ALMOST 40 YEARS ago in North Philadelphia, Dawn Staley was walking home from high school one afternoon with a friend from the neighborhood, when something remarkable happened. Or more to the point, didn't happen.
She lived in a rowhome in the Raymond Rosen housing projects. Her friend, Charles Gathers, had grown up in the high rises across Diamond Street but had recently moved to Staley's side of the projects. The two of them, and Gathers' cousin Patrice, were making their way back to Raymond Rosen, he remembers, when a man jumped in front of them and tried to grab Patrice. Another man, this one with a knife, followed on his heels. Gathers was about to step in, when the men recognized Staley -- that short girl who can play basketball with any boy. Whatever their plans were, Gathers recalls, seeing Staley changed their minds. The men retreated. Basically vanished.
This was the nature of Staley's slice of the city: "If you lived in a certain area, you couldn't go outside your area to even play a game, because of the various gang affiliations," says Doyt Jones, who was one of Staley's high school coaches. But with Staley, "Nobody was going to threaten her or anything like that, because they recognized her athletic ability."
Her game was her passport. She was small but played big. She was young but played old. She was a girl but had no problem playing against the boys. Her game felt as if it were made for Philadelphia, made of Philadelphia, brimming with the same "extraordinary mental and physical toughness" Bo Kimble says the city and its people did. Kimble, who grew up in North Philly, played college ball in Southern California and professional ball all over the world, but nothing, he says, was tougher than Philly ball.
By the time Staley was approaching high school, the legend of Dawn Staley, Philly baller -- that short girl who can play with any boy -- had traveled as fast as those would-be aggressors disappeared into the North Philadelphia ether.
"She had gained the respect of the entire city," Kimble says.
Now, Staley is vying for her fourth national championship as head coach of the South Carolina women's basketball team. There's been a Geno Auriemma era, and a Pat Summitt era, and Staley is working to cement a new age. The Dawn Staley era. At 54, she has reached near-mythical heights on the basketball court -- first as a player, then as a coach -- but it's the tale of a near run-in on a street in North Philadelphia that gets to the heart of her enduring resonance in all the places this game has taken her.
Dawn Staley has always meant something more on the ground she walks on. She has transcended the game in the places she has called home.
STALEY IS GROUNDED now, stopped in a tunnel at Colonial Life Arena in Columbia, South Carolina.
Thirty minutes after South Carolina defeated Kentucky in its regular-season finale, long after the Gamecocks locked in a share of the SEC regular-season title -- their ninth, and fourth in a row, all under Staley -- the coach is still attending to the masses.
There's a stocky man, who looks to be some sort of security detail, doing his level best to usher her away from the court and the throng of fans who are still lining either side of the tunnel, jockeying for her signature, or a selfie, or a shred of her time. His efforts are mostly thwarted. It's the first Sunday in March, and the people who flock to Colonial Life Arena in NCAA record-breaking droves -- last season, more than 270,000 -- are in church.
Staley is finally about to head all the way inside when she stops short at the sound of a fan screaming her name. She looks up and shouts back, a whiff of hope in her voice.
"You from up north?"
He's not.
"Then why am I hearing Doooooawn?"
She rounds those oh's, like the Philadelphian she is, stretching them long and slow, massaging her name into something more than two syllables.
The first time Darrell Gates remembers hearing Staley's name was in high school, at his teammate's house in Raymond Rosen. Gates lived up the street, but on the way to Dobbins, the school where they all attended and played basketball, he'd pass through the neighborhood, just a few blocks from the Moylan Rec Center.
For years, Cheryl Hardy worked at the center on Diamond Street, and she'd open the gymnasium at night for Staley to play ball by herself. The center had a slippery old parquet floor and no glass backboard on the hoops. "It was horrible," says Jimmy Richardson, who grew up with Staley and now works alongside Hardy at the center. "But we didn't care. It was our Garden."
These days, it's called the Hank Gathers Recreation Center. Like Staley, Gathers was a local legend whose talent took him far from Philadelphia. In 1989 at Loyola Marymount, he became the second player in NCAA history to lead the nation in scoring and rebounding; he died a year later, collapsing on the court because of a heart muscle disorder. A mural of Gathers now sits alongside one of Staley on the walls of the rec center, keeping watch over the indoor courts.
