COLUMBIA, S.C. — Here in the happy empire, the waitress learns you’ve traveled in and wonders which side you’re on for the colossus of a game upcoming. The winter sky broods and leaks on a Sunday, but the 18,000 trudge the sidewalks, get inside and fill the concourses with impasses. The towels inside wave with enough frenzy that you might think bygone generations that used to pooh-pooh women’s sports deserve a fresh lampooning.
The empire wins as it has 299 times out of 338 over the past 10 seasons, and fans bunch around the court greeting the stars who greet back, and the coach roams around high-fiving the fans, and the whole big bliss of it exceeds even what the remarkable individual who helms it foresaw 15 years before she got here.
“You know, I never envisioned what the crowd looked like when I took the job here,” said Dawn Staley, South Carolina women’s basketball coach, winner of two national titles, maker of four Final Fours. “I just wanted to win. I wanted to put a product on the floor that, really, people could be proud of. And I didn’t see the crowd — like, I didn’t say, ‘Let’s fill Colonial Life Arena.’ I never — they did it. Our fans did it. They just, you know, word-of-mouth, came in here and decided that we’re going to back this team and we’re going to make it look like what a national championship team looks like prior to us even winning a national championship. So you’ve got to have that look, got to have that support, and our fans have done it how many years?”
She is told it’s eight since the crowds started cresting to lead the country as they do, and she says: “Well, before then, there was like, you know, five [thousand] was a great feat. Now if 5,000 people come in here, something’s really wrong. Something’s really wrong if only 5,000 fans are here.”
No. 1 South Carolina (25-0) just had itself two fine Sundays as it runs around amassing zeniths. It went up to Hartford where the ice sat around on the Park River and overhauled No. 5 Connecticut, the program Staley called “the standard,” for Staley’s first win up there, after which exhilarating young guard Raven Johnson said, “We wanted to break history.” Then it came back home, went up 18-2 on then-unbeaten No. 3 LSU, saw the Tigers nibble that lead almost away and then put down the 88-64 clamp so that LSU Coach Kim Mulkey said, “It’s South Carolina, in my opinion, and everybody else.”
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With rebound upon rebound and layup upon layup from this team both tall and large, the feats for 15 years keep piling up until the big seems the norm. “Thinking about it [three] years ago,” star Aliyah Boston said, “I mean, just thinking back to our U-Conn. game [in February 2020] because that was a sellout, the first sellout of my career here, and it was, like — nervous. I was very nervous. I was, ‘Oh, gosh, there’s a lot of people.’ But now, just thinking about it, we’re — [it’s] just like the regular.”
It’s curious to think about May 2008, when the eternal Philadelphian Staley came from Temple as the hire of then-athletic director Eric Hyman, when it seemed a notch offbeat. The Tennessee empire sprang from Pat Summitt, lifelong Tennessean. Geno Auriemma of Connecticut didn’t hail from Connecticut, but Pennsylvania isn’t really all that far. Tara VanDerveer went from the northeast to California, but that trail long since has its traffic. Muffet McGraw went from Pennsylvania to Notre Dame in northern Indiana.
When Staley arrived and said: “Some people may ask, ‘Why South Carolina?’ And I say, ‘Why not?’ ” Joseph Person of the State newspaper noted that it echoed then-football coach Steve Spurrier. South Carolina had ingredients Staley craved. “The facilities are here,” she said at her first news conference. “The commitment’s here — the community and the people who want to be a part of a winning program.”
She did fret aloud about restaurants closing early even in this state capital with a 33,000-strong university and a 137,000-strong population. To an American Southeast long since artistic at sugarcoating, here came a 38-year-old former two-time national player of the year at Virginia with a gaudy CV and an aversion to sugarcoating.
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There began a long run of coaching that has grown to eminent and commentary that stays earnest, honest and chatty. (“Okay, even local media is here,” she said of four traveling reporters in Connecticut, a signal of an empire. “Shout-out to your bosses for opening their budget up.”) Her news conferences go longer than some even as a tyro of a listener might wish they would go longer, given her listenability on topics from personnel decisions to Randall Cunningham, whose vintage No. 12 jersey she wore Sunday. (“I mean, Randall, Randall was a ceiling-breaker when it was probably not very popular to have a Black quarterback. In Philadelphia, I don’t really think they care. They want to win — like, we want winners.”)
If there’s a one-human window on how South Carolina became an empire after some good sprinkles of past success — 1980 Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women Final Four, 2002 Elite Eight, among others — it could be Mike Sullivan, 77-year-old retired psychologist.
He first witnessed women’s basketball late last century in Washington — Summitt’s Tennessee at George Washington — and he joined those from John Wooden to Paolo Banchero who have found it preferable to the men’s game for the fuller teamwork entailed. He frequented Mystics games from 1999 to 2005, before he and his wife, Susan, moved to Tampa.
When they aimed for elsewhere and checked out Columbia in February 2008, he reveled that he would get to see SEC powerhouses such as Tennessee and LSU, “little realizing we’d be having our own powerhouse.” Soon, at the dawn of Dawn, they let in fans to choose season ticket spots. He moseyed on up to the seventh row above the half-court stripe, pegging that as ideal vantage. There, early on, he would sit among 2,500 or whatever in an 18,000-seat arena, meaning, “You could hear yourself think.”
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Well, those seats nowadays …
“She’s really a transcendent figure,” he said. “She is the most unassuming, most accessible person of her stature that I can imagine.” He lines up for games with “a cross-section of all ages, all races, all walks of life, people in line talking with each other. They’re interacting; they’re laughing. It is such a warm, embracing feeling that I think it’s part of the appeal of going to games.” He finds it “unbelievable” how she has “changed the tenor of the city,” as with two championship parades during which, he said: “She was like a rock star! People were going crazy with excitement. Through the parade, she’s signing autographs, she’s taking selfies.”
When he misses the home game this Thursday against Florida because his doctor said so, it will become his first miss of any Staley-era home game other than in the 2020-21 season of coronavirus-cribbed crowds. He said Staley calls him and some others “Day Oners.” He often has tweeted relevant stats, and Staley often has tweeted in reply. It’s part of her approach, of a piece with her tour of courtside Sunday high-fiving fans.
“I mean, we built our success on that kind of access,” she said. “It’s just a lot more now. And, I mean, I feel the energy. They are happy, like genuinely happy for us winning, because they feel like they were part of it. When you feel like you’re part of it, I’ve got to meet you where you are. I meet our fans where they are, and they want pictures, they want autographs, they want selfies, they want it all. And I want them to keep coming back, so taking that walk around the court is par for the course for us.”
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Now, announced last week, Columbia will have its third statue of a Gamecock luminary. Over at the football stadium there’s 1980 Heisman Trophy winner George Rogers. Back at the basketball arena there’s 2017 national champion and WNBA star A’ja Wilson. Rogers hailed from suburban Atlanta in Duluth, Wilson from Columbia itself.
Well, across from the statehouse, here comes a statue, once completed, of a Philadelphian, who built one happy empire and thousands of bridges until people called her transcendent.
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