JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Today, people know Dawn Staley as a resident of South Carolina. In fact, there's now a new statue of her in Columbia, where she's coached the University of South Carolina women's basketball team to three national championships, following her own hall of fame career as a player. But if you ask her, she'd tell you she's from Philadelphia.
DAWN STALEY: I grew up in the projects. And if you weren't from my neighborhood, you would probably think it's probably the worst place to raise children, whereas if you were from the neighborhood, you felt like you needed and wanted nothing.
SUMMERS: She says that the community at what's now known as the Raymond Rosen Manor created as nurturing an environment as anywhere, including some tough love.
STALEY: If you were outside of your household and an adult in the neighborhood saw you do something that was not appropriate, they had the honor and privilege to put us back in line.
SUMMERS: As a college basketball coach, Dawn Staley is now often the adult figure in the room. She's written a new memoir called "Uncommon Favor: Basketball, North Philly, My Mother And The Life Lessons I Learned From All Three." She's doing interviews about it on top of the other media responsibilities that come with her job. But she says she grew up an introvert.
STALEY: When you are the youngest of five, and it was seven of us living in a, you know, three-bedroom row home, you were - me, I was the lowest on the totem pole. Like, I couldn't say anything. Even if I did have a voice, I don't even think it would have been heard. So quite naturally, I was quiet, and I observed a lot. And I think it's helped me out throughout my career from just growing up in a project to now, where talking is a big part of my job. And now, I've found myself overtalking, and that's a weird dynamic to me.
SUMMERS: You joined South Carolina as head coach back in 2008, and I know that your mother grew up in the state of South Carolina in the 1940s and the '50s, when things certainly looked a whole lot different than they do now. I just wonder, could you have ever imagined that you would have ended up putting down roots, making a life and a career in that state?
STALEY: I could not. Like, my mother left this state. She went to a butchery to get some meat. You know, the butcher was giving her meat that seemed to be spoiled. And my mother asked him if he could go to the back and get some fresh meat. And the butcher was like, you're going to take this meat and that's all you're going to get. So my mother, even at 13, 14 years old, she said, I'm not taking that home. And the butcher said, get out of my store. Never come back in here. And back in that time, those were threatening words to Black people. That meant that you need to get out of town. So my grandmother packed my mother up, sent her up north. I mean, she spent over 50 years in Philly.
And then I bring her this professional move of mine, taking the job at the University of South Carolina. And at first, my mother didn't want to go. I don't know if it was just because of what forced her to go to Philly. But all her siblings were still here in South Carolina, so she ended up coming down. You know, my mother passed away in 2017. And the nine years that she was able to spend here in South Carolina with her siblings, our family, it couldn't happen a better way.
SUMMERS: Switching gears a bit here, in the book you chronicle in significant detail the push that you made to be paid equally to South Carolina's men's basketball coach. And that's a victory that makes you, as you write, the highest-paid Black female coach ever. I just want to hear from you in your words, how significant is that to you? And why is that push so important to talk so openly about?
STALEY: Well, the push is important not necessarily for me and my bank account because prior to me asking for equal pay, I was making a whole lot of money. So I was pretty comfortable with it. It was the sole principle of the success that I've had here at South Carolina versus my male counterpart. And there was a series of things that I did to ensure that it would take place. One of them was asking my agent - that I still have - I asked him to stand down just for this negotiation process...
SUMMERS: Right.
STALEY: ...Of asking for equal pay. And I hired a lawyer. So he believed in it. It took six months to get it, but it was a fight worth fighting, not just for me - just for the next coach. So, you know, if I can be a beacon of hope for other women in different professions, I'd like to be that.
SUMMERS: I do want to ask you about some of what has happened on the court. People may not remember that when you got to South Carolina, success did not come instantly. The first two seasons were losing seasons. How does one go about building a championship-caliber program essentially from scratch?
STALEY: I think it takes losing sometimes. I do think it takes you being - and I wouldn't necessarily say humbled - but it takes you sometimes to lose to see where you are, to see what you need to work for, to see the type of talent that you need to bring in. You need culture. You need chemistry. You need all those things that really take time. Although I thought it was professional suicide during those times in my first two or three years here at South Carolina, now as I reflect on it, it was exactly what I needed when I needed it.
SUMMERS: In the book, you talk about yourself as being a sore loser to this day, but you write that you can handle loss better today because you can identify why you lost. And I know that you and your team recently suffered a big loss in the NCAA championship game. I'm not going to ask you to relive that game, but big picture, what did that loss teach you?
STALEY: You know, here's the thing - I think when you've won national championships - like, we've been a part of three that we've won - you know when you're the more dominant team. To be quite honest, the way that UConn was playing, they were the most dominant team, and they displayed that throughout the entire tournament. So to lose to UConn in that fashion, obviously it hurt, but then you understand, and you see everything that has happened in my life, whether it was winning or losing, are things and experiences that are supposed to happen. So I don't just thank God for the wins. I thank him for the losses because the losses are the ones that really drive me.
SUMMERS: You've now led the team at South Carolina for 17 seasons, those three national championships. What does the future hold for you?
STALEY: You know, everything that I'm doing at this point in my career and my life is being a dream merchant for young people. I'm all into our team success because that means our players - my players - are able to fulfill lifelong dreams like I had. And because I've been a part of multiple national championships and multiple gold-medal games, I'm able to help them. I'm here to give them everything that I have to make sure their success comes a lot sooner than my success.
SUMMERS: We've been talking with coach Dawn Staley of the University of South Carolina. Her memoir is "Uncommon Favor: Basketball, North Philly, My Mother And The Life Lessons I Learned From All Three." Coach Staley, thank you so much.
STALEY: Thank you so much for having me.
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