How Dawn Staley’s salary raise had a ripple effect throughout women’s basketball
Five years ago, when Dawn Staley returned to Columbia, S. C. , from the 2021 NCAA Tournament in the bubble, she was left with a sinking feeling about how to talk with her players about the inequities the women’s teams had experienced during the tournament.
That year, the NCAA made headlines as disparities between the men’s and women’s accommodations, facilities and resources were exposed. Staley was the first coach to publicly call out then-NCAA president Mark Emmert by name in a tweet, and though the uproar ultimately caused the NCAA to commission an external investigation, Staley still felt there was more she needed to do. That April it became obvious.
As she witnessed South Carolina’s men’s coach, Frank Martin, receive a contract extension that would continue to pay him significantly more than her (despite her team out-performing his teams), Staley knew what she needed to do. Staley asked her longtime agent to stand down when she decided to negotiate with the university. Instead, she asked an attorney with long-standing knowledge of university politics and practices if he’d represent her in the negotiations.
“Sometimes you have to do things that are unconventional,” Staley told The Athletic in 2022 when discussing her decision. Staley ended up inking a contract worth $22. 4 million over seven years, averaging out to $3.
2 million a year, just slightly less than what Martin got. (In January 2025, she signed an extension that would pay her more than $4 million a year through the 2029-30 season, making her the highest-paid coach in women’s college basketball. Martin was fired in 2022.
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