley joined the now defunct American Basketball League as one in every of its founding members in 1996, taking part in a pair seasons earlier than switching to the WNBA, the place she starred from 1999–2006.
From Getty Photographs for Aflac.
“Younger folks these days…they solely know that there was a league,” Staley mentioned. “They don’t know the instances through which taking part in on the collegiate stage was one of many methods through which you principally performed out your profession.”
At present, Staley stands atop a really totally different panorama in girls’s basketball, one affected by transcendent expertise and a swelling variety of followers. The collegiate ranks burn notably vibrant with star energy, with LSU’s Angel Reese and Iowa’s Caitlin Clark headlining the upcoming season (and probably subsequent yr’s WNBA Draft). All of that has helped flip girls’s basketball into appointment viewing, even spectacle. Because the Aces and Liberty have been squaring off at a raucous Barclays Heart in Brooklyn final month throughout the WNBA Finals, Clark and Iowa have been taking part in an exhibition sport earlier than 55,646 spectators on the college’s soccer stadium, an NCAA report for girls’s basketball.
