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Throughout her career in women’s basketball, South Carolina coach Dawn Staley has remained very private. The Gamecocks women’s basketball coach has never publicly disclosed a relationship, but her family has been key to her success. “My parents made me,” she told ESPN. “My foundation is rooted in discipline. They gave me that.” Here, get to know Dawn Staley’s family.

Her mom, Estelle Staley

Dawn’s mom, Estelle, passed away in 2017. She is from South Carolina, though spent much of her life in Philadelphia.

“My mother grew up in South Carolina,” Dawn wrote in The Player’s Tribune. “This was the 1940s and early ’50s. Segregation was still legal. Separate bathrooms. All of it. She left the South at the age of 13, seeking equality and opportunity. I think about her a lot … I think about what she made possible for me 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. I also know what me coaching here symbolizes in light of history. When I walk around different neighborhoods in this city, I’ll hear Black people say, ‘I had never been on that campus before coming to your game.’ I understand that my success isn’t about championships — it’s about bringing together people who were once, and in some ways still are, divided. It’s bigger than basketball.”

Dawn added, “We grew up in poverty. My mom was a domestic worker. She cleaned houses and buildings. That was her only real employment option. We didn’t have a lot of nice things — clothes and shoes, things like that. You don’t think much about it when you’re young. Maybe I wanted some nice sneakers sometimes, but where we were from was all we knew.”

Estelle passed away after a battle with Alzheimer’s; she keeps lilies in her office as a tribute to her mom, as “they were her favorite flower.”

Her dad, Clarence Staley

Dawn’s dad, Clarence, passed away in 2006 from an illness. Like Estelle, he was from South Carolina and moved to Philadelphia, where he worked as a carpenter.

Per ESPN, “Clarence and Estelle Staley moved to North Philadelphia from South Carolina in the 1950s, when they were still teenagers. They married young and in 1967 moved into a three-bedroom, single-bath row house, where they raised five kids—three boys, two girls, the youngest their daughter Dawn.”

Her siblings

She has four siblings: Tracey, Lawrence, Anthony, and Eric. Tracey was diagnosed with leukemia in 2020, and Dawn was determined to help her navigate her health. “I called everybody in America, I think,” Dawn told the Associated Press about care for her sister. Their brother, Lawrence, was a match for a bone-marrow transplant, and Tracey successfully underwent a transplant in 2021. Dawn and Tracey are now advocates for “Be the Match” donor registration, especially noting the need for more Black bone marrow donors.

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