It was Gathers who first alerted Darrell Gates to a thrilling ninth grader named Doooooawn Staley. He nudged a tape into the VCR and told his friend to watch this girl's game film. "We were sitting on the edge of the couch," Gates says, "We couldn't believe what she was doing. We were just sitting up there laughing because we just couldn't believe it."
She'd have her back turned to a defender, then lob a pass over their head. She'd throw the ball through some poor sap's legs. Her otherworldly ability to find her intended target made Gathers and Gates intent on seeing more, and before practice, they'd sneak over to watch her games at Dobbins. They'd spread the word about Staley to teammates such as Kimble. "Nobody can stop her," Kimble recalls of their breathless reviews. "The fellas can't stop her."
Their word was dogma in North Philly. She had this stunning talent and the stamp of approval from some of the city's most revered players, so when she wanted to play against boys her age, she could. "And they'd pick her first," says Debbie Ryan, who coached Staley in college at Virginia and saw her play for the first time in Philadelphia. "Because she could get 'em the ball."
She did more than earn a spot on the court with the boys. She became the main attraction. "Her name started circulatin'," Richardson says. "When your name starts circulatin', everybody wants to figure out where that person is at. 'Where we goin'? Where we goin'?'"
There she'd be, reveling in the fierceness of neighborhood ball, dispensing but also happy to receive a Philadelphia foul -- not your run-of-the-mill physical foul, Kimble says, but a foul so physical it verges on disrespect. You had to foul like you wanted to break some bones because if you didn't, you'd lose the game. If you weren't on the court, you weren't getting better. And they -- Staley and Gathers, Gates and Kimble -- had to get better to get where they were going.
Today, a plaque at the Hank Gathers Rec Center bears a message from Staley: "25th and Diamond is where dreams start!"
NORTH PHILADELPHIA IS an easy place to love but a hard place to survive.
Darrell Clarke grew up in Strawberry Mansion, five blocks away from Staley. For nearly 24 years, he represented that same neighborhood -- including the Hank Gathers Rec Center -- as a city councilman. He says he saw firsthand how government disinvestment eroded his neighborhood. How federal funding earmarked for housing in low-income communities got redirected to build shopping malls elsewhere. "If you disinvest so much in a particular community, eventually the people will leave," Clarke says. "But an interesting thing happened along the way. Most of the people decided, 'We're not gonna leave. We like our neighborhood.'"
By the time Dawn Staley came along, her inheritance, Kimble says, was, "Everything ... crime, drugs, violence, a lot of abandoned buildings, a lot of blight."
But it was also the place where, when Hank Gathers died, older guys from around Raymond Rosen would keep a watchful eye on his younger brother, Charles. They became his family, his protectors. No, he couldn't hang on that block anymore because other people across the street might be doing drugs or selling them. No, he couldn't just idle his day away.
"The city has a certain pulse about it," Staley said in 2017. "It's real. It's authentic. It's genuine. I'm not saying that it's always positive, but you know what you're getting, and that's appealing."
To this day, Staley makes clear exactly where she's from. "Sometimes people who grew up in certain types of environments, they try to act like, 'Oh, I'm above that now,''' Clarke says. "She emphasized that. You know, 'I'm from North Philadelphia. And that's a great thing.' The people of North Philadelphia appreciate that, you know?"
In the early 2000s, Staley multitasked the end of her professional playing days with the onset of her coaching career. She was a perennial WNBA All-Star, and for eight years -- the first six of which she was still playing in the league -- she was Temple's women's basketball coach. The campus was a mile from her home in North Philly, and former players recall how she'd haul her team down Diamond Street. She wanted them to see her block, and her home, and her second home. She always comes back to the rec center.
Inside, there's a blue rubber court that Staley helped commission to replace the old parquet one. A replica NCAA championship trophy she gifted the center sits just outside the doors that lead to the courts. The heat in the building stays on in the winter because she called Clarke one day to let him know she'd been back and it was broken and needed fixing. "She really started leaning on me to make sure that things got done," he says. "Not only for the recreation center, but for the neighborhood."
Kahleah Copper lived in the neighborhood too, on Diamond Street, in Raymond Rosen, when she was a kid. Now 30, she's a WNBA All-Star and an Olympic gold medalist. Back when she'd frequent the rec center, guys from the neighborhood would watch her play, and her fearlessness looked familiar. "Oh, you're trying to be the next Dawn, huh?"
They could see it. Copper could too. "She heightened my ceiling," she says. "What I thought was possible for me."
