From Columbia to the country, the coaches shaped by Staley are carrying her championship DNA to programs across women’s basketball
There are coaches who win. There are coaches who develop players. And then there are coaches like Dawn Staley — who do both while simultaneously building the next generation of leaders in the sport. In the 18-plus years she has spent running one of the most dominant programs in the history of women’s college basketball, Staley has done something that extends far beyond championships and recruiting rankings. She has built a coaching tree that is quietly but unmistakably reshaping women’s basketball from the ground up.
Staley has a knack for developing head coaches, and helping assistant coaches turn into head coaches is a point of pride for her. As she has put it: “Ultimately that’s their dream. The dream isn’t just with players. The dream is with people and the people I work with.”
That philosophy has produced real, tangible results — coaches who have taken the lessons, culture, and competitive standards of South Carolina women’s basketball and transplanted them into programs across the country. Here is the full picture of where every branch of Staley’s coaching tree stands today.
The Inner Circle: Who’s Still in Columbia
Before tracing where her branches have spread, it’s worth honoring the roots — the coaches who have remained in Columbia and continue to help Staley build.
Lisa Boyer — Associate Head Coach, South Carolina
Lisa Boyer joined Staley’s coaching staff in 2008 as an assistant coach before earning her promotion to associate head coach in 2010. She has been working under Staley since the 2002-03 season during their time at Temple. In her 16 seasons with the Gamecocks, Boyer has led the program to 12 25-win seasons and 12 NCAA Tournament appearances.
Boyer is the longest-tenured member of Staley’s staff — a steady, encyclopedic basketball mind who has been present for every national championship, every Final Four run, and every impossible moment along the way. Staley has described her as someone who has “stamina to talk about basketball and what’s happening every single pass — not possession, pass — and if it’s not perfected in the way that her vision sees it, we hear about it. Boyer is the standard-bearer inside the program, the constant thread running through everything South Carolina has built.
Jolette Law — Assistant Coach, South Carolina
Jolette Law joined the program in June 2017 and is widely renowned as one of the best recruiters in the country. Her ability to identify and develop talent has been central to South Carolina’s sustained excellence in the years following their first national championship. Staley has described Law’s coaching demeanor as “kind of calm and cool,” a steady presence who complements the more vocal personalities on the staff.
Khadijah Sessions — Assistant Coach, South Carolina
Perhaps the most beloved addition to Staley’s bench in recent years, Sessions is a former Gamecock player turned coach whose energy and authenticity have made her a fan favorite and a genuine asset to the program.
Sessions is described as someone who played an integral role for the Gamecocks as a player, leading the squad in steals in both of her last two seasons at South Carolina. After retiring as a player, she turned to coaching, privately training young basketball players and leading a youth AAU team before joining Ridge View High School as its junior varsity head coach and an assistant for its varsity squad. She helped the varsity team claim the 2022 5A State Championship and saw 10 of her players go on to play at the college level.
Sessions was initially hesitant when Staley called about joining the staff — it would have been an automatic “no” had the offer come from anyone else in the women’s game. Only Staley was worth veering off the path she had determined for herself. But there was the homecoming aspect, the learning opportunity, and the ability to say she was part of Staley’s coaching tree — an entry in her resume that would jump off the page.
Staley has described Sessions as the staff’s “youthful energy” — “Khadijah is wild” — and players have fully embraced that personality, knowing it comes from a genuine place of wanting them to succeed. Sessions went viral during the 2024 SEC Tournament for her reaction to Kamilla Cardoso’s buzzer-beating three-pointer against Tennessee, sprinting across the court in unbridled joy — the moment was so perfectly her that A’ja Wilson commented from the sidelines of her WNBA career.
Branch One: Fred Chmiel — Head Coach, Bowling Green State University
Years at South Carolina: 2015–2023 | Now: Third Year at BGSU
Chmiel spent eight seasons on Staley’s staff, and together they won national titles in 2017 and 2022 with the Gamecocks, with South Carolina advancing to the Final Four in each of his final three seasons there.
When Chmiel left in April 2023 to take the head coaching position at Bowling Green State University, he carried something invaluable with him. He has said that “80 to 90%” of what he does at Bowling Green he learned during his time with Staley, joking that sometimes it happens without even knowing he’s doing it. “I stole everything from Dawn. I took everything,” Chmiel said. “You’ve always got to put your own little spin on it, but the origins of it, pretty much the majority of it, a lot of it is Dawn.”
In his first season at the BGSU helm, Chmiel guided the Falcons to a winning record and a postseason tournament berth despite a veritable plethora of injuries. Then, in season number two, the Orange and Brown ended the regular season by winning seven of eight games, finishing with 18 overall victories.
In his third season (2025-26), Bowling Green finished with an 11-11 record (4-7, 8th in the MAC). It was a transitional year — the season ended in the MAC Tournament quarterfinals with a loss to Ball State, and four key players subsequently entered the transfer portal. Chmiel acknowledged the growing pains, but also made clear the foundation he is building. Heading into the season, Chmiel had emphasized a new identity built on the defensive end: “I think we struggled with having an identity last year. But this year, I think we have a little bit stronger identity — we have a foundation built on defense.”
The challenge now is roster continuity and rebuilding through recruiting — but the blueprint Chmiel is working from was designed by the winningest coach in the country. That doesn’t disappear overnight.
