COLUMBIA, S.C. – Bakari Sellers, the former South Carolina state representative and current CNN political commentator, was at the Democratic National Convention in August when he ran into Susan Rice.

“I told her, ‘You know my girl’s coming,’” Sellers recalled in a conversation with USA TODAY Sports.

Rice, the former United Nations ambassador and National Security Advisor under Barack Obama, wasn’t sure who he meant.

 “Dawn’s coming,” he said, referring to South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley.

Here is somebody in Rice who has been in rooms with the most powerful people in the world, worked in three presidential administrations and been part of some of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of our time. And yet the prospect of getting face time with Staley was so exciting, Rice wasn’t going to leave until they got to meet.

“You’ve got to realize, Ambassador Rice waited right there about 30 minutes for Dawn to make her way across the arena just so they could talk basketball,” Sellers said. “I mean, she’s bigger than life.”

And her life, especially right now as she begins her 17^th season at South Carolina with another team ranked No. 1 in the preseason, is bigger than ever. The Gamecocks open their title defense Monday in Las Vegas against Michigan.

Just take a trip through Staley’s social media account where you see her photographed with everyone from Obama to Tom Brady, Serena Williams to Guy Fieri, Pharrell Williams to Nancy Pelosi and everywhere from the New York Stock Exchange to a Gucci fashion show in Milan to the Balenciaga/Under Armour show in Shanghai to the Paris Olympics to the DNC.

And that’s all just since winning her third national championship in April.

“I love that for her,” said Te-Hina Paopao, the senior guard from California who transferred from Oregon to play for Staley last year. “She’s so cool, so chill. I want to be like coach Staley. One day she’s in Paris and the next day she’s at practice.”

Dawn Staley – a star with unvarnished authenticity

In an era of college athletics where so many coaches feel consumed by the job like never before thanks to the complications of roster building through name, image and likeness and the transfer portal, Staley has managed to leverage on-court success into a level of mainstream celebrity no women’s college basketball coach has ever achieved.

Despite a Hall of Fame playing career including three Olympic gold medals, Staley has never been more culturally relevant than she is now at age 54 in a role that goes well beyond the importance of a Black woman building a college basketball dynasty out of nothing.

On any given day, she’s a fashion icon, a Philadelphia sports superfan, a champion for equality and someone politicians and celebrities want to be around. Even her dog, Champ, the 7-year old Havanese, has social media accounts with thousands of followers.

At this moment, as millions of new fans have been drawn in by the Caitlin Clark phenomenon, Staley is the bridge that connects the rise of women’s basketball as a major entity to a celebrity culture that now absorbs the sport rather than shuns it.

“She and Caitlin have a lot of similarities in that they have both crossed over the sports media landscape into the mainstream media,” said Debbie Antonelli, the basketball analyst for ESPN and other networks who called Staley’s games as a player with the Charlotte Sting. “They are stories wherever they go. Not every women’s basketball coach or player can say that.”

Staley’s explanation for how it all happened – life was not like this when she was grinding it out in the early years at South Carolina, struggling just to make the NCAA tournament – is simpler and more organic than you might think.

When you see her pop up in these places that belie the stereotypes around singularly focused and stressed-out coaches or rubbing elbows with the rich and famous, it is not part of some public relations strategy or recruiting gimmick. It is simply because the success she achieved has opened doors that now, at this point in her life, she is ready to walk through.

“I was not invited to certain stuff, but when you win and you’re successful, you get invited,” she said. “If I was a player, I probably would have never gone to any of it – anything that wasn’t basketball-related. But now that I’m older, I’m able to experience. I’m unafraid.

“Before, I was singularly focused on my craft, and it was weird. I wouldn’t even want our players to be the way I was because I didn’t really have friends, and I was OK with it. Now I’ve probably got more friends in my life than I’ve ever had, and we enjoy things together, we go on vacation together. I want to see things. I want to compare the Balenciaga fashion show to the Gucci fashion show.”

That brand of unvarnished authenticity – whether it’s talking about herself, criticizing the pay scale for coaches in women’s basketball, highlighting the lack of opportunity for Black coaches or even being open about her preferences in the upcoming election – partly explains why she has carved out such a prominent place in sports culture.

“She’s true to herself and she’s really, really comfortable in her own skin,” said Lisa Boyer, who has been her right-hand assistant since they started together at Temple in 2002 when Staley was simultaneously coaching in college and playing in the WNBA. “She’s not going to sit by and (let) things go. Part of it is because, you know, she has a team and she has young women. She has to step up. I’m not saying she’s consciously doing it, but she is leading them. She’s showing them a way.”

This has manifested in various words and deeds that, in theory, might make Staley a controversial figure in one of the nation’s most politically conservative states, one that didn’t even remove the Confederate flag from its capitol building until nine years ago.

And, in fact, it is difficult not to connect those dots at a time when the nation is on the verge of a choice between former president Donald Trump and vice president Kamala Harris, who would become the first Black woman to reach the highest office if she wins on Tuesday.