Here was this person who looked like Copper and who came from where she came from. Here was this person who knew what it was to love a place and still fight to rise above it. Staley had left these breadcrumbs of herself behind, a trail forward.
"When she comes back, she wants you to touch her," Richardson says. "She wants you to know that she's real so you know you can do it. You can make it."
THERE WERE A pair of outdoor courts in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the hoops had chain nets, the floodlights went on at night, and Staley could ball out with the locals.
Staley came to play basketball for the University of Virginia in 1988, and in the offseason, when the Cavaliers didn't have any organized practices, she'd take off for the Dell, a park just off campus, with Tammi Reiss, her roommate and teammate. Reiss would watch her on the court -- "She got straight nasty at the Dell," Reiss says -- and think to herself, Oh, there she is. There is Dawn from Philly.
In one game, Staley crossed up a defender and the next time down the court, she went to cut in, and he threw her into a pole. She popped up, shook her head, her hair flopping -- set in a style her teammates at the time lovingly called a "mushroom cut" -- and shot the man a look. The other guys on Staley's team tried to act as protectors, but she shook them off too.
"No, man," Reiss remembers Staley reassuring the players on the court that night. "We good. You gonna play like that?"
A shove into a pole felt awfully close to a Philadelphia foul, after all.
Not much else in Charlottesville looked like Staley's old world. Back home, her neighborhood was "100% Black," she has said. But the year she joined Virginia, only 14% of first-year students were Black. Basketball was basketball, and that translated, but everything away from the court was a shock to her system, her old teammates and coaches say.
"I think her first interview she literally threw up," Reiss says. "She physically got sick."
She was expected to talk to her professors, one-on-one, but: "In the beginning, she just wouldn't do it," Ryan says.
Reiss says Staley eventually grew into her role as a public face of the team. Ryan echoes that with time, Staley embraced the expectations and culture of this new place. But on one vital point, Staley was unwavering.
"Dawn never left who she was," Reiss says. "She never conformed to her surroundings. The way her mother raised her was to embrace and be her authentic self and know it's OK to be that in different places."
Staley's hair stayed the same. The way she dressed. The way she spoke. She did not sand away those hallmarks, not when she arrived, nor by the time she left, four years and three Final Four appearances later. That act of rebellion, or at least of nonconformance, served Staley. It's the very reason she has said she is able to do what she has done at South Carolina -- because of who she was in Virginia, and who she refused not to be.
"I wasn't intimidated, but I was uncomfortable," she once said. "But I got through it."
Staley kept a firm grip on her roots but opened her arms to what was new and unknown about Virginia, and in that sweet spot, Reiss says, people felt they could relate to her and understand her, be understood by her. "People flocked to Dawn," Reiss says.
Reiss came to Virginia with Staley, and left with her too. She was there for every moment that added up to the Cavaliers' three deep tournament runs, to Staley's two national player of the year awards. But what she thinks of now, when she considers the weight of Staley's presence in Charlottesville, is this: the fact of people reaching out for Staley, wanting to be near her, seen by her.
Reiss remembers being in the suite she shared with Staley their senior season when the police called. A 16-year-old girl was on the roof of a parking structure, threatening to jump, and the police had been able to talk to her enough to discern this much: She loved Dawn Staley. At their request, Staley made her way to the scene, spoke to the girl on the edge of a concrete structure, and sat with her for two hours in a police station once she came down on her own.
"That's who Dawn had started to become," Reiss says.
She had started to become proof -- of what a person can mean to a place, even when they are not of that place. Proof of what it can mean to another person if you know what you mean to yourself.
BY NOW, STALEY has called South Carolina home for just about as long as she had Raymond Rosen. This past fall marked the start of her 16th year in Columbia; she was barely 18 when she left North Philadelphia for Charlottesville.
In the beginning, Staley lived in Columbia proper, but she moved just across the bridge to West Columbia years ago, and found walking the path along the Congaree River, which snakes by her backyard, was its own act of community. She sees her neighbors, such as Joseph Dickey, who's also a councilman for West Columbia, and asks after his two young children.
Her neighbors see her, because she winds up walking the whole of Columbia, to hear the locals tell it.
"There are people who set their watch on her walks," says Daniel Rickenmann, the mayor of Columbia. "There's a coffee shop in Five Points that she walks by and somebody will go, 'It must be 8:30. There goes Dawn.'"