Notably, when South Carolina opened their season against Bowling Green, Chmiel acknowledged the bittersweet nature of facing his former employer, saying after the game: “Yeah, it’s the number two team in the country for a reason.” He is clear-eyed about the journey, and equally clear about the destination he is aiming for. On3
Branch Two: Winston Gandy — Head Coach, Grand Canyon University
Years at South Carolina: 2023–2025 | Now: First Year Completed at GCU
Winston Gandy was named the 10th head coach of the Grand Canyon women’s basketball program on March 24, 2025, entering as one of the top young coaches in the nation. Gandy joined the Gamecocks staff in 2023, helping lead the squad to a 38-0 record and the 2024 national championship — just the 10th team in the history of the sport to go undefeated in one campaign.
Specializing with the guard position, Gandy mentored All-American Te-Hina Paopao, who led the nation in 3-point percentage (46.8%) in 2023-24.
His first season at GCU was nothing short of a baptism by fire. Grand Canyon went 13-19 overall and 11-9 in their first season in the Mountain West Conference before falling to Colorado State on a buzzer beater in the second round of the conference tournament. That record doesn’t tell the whole story. Gandy walked into a program that had just gone 32-3 under his predecessor, faced a dramatically higher level of competition in a new conference with a near-completely rebuilt roster, and immediately scheduled the nation’s powerhouse programs to prepare his team for what was ahead.
Gandy said his biggest lesson from the year was patience: “I’ve learned how important patience is — and how hard it is to win.” He intentionally scheduled games against South Carolina, Oregon, and Gonzaga so his players could feel what competing against elite programs felt like before conference play began.
Gandy has been explicit about the influence Staley has had on his approach, saying: “I’m on record saying how awesome Dawn was to work for and how phenomenal of a leader and a coach she is. I think that’s how I’ve emulated my schedule a little bit, in the sense that she plays anybody anywhere.”
Gandy’s coaching staff at GCU also includes Chloe Rice, who worked for Dawn Staley on South Carolina’s last three Final Four teams, including the past two years alongside Gandy on the Gamecocks’ bench. She was an assistant recruiting coordinator for South Carolina before joining Gandy in Phoenix. The Staley influence doesn’t end with Gandy — it runs through his entire staff.
Branch Three: The Late Nikki McCray-Penson — A Legacy That Will Never Fade
Years at South Carolina: 2008–2017 | Head Coach: Old Dominion & Mississippi State
No account of Staley’s coaching tree is complete without honoring the woman who was its first and most powerful branch — and whose loss continues to be felt across women’s basketball.
Nikki McCray-Penson joined the coaching staff as an assistant coach for the South Carolina Gamecocks in 2008 — right when Staley took the job — and remained there through the Gamecocks’ first national championship in 2017.
The two were more than colleagues. They were gold-medal teammates at the 1996 Atlanta and 2000 Sydney Olympics — a bond forged in the fires of international competition that translated seamlessly into one of the most trusted coach-assistant relationships in the sport.
After South Carolina won its NCAA title in 2017, McCray-Penson was offered the head coaching job at Old Dominion. She helped the Monarchs progress from eight wins in 2018 to 21 wins in 2019 and was named Conference USA Coach of the Year after guiding ODU to a regular-season conference title. She then moved to Mississippi State as head coach in 2020, taking over one of the SEC’s most historic programs — before resigning in 2021 citing health reasons.
She returned as an assistant at Rutgers under Coquese Washington before she died on July 7, 2023, at age 51 after being diagnosed with cancer and pneumonia.
When McCray-Penson was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013 while coaching at South Carolina, Staley was right beside her — rushing over when she got the phone call, attending doctor’s appointments and chemotherapy sessions. “I knew hard work. I knew the type of coach, player and person Nikki was,” Staley said. “I had to get Nik because we’d been through it, we’d been in the foxhole together, we accomplished incredible feats.”
McCray-Penson’s legacy lives on in every coach who sat in those South Carolina staff meetings, in every defensive principle passed down through the program, and in the standard she set for what it means to leave a place better than you found it.
The Deeper Roots: Others Who Passed Through
Beyond the primary branches, Staley’s influence extends to other coaches and administrators who have spread out around the coaching world. These include Cynthia Jordan, a former director of operations who is now a Florida assistant; Darius Taylor, an assistant for Staley at both Temple and South Carolina who is now at Texas A&M in a general manager-type role; and Carla McGhee, a former South Carolina assistant with her own coaching career.
The list keeps growing every year — former players turned coaches, former graduate assistants now running recruiting operations at other programs, former staff members who carry the South Carolina standard into every building they enter.
What It All Means
That community and family feeling extends to every coach that’s been through Staley’s program. The legendary coach, entering her 18th season in South Carolina, often extends as much support as she can to her former assistants.
But make no mistake — when tip-off comes, the support pauses. “Anybody that comes in here, whether they’re family or foe, we want to beat,” Staley has said. The respect is genuine. The competition is real. And both things can exist simultaneously because that’s the standard Staley has always demanded.
Fred Chmiel is building a defensive identity in Ohio, brick by brick, using the blueprint he borrowed from Columbia. Winston Gandy is bringing championship-level expectations to the desert of Phoenix, learning the hard lessons of first-year head coaching while staying true to what he knows. Khadijah Sessions is lighting up practice gyms in South Carolina, pouring her energy into the next generation of Gamecocks. Lisa Boyer and Jolette Law remain pillars of one of the most successful staffs in all of college sports. And Nikki McCray-Penson’s spirit lives in every program her former colleagues touch.
Dawn Staley has built a dynasty in Columbia. But she has also built something bigger — a network of coaches, leaders, and believers who are taking women’s basketball to new corners of the country and elevating it everywhere they land.
That is the real legacy. The tree keeps growing. 🌳🖤❤️
