While her interview was legitimate, Dawn Staley doesn’t think that the NBA is actually ready for a woman to be a head coach in the league.
The longtime South Carolina head coach actually interviewed for the same opening with the New York Knicks earlier this offseason when the franchise parted with Tom Thibodeau. The Knicks ended up hiring Mike Brown. It’s unclear how far Staley actually got in the process, but she wasn’t considered a finalist for the job.
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Now looking back on the process, she thinks that the league as a whole just isn’t ready to hire a woman.
“No, I don’t [believe it will happen in my lifetime],” Staley said on Tuesday, via ESPN’s Myron Medcalf. “And I hope I’m wrong.”
Staley has been at South Carolina since 2008, and she’s quickly turned the program into a women’s basketball powerhouse. She’s led the Gamecocks to nine SEC tournament and regular season titles, seven Final Four appearances and three NCAA championships — most recently in 2024. They’ve been to the Final Four five straight times, and the national championship game in three of the last four years.
Staley is the highest-paid coach in women’s college basketball, too. She signed an extension through the 2029-30 season earlier this year that is worth around $25.5 million. She was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013, too.
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The Gamecocks are ranked No. 2 in the Associated Press’ preseason poll this fall, even though star Chloe Kitts will miss the entire season with a torn ACL.
Staley isn’t the first woman to interview for a head coaching job in the NBA. Former San Antonio Spurs assistant Becky Hammon interviewed for jobs several times, and she was a finalist for the Portland Trail Blazers opening in 2021, before she eventually landed with the Las Vegas Aces. But as no woman has gotten over that hill yet, Staley knows the criticism she would have faced in the Knicks role would have been incredibly severe.
“If the Knicks have a five-game losing streak, it’s not going to be about the losing streak,” Staley said. “It’s going to be about being a female coach. So you as an organization, a franchise, you have to be prepared for and strong enough to ignore those types of instances when you’re going to look to hire a female coach.”
Though Staley revealed earlier this year that she would have taken the Knicks job were it offered to her, she seems very content at South Carolina. She’s also more than willing to help any other women in the sport in the future, even though she’s skeptical it will ever happen.
“If there is somebody that is interested in knowing and interested in being the first female NBA coach, I’ve got all the information,” she said. “Come see me, because I’ll get you prepared for the interview.
“And if there are NBA franchises that are interested in hiring a female, I’m here, too, because you’ve got to be ready to take that on and all the things that it comes with because it’s not just about hiring the first female coach.”
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