Keyboard Quarterbacks

By Karen Bailis

Say it ain’t so!

Dawn Staley, the Philly hoops phenom who came home to coach just blocks from where she grew up, is leaving Temple University for the University of South Carolina and a total annual salary package of $650,000.

Staley, who’d been reluctant to coach at all when she was approached for the Temple job in 2000 while she was still playing in the WNBA, said her goal had been to make Temple a national women's basketball powerhouse. In her mind, that meant a national championship, which she’d fallen just short of in her stellar college career at the University of Virginia and in the WNBA.

In her eight years at the gritty North Philadelphia campus, she immediately turned around a decade-long losing record and took her team to the NCAA tournament six times, won the Atlantic 10 Championship four times and compiled a 172-80 record, the best in team history. The Owls cracked the AP Top 25, and two of Staley’s former players are in the WNBA.

Still, by her own measure, Staley leaves unfinished business. Her Owls had yet to advance beyond the first round of the Tournament. Although Staley regularly scheduled powerhouse non-conference opponents -- Tennessee, Maryland, Rutgers, Duke -- who would draw more fans to the Liacouras Center, attendance at the women’s games still came nowhere near the men’s, which was a struggling squad during Staley’s tenure.

It’s hard to believe the three-time Olympic gold medalist would leave Philadelphia for another coaching job, given her protestations that she was attracted to the Temple job only because it gave her the chance to give more back to her hometown. She’d started the Dawn Staley Foundation to help inner-city youth years before, but she’d not considered coaching. Didn’t think she’d be good at it.

Nearly everyone else knew better. The best in the business have called her, well, simply the best. C. Vivian Stringer: “Dawn is just special.” Nancy Lieberman: She’s a “gem.”

So Temple awarded their gem a six-year contract extension last year, worth about $500,000 annually, when other teams came calling. After all, this is a school whose founder, Russell Conwell, built the institution based on the mission of cultivating the “acres of diamonds” in one’s own backyard. Staley had been one of those diamonds in the rough, just 10 blocks away at the Raymond Rosen houses.

But diamonds are much-coveted, and South Carolina has an attractive setting. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to compete in the all-powerful SEC? The conference draws bigger crowds and thus is an easier sell for top recruits. And then there’s the $650,000 a year, plus the promise to help pay back Staley’s $500,000 buyout.

Staley’s guaranteed income is more than Gamecocks baseball coach Ray Tanner ($345,000) and the man who hired her, USC athletics director Eric Hyman ($475,000), The State reported.

So while I’m bereft that Staley, one of my idols, is leaving my alma mater, I’m consoled that she left it much better than when she came. Still, how great would it have been for her to have done what even the legendary John Chaney could not?: Bring a national basketball championship to North Broad Street.