A two-time Final Four veteran and national champion staff member takes the next step in a coaching career that’s just getting started — on the same day she got married
The South Carolina Gamecocks have built one of the most decorated programs in women’s college basketball history. But the influence of what Dawn Staley has constructed in Columbia extends far beyond the players she has developed and the banners hanging in Colonial Life Arena. It lives in the coaches, the staff members, and the administrators who have passed through that program — and who carry its standards and culture with them wherever they go next.
Chloe Rice is the latest proof of that pipeline.
Rice has officially joined the staff at Loyola University Chicago as an assistant coach, linking up with first-year head coach Morgan Paige — the former associate head coach at Kansas who was named to lead the Ramblers program in April. The hire brings a young, credentialed, and deeply motivated coaching mind to a program looking to establish a new identity under new leadership, and it continues a career arc that Rice has navigated with impressive intentionality since her playing days ended.
“I’m extremely grateful to join this staff and university,” Rice said in a statement released by the team. “I want to thank Coach Paige and the athletic department for this incredible opportunity. I’m excited to continue growing alongside them and to help carry on the great tradition of Loyola Ramblers basketball.”
A Resume Built on Winning Culture
To understand why Loyola Chicago would be excited to add Rice, you have to trace the environment she has operated in for the past several years. Rice arrived at South Carolina as a graduate assistant in 2022 and remained on staff through the 2024-25 season, ultimately serving as the assistant recruiting coordinator in her final year in Columbia.
The timing of her tenure is not incidental. South Carolina made the Final Four in all three seasons Rice served as a graduate assistant — and in 2024, the Gamecocks completed a perfect undefeated season and won the national championship. Rice was on the staff for all of it. She sat in those meetings, absorbed that culture, watched how Dawn Staley builds, recruits, and develops players at the highest level, and contributed directly to the program’s continued rise. In the 2025 cycle, she helped South Carolina sign the fourth-ranked recruiting class in the country — a meaningful responsibility for someone at the assistant recruiting coordinator level.
That kind of experience — being present, actively contributing, and learning from a Hall of Fame program through championship runs — simply cannot be replicated in a classroom or replicated at programs still working to establish their foundation. Rice didn’t just watch South Carolina win. She was part of how it was built.
The Grand Canyon Chapter: Learning to Lead on Her Own
Before landing at Loyola, Rice took a critical developmental step. She spent the 2024-25 season as a full-time assistant coach at Grand Canyon University under head coach Winston Gandy — himself a former South Carolina assistant coach, and another example of how the Gamecock coaching tree has branched outward across the country. Grand Canyon was Rice’s first full-time assistant job, and it gave her something that even the richest graduate assistant experience cannot fully provide: the daily responsibility of running a program, not just supporting one.
The year at GCU was about more than credentials. It was about learning how to build relationships with players independently, how to operate within a staff dynamic as an equal contributor rather than a developing student, and how to apply the lessons absorbed in Columbia to a different context with different resources and a different competitive landscape. Every coach needs that formative first full-time role — the one where the training wheels come off. Rice got hers at Grand Canyon, and now she arrives at Loyola with a complete picture of what it looks like both inside an elite program and on the floor of a mid-major operation.
A Playing Career Worth Remembering
Before she was a coach, Rice was a player. She played at Saint Louis and Bradley, and it was at Bradley where she left her most lasting mark. Rice helped lead the Braves to their first NCAA Tournament appearance in program history in 2021 — a milestone moment for a mid-major program — and was named team captain for the 2021-22 season. She earned Missouri Valley Conference Honor Roll recognition in both 2021 and 2022, blending on-court leadership with academic distinction.
That combination — player who experienced breakthrough success, academic excellence, and program-first leadership — is exactly the background that programs look for when building a coaching staff. The best assistant coaches understand what it feels like to be the player in the film session, to need coaching in a way that lands, to carry the weight of expectations in a locker room. Rice carries that understanding from lived experience.
She added to her academic portfolio at South Carolina, earning a master’s degree in sport and entertainment management after her bachelor’s degree in sports communication from Bradley — a credential that speaks to someone who has been intentional about building a complete professional identity.
The Perfect Ending to One Chapter — and Beginning of Another
There is one more detail about the day of Rice’s hiring announcement that deserves its own mention. On the same day Loyola University Chicago publicly announced Rice’s addition to the coaching staff, she married former South Carolina long jumper Blair Brooks. By any measure, May 13 was one for the record books in the Rice household — a personal milestone and a professional one, celebrated simultaneously.
It’s the kind of story that captures something real about the people who build careers in college athletics. The commitments are total, the relationships forged in those programs are lasting, and the personal and professional chapters often overlap in ways that produce moments worth remembering.
For Morgan Paige’s inaugural staff at Loyola, Rice brings championship DNA, recruitment expertise, a player’s perspective, and the kind of hunger that comes from someone who has seen exactly what a program looks like at its absolute best — and is now ready to help build that standard somewhere new.
The South Carolina pipeline keeps flowing. And Loyola Chicago is better for it.
