By Justin Jarrett
Dawn Staley wept.
As the confetti fell around her and the South Carolina Gamecocks celebrated their third national championship under Staley, she couldn’t choke back the tears that represented a release, a relief, after completing the unlikely task of a perfect season.
Staley pushed all the right buttons in the finale, which was the most-watched women’s basketball game on record with an audience of more than 18 million viewers, letting defensive whiz Raven Johnson run the uncontainable Caitlin Clark ragged while Kamilla Cardoso dominated inside and freshman Tessa Johnson stole the spotlight.
It was the expected outcome from a coach who has separated herself from her contemporaries on and off the court, but we already knew what kind of coach Dawn Staley was, and she reminded us what kind of person she is this weekend, as well.
When a trolling “reporter” from one of the two sports media outlets I refuse to consume or mention by name tried to bait Staley into joining the trans panic, she didn’t fall for it.
“If you consider yourself a woman and you want to play sports, or vice versa, you should be able to play,” Staley responded. “So now the barnstorm of people are going to flood my timeline and be a distraction to me on one of the biggest days of our game, and I’m OK with that. I really am.”
The storm came, all right, and it brought the usual array of straw men and absurd hypotheticals that follow this issue around the internet in a trail of ignorance and bigotry. The clown reporter got his 15 minutes of fame, and the faux outrage flooded Elon Musk’s Husk of Twitter.
And then, it was gone. Replaced by adulation for a Hall of Famer who just wins, baby. Three Olympic gold medals as a player with Team USA and another as the coach, and now a trio of national titles with the Gamecocks.
Unlike LSU coach Kim Mulkey, who seems to welcome controversy and distraction and egg it on, Staley calmly swatted it away when it was brought before her on the biggest of stages.
She did not stutter.
“If you consider yourself a woman and you want to play sports, or vice versa, you should be able to play.”
Staley has undoubtedly spent far more time pondering the ramifications of the dilemma than most of us — perhaps more than anyone. She is a women’s hoops legend and an advocate for and active participant in the present growth of the game, so she can put herself in each role in this drama and try it on for size.
She can easily envision a world in which someone who looked like her might be shunned from playing the game she loves. She’s a Black woman in America, after all.
And she’s not OK with that. She’s really not.
It wasn’t all that long ago that the idea of women playing basketball was appalling to many (and perhaps still is to a smaller faction), and as recently as the 1960s, teams from what is now the Southeastern Conference were still declining invitations to the national championship tournament at the behest of segregationists.
The modern-day equivalent took to Twitter — their preferred platform these days, it would seem — to spew their bigotry and display their lack of understanding and empathy for the human condition. They barked about Lia Thomas, the transgender woman who won a national championship as a swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, and the only example they can point to in which this issue has actually, well, become an issue.
Among the more than 500,000 athletes who compete in the NCAA each year, a whopping total of 34 openly trans athletes have competed in the entire history of collegiate sports, according to a report from the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. The NCAA adopted a policy in 2022 allowing each individual sport to determine its rules regarding the inclusion of transgender athletes, mimicking the policies at the national and international levels of sport, and requiring trans athletes to document their testosterone levels at proscribed points before and throughout the season.
Nonetheless, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) approved a policy banning transgender athletes assigned male at birth from competing in women’s sports. It was approved unanimously by the league’s Council of Presidents.
This is largely a solution in search of a problem, and an overreaction to an issue that the vast majority will look back on and shake our heads in wonderment that people ever thought like that (and that some still do).
When considering this issue, I’m reminded of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who concluded he would rather not attempt to define what constitutes “hard-core pornography” but he knew it when he saw it.
In most cases, trans athletes can be allowed to compete, within the rules, and no one will even notice. In the rare instances it becomes a competitive imbalance, we will know it when we see it, and adjust from there.
I’m with Staley. If you want to play ball, you should play ball, and my kids can play for her anytime, anywhere, any sport. She’s a winner.
Justin Jarrett is the sports editor of The Island News and the founder of LowcoSports.com. He was the sports editor of the Island Packet and the Beaufort Gazette for 6½ years. He has a passion for sports and community journalism and a questionable sense of humor.
