There’s a particular kind of coach who is dangerous to underestimate — the one who has actually lived the system they’re installing.
Tina Roy is that coach.
The former South Carolina guard is returning to the Palmetto State, named in April as the first-ever girls basketball coach at ALA Blythewood, a charter school opening this fall in the Midlands. She isn’t inheriting a program. She isn’t stepping into an established culture. She is building one from nothing — and if her playing days under Dawn Staley taught her anything, she knows exactly what that foundation should look like.
The Reset That Made Her Ready
Before this moment, Roy needed a detour.
After more than a decade away from home, she returned to Kaplan, Louisiana — her hometown — to coach at Kaplan High School from 2023 to 2026. On paper, it looked like a step back. In reality, it was exactly what she needed.
“I think I needed it. I had been away from home for like 11 years, and I’m very family oriented,” Roy said. “It was good to go back and pour into those kids, especially my nieces that played for the team as well. Most of the teachers at the school were teachers who taught me. They became my coworkers. I enjoyed it.”
That detail — coaching her own nieces while being surrounded by her former teachers — speaks to something beyond basketball. Roy wasn’t just maintaining her coaching résumé in Louisiana. She was replenishing herself. She earned Region Coach of the Year in 2023, but the deeper reward was personal: the chance to pour into the next generation of her own family before they graduated and moved on.
With her nieces’ time at Kaplan now done, the chapter naturally closed. Roy began exploring opportunities elsewhere in Louisiana — even entertaining a head coaching job that, by her own admission, made her feel like a “traitor” to her alma mater for considering it. Then, on the very morning she was prepared to commit to staying in Louisiana, her phone lit up with a message about ALA Blythewood.
“I was like, ‘God, if it’s meant for me to stay, I’ll get this other job. But if it’s meant for me to leave, then something will happen,'” Roy recalled. “Then literally that morning … I got a message about the job.”
She took it as a sign. It’s hard to argue with the timing.
What She’s Bringing Back
Roy played for the Gamecocks from 2011 to 2016 — 134 games, primarily off the bench, averaging 4.7 points per contest as a reliable sharpshooter. The raw numbers don’t tell the full story of her value. She was part of the 2015 Final Four team and contributed to three SEC regular-season championships and two SEC Tournament titles. Those were the foundational years of what South Carolina women’s basketball has become — the early chapters of the Staley dynasty before it fully announced itself to the country.
Roy absorbed all of it. And now she’s exporting it.
“If I’m being honest, a lot of my stuff is pretty much most of the things that she taught us,” Roy said of Staley’s influence. “I always talk about return on investment, that’s what she always taught us. What you put into is what you’re gonna get out of it, so of course I instilled it in my girls. … It’s bigger than just basketball, like just different character traits. Just being disciplined, being on time — that’s most of the things I learned from playing in college. Once you finish basketball, those characteristics help you in life.”
That philosophy — basketball as a vehicle for life skills, not just wins — is the core of what Staley built in Columbia. The fact that Roy is carrying it into a brand-new high school program suggests Staley’s influence doesn’t stop at Colonial Life Arena. It ripples outward through every player who passed through her program and now stands in front of their own teams.
Staley noticed. When news broke of Roy’s return, she posted on X without hesitation: “TIN back in Cola! Let’s gooooo!”
Building From the Ground Up
ALA Blythewood will operate on a junior varsity-only schedule in its first year before adding varsity competition the following season. The school will begin as an at-large member of the South Carolina High School League before applying for full membership in 2027-28. By any measure, Roy is starting from zero.
That fact doesn’t intimidate her. If anything, it’s the draw.
“I’m building from the ground up, like, it’s my program,” Roy said. “It’s an opportunity to come back to South Carolina. I feel like a part of me wanted to come back, but I didn’t know where I would be going, then it kind of just fell into my lap.”
Her goals for year one are refreshingly grounded. She isn’t projecting state titles. She’s projecting identity.
“We want to win. I mean, I don’t like losing. But I’m also a realist,” Roy said. “I want to make the playoffs. If I can get us to make the playoffs, then we did something. … Every year just try to get further and further.”
That framing — incremental progress as the measure of success — is precisely how South Carolina’s program grew during Roy’s time there. The Gamecocks didn’t become a dynasty overnight. They built it layer by layer, year by year, until the standard became so high that anything short of a national title felt like disappointment.
Roy lived that transformation from the inside. Now she’s replicating the process on a smaller stage, with younger players, in a brand-new school that doesn’t even have a varsity schedule yet.
The Staley tree keeps growing. And in Blythewood this fall, one of its branches is planting roots of its own.