‘It’s OK, we can differ’

While most college coaches do whatever they can to avoid wading into politics at this time of year – Nick Saban in 2016 famously said he forgot that it was election day – there are exceptions. And the day before sitting down for an interview with USA TODAY Sports, Staley posted a picture to her X, formerly known as Twitter, account with her “I Voted” sticker and the following caption: “This just happened and I’m sure @KamalaHarris would approve of this vote.”

Though Staley is aware she lives in a state where Trump won by 14 and 12 percentage points in the previous two elections and admitted she’s “worried” about what will happen if he wins the presidency, she does not see this as a dividing line between herself and South Carolina’s fan base.

“It’s OK,” she said. “We can differ. I always say we can agree to disagree agreeably, and if a lot more people would take that approach, we’ll be much better off.

“But I will speak from my heart. I don’t think I’ve changed from Year 1 until now. I really am the same. I’ll answer questions from what my experience is at that particular time.

Of course, there is some backlash and a segment of the fan base who would prefer she “stick to sports.” Staley sees that, mostly on social media, and even engages it from time to time. But at the end of the day, this is an easy alliance: Staley is unquestionably one of the most important figures in the history of the university, and South Carolina has embraced and invested in women’s basketball at a level nobody could have imagined a decade ago with crowds that regularly fill their 18,000-seat arena.

“She has a great deal of runway,” Sellers said. “It doesn’t happen overnight. She wins, her girls are responsible and good citizens and good corporate citizens. Therefore she’s able to go out and endorse Kamala Harris and say what she wants to say. But you’ve got to remind people sometimes that she’s from Philly with the ‘F.’ She grew up in a different lifestyle, and that comes out a lot. That’s her edge.”

Fighting for gender equity

Staley said she does not have a personal relationship with the vice president, though Harris did stop by the team’s shootaround in January during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day visit to Columbia for an NAACP event.

And at this point, Staley has so much experience meeting presidents from Olympic gold medal and national championship White House visits that one might wonder if a bigger role in politics or elected office might be tempting. She was adamant that the basketball court is the platform where she can make a difference.

“I think the biggest moment for me was when she spoke at the ESPYs about just the different challenges within the game and for herself,” said Bree Hall, a senior Gamecocks guard who has been part of two national championship teams. “I was just like, wow that was incredible. That was so powerful and I feel like other people looked at that and were like, ‘Wow she’s more than just a coach. She’s a leader.’”

In that speech earlier this summer, where Staley accepted the Jimmy V Award for Perseverance, she laid out clearly why this job means more to her than a $3 million salary and a growing trophy case.

“How do I not fight injustice when I ask them to do things the right way?” she said. “How do I not fight for fairness when I ask them not to cheat themselves, not to cut corners? How do I not fight for equity when I tell them they can climb as high as they want?

“How do I not fight pay disparity when I do the same job and get paid less but win more?

“They’re watching me. 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.”

And suddenly, everything that has happened at South Carolina over the last half-dozen years makes sense. Becoming the sport’s dominant program isn’t just the talent or the X’s and O’s, though of course those things obviously matter a great deal.

It’s the idea that Staley and her program now represent: You can, in fact, demand better of people and institutions the way Staley did when she went to South Carolina and sought a contract extension that addressed gender equity. You can force those who may not agree with you about important things to appreciate the value you bring to a community. You can win and be generous, as Staley showed when she sent pieces of the net from her first national championship to every Black head coach in women’s basketball. You can have it all without compromising the values you believe are important and speaking up about important issues.

“She’s not rude or contentious but she is going to tell the truth,” Boyer said. “I don’t think she’s going to be silent about certain things, and I think that’s growth. That’s something that’s evolved as she’s been here, moving to South Carolina and not really knowing (what to expect), but the people here really embraced her especially when we started winning. There’s not a lot of nonsense here. People know where Dawn stands on most situations, and we run a pretty tight ship. I think those are values people of South Carolina really admire and can relate to.”

And they are the values that have driven sustained success: Six Final Fours over the past nine NCAA tournaments and a championship team last year that, remarkably, had seven players averaging between 8.1 and 14.4 points while going 38-0.

Maintaining that kind of depth takes sacrifice and an unnatural level of buy-in from players, particularly now that they can so freely move around from one program to another. But it is not an accident.

Last year, even as Clark was driving most of the national conversation in women’s basketball, you might have noticed that South Carolina did not complain about the attention deficit even as they were on the way to a historic season. In fact, after the championship game where South Carolina beat Iowa 87-75, Staley went out of her way to thank Clark for “lifting up our sport.”

It was one more example of the type of leadership that has drawn a level praise from politicians, athletes and entertainers that borders on the absurd. Few people in any sport would have as high an approval rating as Staley right now as she starts the journey to a potential fourth championship.

So she will keep sharing, keep advocating, keep being herself even in a world and environment at South Carolina where some might have wondered if it was tenable.

But now that the championships have started to come in bunches, Staley has become something beyond even women’s basketball itself: An American sports icon whose voice and what she represents matters as much as her clipboard.

“I’m not going to subject myself to living in a box,” she said. “If I have something to say, if I have a belief, if I have a perspective, we live in a day and age where you share it. You share it. Whether that pulls people in or pushes people away, that’s really not on me.”

“But I’m blessed. My players allow me to be me.”