Women’s NCAA Tournament live updates: South Carolina vs. UCLA score, bracket,

On Mar 25, 2023

COLUMBIA, S.C. — It’s a Monday afternoon and Dawn Staley is on a roll. The chips and salsa on her desk are half-eaten, and she already finished her podcast recording earlier. There’s no practice today, so her mind has a bit more space to wander and her energy needs some place to go.

But as she starts in on the lack of investment in the women’s game, this is clearly not a place she just arrived. She has been thinking about this for decades.

Staley has a rule of thumb: When she speaks out, if she thinks whatever she has to say might have a lifespan of more than one day, she usually will sleep on it. If it’s still with her in the morning, she says something. And then?

“I just have to take the hit for what it is,” she says.

Certainly, there are exceptions to her rule, but on this specific Monday, with the NCAA Tournament approaching, the South Carolina coach is thinking a lot about last year’s tournament. She’s thinking about the Kaplan Report. And she’s thinking about the fact that the NCAA hasn’t proven anything yet. She’s worried that the Band-Aid put on the women’s tournament last year might’ve pacified too many when what women’s basketball needs right now are some loud voices out front making sure the push keeps going.

She’s upset about a lot that has happened and continues to happen in the game. But it’s both her anger and her love of the game — the way she remembers a “pure innocence” about the way she was able to grow up playing — that gets her out of her comfort zone and into the spotlight. Admittedly, it’s a place she doesn’t love. But she’s there and she’s there often because she feels a bigger purpose and she knows the weight her voice carries — to women and, specifically, to Black women, to all players and not just hers, to the sport and to all sports.

“I think women’s basketball is on the brink of being really great — if you really invested,” Staley says. “Look at men’s basketball and March Madness and all of that. Like, y’all chose to invest. What’s so wrong with investing in women’s basketball? Don’t you want it to grow? I really don’t understand — you would hold down a sport to keep lifting this other sport up?”