She is there, not just in this place, but somehow of it too, in ways that seem intentional and vital. It matters to the people there that she sees them on the riverwalk, and that they see her in Five Points. These people see her and are seen, and so she matters. When Dickey and his wife were navigating the blows of a family tragedy several years ago, Staley would seek him out. "She would share her faith, and I would share mine, and I would keep her updated about it," Dickey says. "You forget you're talking to Dawn Staley, because I'm just talking to a neighbor who's concerned and praying for me."
That it's happening here, in this particular place, matters too.
Just across the Congaree, a few blocks from Colonial Life Arena down Lincoln Street, there's a small art gallery called SoulHAUS. The owner, Preach Jacobs, likes to say his shop is hyperlocal -- his space mostly showcases Black artists from Columbia, or South Carolina, or at the very least, the South. Jacobs, a musician and DJ in the area, is hyperlocal, himself. He grew up in Northeast Columbia; his mother and father came from the outskirts of the city; his grandmother attended Benedict College, one of the city's HBCUs in the heart of downtown.
"Columbia is ..." he starts, then stops. It's complicated, this place and his relationship to it. "The best way I can say it: I used to work at the Columbia Museum of Art, which is on Main Street, and there were times where I'm going to work on programming that's amplifying Black artists, but I turn around and a Confederate flag is up there at the Statehouse, right? There was always this underlying comment: 'You don't belong here.'
"And it made you want to get the f--- out."
The flag came down in 2015, with then-Gov. Nikki Haley's blessing and, ultimately, her signature on a bill passed by its long-resistant legislature. But it was never as simple as excising it from Statehouse grounds. It came down, but only in the wake of Dylann Roof, a Columbia native, killing nine Black churchgoers at a bible study across the state in Charleston. It came down but has been raised again in the years since, by protestors taking to the Statehouse to decry its removal. It came down, but Jacobs has still found himself deejaying porch parties on Confederate Avenue.
The last time Jacobs spoke to his grandmother before she died, she told him about her great-grandmother, a former enslaved woman, who lived with her for a brief time. He reeled, doing the math, piecing together that he could directly know and love a person who had directly known and loved a former enslaved person. The history of this place, he found, has a way of colliding with its present.
"So when you decide to stay here," he says, "I take it as a revolutionary act."
Staley -- for Jacobs, for a lot of the people around here -- did something more than stay in this place.
She chose to return.
She chose to reclaim it.
JUST 25 MILES south of Columbia sits Woodford, South Carolina. This is the town where Staley's mother, Estelle, grew up. She lived there until she was 13, until the day Estelle's mother sent her on an errand to the butcher -- a white butcher, who refused to offer her fresh meat. She argued with the store owner -- insisting she wouldn't leave with rotten food -- until he ran her out of the shop and she returned home. Her mother packed Estelle's bags and sent her to live with family up north then and there. She was afraid Estelle might be lynched.
Estelle Staley had to leave South Carolina to live. Her daughter has resolved to live here to leave it transformed.
"I think about what she made possible for me," Staley wrote in an essay, "And maybe what I'm supposed to make possible for others. She left South Carolina because of the racial divide. I came back with a hope to bridge it."
Staley has never been anything but transparent about her intentions in Columbia. She came to win championships, and she has. She also came to win hearts and minds. "For her to choose Columbia means a lot, right?" Jacobs says. "There's something about knowing that a place belongs to you and it can be tragic that you had to get away from it. I think that if she was somebody who just had roots up north, she wouldn't understand the importance of the work she's doing in South Carolina."
Staley advocates for more Black coaches, sends them pieces of the championship nets she cuts down, so they know her successes are theirs. "I want my piece of net to be an inspiration for someone else to win the championship," she said after she captured her first.
Then she'll lobby quietly on their behalf, the way she did when she called the athletic director at nearby Allen University to campaign for her former player, Olivia Gaines, to be named the new women's basketball head coach. "She always tells me this," Gaines says. "'You don't stop until you get what you're worth."
She speaks out against police brutality, publicly criticizing Haley, who had seemed to equate WNBA players with "a mob" for their support of Black Lives Matter. Then she logs onto a private Zoom session with Leon Lott, the sheriff of Richland County who has become her friend, to give her players the opportunity to speak directly with police, to ask questions, to understand.
