March Madness Daily: Dawn Staley is the progress
South Carolina's rise from doormat to dynasty has perfectly overlapped with women's college basketball's star turn.
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, we talk about getting that bag:
Eben: When Dawn Staley was hired by South Carolina in 2008, her starting salary was $640,000. Should the Gamecocks 🐔 win their fourth title on Sunday, her performance bonuses alone would total $630,000.
Staley’s 17-year career at South Carolina is a microcosm of the massive business boom in women’s college basketball. The Gamecocks’ had made just three Sweet Sixteen appearances when Staley was hired away from Temple 🦉, and had never been to the Final Four. The team won two SEC games in her first year, then 7, then 8, and have never been in single digits since. They made the Sweet Sixteen in 2014, and have gotten at least that far in every subsequent NCAA tournament. Look at this glow-up! 👇
For years Staley, Geno Auriemma and Kim Mulkey yo-yo’ed back and forth as the sports highest-paid coach. In January, however, South Carolina gave Staley a new five-year deal that vaulted her way above the rest. She currently makes $4 million per year on an annualized basis; Auriemma is at $3.34 million and Mulkey is a $3.25 million.
As part of that contract, she earned a $15,000 bonus for winning 11+ SEC games this year, $15,000 for finishing in the the AP Top 25, and another $100,000 for winning both the SEC regular season title and conference tournament. She’ll earn another $500,000 for winning the national championship.1
Last year South Carolina sold $1.6 million in women’s basketball tickets. That may not seem like a lot, but its more than dozens of big-time men’s teams, including Mississippi State 🐕, Georgia 🐶 and Central Florida ⚔️. TV ratings have jumped, and the NCAA recently rode the attention to a new $920 million media deal with ESPN.
Staley’s role there was two-fold. Not only did she turn South Carolina into a power, but she joined a vanguard of coaches that were bringing parity to the top of the sport. For most of the 1990s and early 2000s, it was just UConn 🐶 and Tennessee 🟠. Since then, the likes of Maryland 🐢, Stanford 🌲, Texas A&M 🐩, Baylor 🐻, LSU 🐯, South Carolina 🐔 and Notre Dame ☘️ have all had their time at the top.
Earlier this week, however, Auriemma warned that the sport could soon lose that parity. Starting next year schools are expecting to start sharing tens of millions of revenue directly with their athletes. Many, like Auriemma (and me!) believe we’re on the precipice of a new world order where the richest schools—the ones with the SEC and Big Ten football teams—gap away from everyone else, even more than they currently do.
“I'm for revenue sharing, [but] there will be less parity in the game of basketball,” Auriemma said. “If you look at right now there's less parity happening every year in men's basketball. People talk about the same schools in the Final Four seems like every year. And as the money now drives it. There's going to be less people that have that kind of money. There's going to be less of them that are going to want to give it to women's basketball.”
He closed with a baseball analogy.
"So when you do those kind of things and it's money-driven, who is going to become the Dodgers and Yankees? And how many of those are you going to have? And how many other programs in women's basketball are going to be Milwaukee and Kansas City? Because that's where we're headed.”
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Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
It’s $250,000 if she loses.