South Carolina Gets by With a Little Help From Dawn Staley’s Friends

Earlier this season, the South Carolina women’s basketball team walked into practice and found a surprise guest.

“We were all like: What the hell?” Gamecocks senior Ta’Niya Latson says. “Lisa Leslie is here?”

The Hall of Fame center had come to share advice with the post players, but she took a bit of time for the guards, too. (And she was happy to chat about subjects other than basketball: “I got to talk to her about hair care,” Latson says. “She’s such a great person.”) Latson transferred to South Carolina this year from Florida State. That an icon like Leslie might just casually swing by practice felt almost unbelievable.

But such are the perks of being coached by Dawn Staley.

The Gamecocks’ coach is among the most successful in the college game. Staley has won three national championships in the last decade and is now in a sixth consecutive Final Four with No. 1 seed South Carolina. But the coach is not shy about bringing in extra help. After building respect first as an accomplished player, and now for decades as a coach, Staley’s contacts folder is full of phone numbers belonging to prominent voices around the sport. And she’s not afraid to call them.

“She definitely takes pages out of other people’s books,” says Gamecocks sophomore guard Maddy McDaniel. “She’s just so savvy and has a lot of different information. She definitely doesn’t deter from getting stuff from other people.”

Those will sometimes be her former teammates, such as Leslie, who shared a Team USA roster with Staley and brought home three gold medals together from 1996 to 2004. Another one of Staley’s former Olympic teammates, Teresa Edwards, visited with the program just before the season began. But sometimes those outside voices are people with no prior connection to either Staley or South Carolina.

The legend herself came to town and shared her incredible basketball mind with the future of our game. She’s always been a truth teller and that was told today! Welcome to Gamecock country! We so appreciate you and your legendary career, @5xOLYMPIAN! https://t.co/fLmvOxbIBe
— dawnstaley (@dawnstaley) August 21, 2025

In December, for instance, Staley called up Atlanta Dream coach Karl Smesko. He spent decades building up Florida Gulf Coast as an analytic darling that punched above its weight as a mid-major because of its three-point shooting. (That effort was rewarded last year when Smesko made the leap straight from FGCU to the WNBA.) So when the Gamecocks did a non-conference road trip for games against South Florida and FGCU, and Staley realized that Smesko would be in town, she called for some advice.

“I asked him,” Staley says. “I said, O.K., can you give me some tips about shooting that I can share with my team?”

Some of the resulting conversation was about how to frame analytic goals for players. (If the hope is to improve distance shooting by four percentage points, for instance, break it down as just one additional three made in every 25 attempts.) Some of it was about communicating mechanical tweaks and getting a player comfortable with recognizing when she’s in her shooting pocket.

“I shared it with our team, and I really didn’t think Raven was listening,” Staley quipped after South Carolina senior guard Raven Johnson mentioned Smesko months later at the SEC tournament in March. Johnson leaned into the microphone next to her and piped up: “I was listening.” Johnson boosted her three-point shooting percentage from 29.5% last year to a career high of 41.4% this year.

South Carolina had already been set up to shoot better from beyond the arc this year. That was part of why the program brought in Latson from the transfer portal and gave a starting role to sharpshooter Tessa Johnson. But the year-over-year change was striking. The Gamecocks went from shooting 34.0% from deep last season up to 37.7% this season—very nearly those four percentage points that Staley had asked Smesko about communicating as 1 in 25. The Gamecocks are not attempting more threes than they did last year. (They’re actually taking slightly fewer.) But they’re making far more of them. That has changed the threat posed by this offense. And while that was partially a matter of new players and new schemes, it was a matter of Staley asking for help from Smesko, too.

“That one thing changed the trajectory of some of our players’ three-point percentage,” Gamecocks associate coach Lisa Boyer says of Staley’s conversation with Smesko. “It resonated.”

And sometimes the coach will bring in people who have no connection to basketball at all. Staley arranged for South Carolina to get a locker room visit in February from Olympic sprinters Twanisha Terry and Melissa Jefferson-Wooden.

“Even though they weren’t basketball players, I feel like their perspective on what it’s like to be a professional was really good,” says Gamecocks freshman Agot Makeer.

Many players choose South Carolina specifically for the relationship they can build with Staley. “She’s in our life every single day, and I feel like she plays every figure—like coach, mother, everything in our life,” Makeer says. “Her impact is not just on the court. But it’s off the court, and I think that's like the best part.” Yet for everything they get from Staley, they have learned there is still plenty to get from her network of contacts, too.

“It means a lot to this team,” Latson says. “Her ability to have relationships outside of just college basketball, and with the league, I feel like it gives us an advantage.”

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