Staley is loud about what matters to her and quietly relentless in pursuit of it. That's her prize in her long climb to the top of women's basketball -- the platform she is given to speak and be heard. It is also her burden. It's a lonely road.
"They're watching me," she has said of her players. "I can't ask them to stand up for themselves if I'm sitting down. Nor can I ask them to use their voice to affect change if I'm only willing to whisper. So when someone tells me to shut up and coach, I simply say, 'No.' I have a job to do. I'm being watched."
Marcus Lattimore knows the peaks and valleys of that road, because he also walked it alone. He's here to say that the winning makes Staley's mission possible, but it doesn't make it easy.
If Staley is this state's adopted hero, Lattimore was its homegrown one. He electrified South Carolina as one of the country's best high school running backs up the road in Duncan in the early 2000s, then did something a lot of local stars didn't do much of at the time, especially the brightest ones. He stayed home. He was deified for his loyalty, often literally; he was called a god to his face more than once by besotted South Carolinians. But the moments before all that fawning sat like a weight on his chest.
"If they don't know who you are and you walk in Black skin? Being an average Black person in South Carolina, it's very different than being well-known in South Carolina," Lattimore says.
He would watch the lights turn on in someone's eyes when it dawned on them who he was and who he had been on a football field. "Now I'm different," he'd think. "Now I'm a completely different human being."
There was a shift, something atmospheric, and it changed him. Lattimore started to do things such as attach his name -- this name that meant so much to so many people -- to petitions to remove Strom Thurmond's name from the campus fitness center.
The building is regal. Its rotunda is just as stately as the one on the actual Statehouse down the street; the exterior is bleached and practically sun-kissed. And it bears the name of South Carolina's long-serving, segregationist senator, who is perhaps most famous for his 24-hour filibuster in an attempt to block the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The fitness center is just a 10-minute walk from Colonial Life Arena, where one of the country's most prominent Black coaches walks the sideline.
Lattimore couldn't square how the university could implore young, Black athletes to sign on to South Carolina, then ask them to walk through the doors of a Strom Thurmond fitness center. Staley couldn't either, and in the summer of 2020, she took to the front of the building with other Gamecocks athletes to call for change.
"It's pretty simple," she said then. "I don't know how you get any more simple than if something or somebody promotes racial divides, it shouldn't be a part of our university and it shouldn't be part of our existence."
Five years later, plaques still bear Thurmond's name on the center; signposts welcome visitors to "the Strom."
Lattimore knows -- with his name now bound to issues like the petition -- that he has surrendered some fans as he found his voice. He's sure Staley has too. But since that afternoon in August 2020 when she pushed for the building's renaming, she has also, in chronological order:
* Kneeled during the pregame playing of the national anthem. While she normally remained standing, she took a knee alongside one of her players, hoping to shield that player from public outrage. "They're going to tear her ass up," Staley said she thought at the time.
* Publicly rebuked former NCAA president Mark Emmert for the inequities that went public -- and viral -- in the tournament's provisions for men and women athletes. "There is no answer that the NCAA executive leadership led by Mark Emmert can give to explain the disparities," she wrote in a letter and posted to social media. "The real issue is not the weights or the 'swag' bags; it's that they did not think or do not think that the women's players 'deserve' the same amenities of the men."
* Won the 2022 national championship, making history as the first Black head coach in Division I men's or women's basketball to win multiple titles. "I felt a great deal of pressure to win because I'm a Black coach," Staley said at the time. "Because if we don't win, then you bring in ... just scrutiny. Like, 'You can't coach, you had enough to get it done but yet you failed.'"
* Canceled a series with BYU after a Duke player alleged a fan in the stands shouted a racial slur at her during a volleyball match. BYU said it found no evidence, but Staley stood by her decision. "After my personal research," she said in a statement, "I made a decision for the well-being of my team."
* Voiced support for transgender athletes to play on teams in accordance with their gender identity. "I'm of the opinion that if you're a woman you should play," she said during last year's tournament. "If you consider yourself a woman and you want to play sports, or vice versa, you should be able to play."
* Won the 2024 national championship.
* Endorsed Kamala Harris for president in a state that would go on to vote for Donald Trump by an 18-point margin.
* Became the highest-paid women's basketball coach in NCAA history. "I look forward to continuing to be an example of how an investment in women's basketball is one that will pay off for everyone," she said in a statement after news of her contract broke.
