South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley has “managed to leverage on-court success into a level of mainstream celebrity no women’s college basketball coach has ever achieved,” according to Dan Wolken of USA TODAY. Since winning her third national championship in April, Staley can be seen on her social media account “photographed with everyone” from former President Barack Obama to former NFLer Tom Brady and “everywhere from the New York Stock Exchange to a Gucci fashion show in Milan to the Balenciaga/Under Armor show in Shanghai to the Paris Olympics to the DNC.”

Despite a Hall of Fame playing career including three Olympic gold medals, Staley has “never been more culturally relevant than she is now at age 54” in a role that goes “well beyond the importance of a Black woman building a college basketball dynasty out of nothing.”

As millions of new fans have been “drawn in by the Caitlin Clark phenomenon,” Staley is the “bridge that connects the rise of women’s basketball as a major entity to a celebrity culture that now absorbs the sport rather than shuns it.” Wolken writes Staley is “unquestionably one of the most important figures” in South Carolina’s history, and the school has “embraced and invested in women’s basketball at a level nobody could have imagined a decade ago with crowds that regularly fill their 18,000-seat arena.”

Wolken: “Few people in any sport would have as high an approval rating as Staley right now as she starts the journey to a potential fourth championship.” But now that the championships have “started to come in bunches,” Staley has “become something beyond even women’s basketball itself: An American sports icon whose voice and what she represents matters as much as her clipboard” (USA TODAY, 11/4).