"She just gets put into those categories of revered women in history -- partly because of what she's done on the basketball court, but more because of what she stands for," Lattimore says. "I can't even quantify it. If there's a list of top five most important South Carolinians ever, she's No. 1 in my book."
A few years ago, a group called Statues for Equality reached out to Rickenmann. They wanted to talk to the mayor of Columbia about erecting a statue in town of a woman of import. The country had so few such monuments -- Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Eleanor Roosevelt; Jane Goodall -- but they wanted more and did he have any ideas?
Dawn, he thought to himself. It's Dawn. It's gotta be Dawn.
The statue won't live at the arena. Rickenmann thought it ought to be downtown because Staley has never mattered only to basketball. He figures it's only right that the statue -- like Staley -- command attention in a community space. "I'm excited that we have a coach who has really embraced our community and at the same time has really empowered her athletes to stand up tall every day," he said in 2023. Though the city remains tight-lipped about its final destination, one spot reportedly under consideration is at the corner of Gervais and Main Streets, right across from the Statehouse. Jacobs used to walk this intersection downtown and get a message: You don't belong. He might walk it soon to find a new one. Yes, you do.
Still, when the statue is unveiled sometime after this season, it might face the building where the Confederate flag flew a decade ago, and where a statue of Strom Thurmond still stands around the back. There the two could live one day, facing off: the statue of a Black woman and coach who has won in and won over Columbia, and the statue of a man who would not have welcomed her there.
"How can two truths exist at once?" Lattimore says. "But they can. They can. It's conflicting, but also at the same time, it's a way out of the past. Not erase it, but move on from it."
FOR A WOMAN soon to be cast in bronze, Staley does not stay still.
She spends precious few minutes actually sitting in her seat in the season finale against Kentucky, jumping up from her chair, pacing alongside the scorer's table, thrashing a rolled-up paper -- her constant companion on gamedays -- in the air, stomping her right foot in staccato bursts, as if she can't quite fathom how Raven Johnson could possibly miss a pull-up jumper.
Across the court, in floor seats facing the bench, sits Sheriff Lott, who has season tickets. "Maybe people would not expect a Black female coach and a white Southern sheriff to be friends," he says, but there he sits, the way he sits in the car with her on the ride-alongs she's always requesting during the offseason, showing up for this person who doesn't look like him or even think like him all the time, but understands him. "We're both at that level in our professions where you don't have a whole lot of peers," he says. "I'm the sheriff. She's the head basketball coach."
On the other side of the basket, a smattering of players' families fill in Section 103, among them, LaShauna Hall, South Carolina guard Bree Hall's mother. She flew down from Ohio, and, if she's being honest, she wasn't all that thrilled at first at the prospect of her daughter choosing a school so far from home. But Staley recruited LaShauna as much as she did Bree, and LaShauna was struck by her honesty. She did not try to sell them dreams, only her vision: that she'd love for Bree to join her in Columbia, but the team was replete with good players, so if individual accolades were their thing, maybe their place was elsewhere.
Bree announced her commitment to South Carolina the same day George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis. While the country reeled in the days and weeks and months after, LaShauna says that as Bree was figuring out how to feel, she did know this much: She wanted to be close to Staley. "There were times when Bree felt like she had been slighted because of the color of her skin," LaShauna says. "And so she felt like, 'I'm gonna go with this woman. And this woman is going to help me become a woman but also get what I deserve.'"
Back in Philadelphia, Darrell Gates is watching. He was glued to a television screen playing a VHS highlight of Dawn Staley from 40 years ago and he's captivated by her still. Gates plays in an over-50 league, but on weekends as the afternoon tip gets closer, he's steadfast: "I'm outta here," he tells his teammates. "I need to go see her team play."
In Columbia, when Leon Lott and LaShauna Hall leave the arena, they pass by the stretch of Lincoln Street between College and Blossom named Dawn Staley Way. And hundreds of miles north, when Jimmy Richardson heads to work at the center in North Philly, if Gates swings by his old home court there, they'll make their way between 23rd and 25th on Diamond Street, a stretch called Dawn Staley Lane.
Here she is and there she is. This Philadelphian. This South Carolinian. This basketball player and coach and person.
This weekend, Staley will be in Tampa, Florida, pursuing another title, and no matter what happens next, and no matter where it happens, the places she has been and the people still there will be with her.
"If she wins," Richardson says, "we win."