Dawn Staley has a knack for developing assistants. Who’s part of her coaching tree?
In Dawn Staley’s 25 years as a head coach, including 18 at South Carolina, she’s become known to produce professional talent.
Staley has sent 14 players to the WNBA in her time as a head coach at Temple and South Carolina. Her talent for developing players has been her calling card, and it’s helped her win three national titles and 648 games .
But Staley has another talent that’s been a topic of discussion during No. 2 South Carolina’s first week of the 2025-26 season.
She has a knack for developing head coaches.
Dawn Staley’s coaching tree
The Gamecocks opened this season with two games against teams led by Staley’s former assistants.
On Monday, South Carolina beat Grand Canyon 94-54 in its season opener. The Antelopes are led by first-year head coach Winston Gandy, who spent the previous two seasons as a Gamecocks’ assistant.
On Friday, the Gamecocks faced Bowling Green. The Falcons are led by Fred Chmiel, who was an assistant at South Carolina from 2015-23.
“Anybody that comes in here, whether they’re family or foe, we want to beat,” Staley said after the win over Grand Canyon at Colonial Life Arena. “So it was cool. It’ll be cool to have Fred back with his team, and I hope it’s the same results.
Gandy, Chmiel and the late Nikki McCray-Penson make up the three main branches of Staley’s coaching tree: assistant coaches who left South Carolina to take Division I head coaching jobs.
McCray-Penson was on Staley’s first staff at South Carolina and was an assistant for the Gamecocks until 2017. She left to take the head coach position at Old Dominion where she stayed until 2020 before becoming a head coach in the SEC at Mississippi State. She resigned in 2021, citing health issues, and was an assistant briefly at Rutgers before she died in 2023 at 51 after being diagnosed with cancer and pneumonia, according to the Tennessean.
There are plenty of other former assistants (and players) who have left Staley’s staff and spread out around the coaching world.
Some of those include Cynthia Jordan (a former director of operations and now-Florida assistant), Darius Taylor (an assistant for Staley and Temple and USC who is now at Texas A&M in a general manager-type role), Carla McGhee (a former USC assistant who also logged stints at Auburn but now works for Nike) and Olivia Gaines (who played at USC for Staley and is now the head coach at Allen University).
Helping assistant coaches turn into head coaches is a point of pride for Staley.
“Ultimately that’s their dream,” Staley said. “The dream isn’t just with players. The dream is with people and the people I work with.”
Lessons learned from Staley
Coaching is a copycat profession. The best coaches’ plays and styles are eventually adopted as the norm or adapted and tweaked by others.
Staley is a strong influence on how Chmiel does things at Bowling Green in Ohio, simply because the two share a long history.
Staley hired Chmiel as an assistant during her final two seasons at Temple and again at South Carolina in 2015. Together, they won national titles in 2017 and 2022 with the Gamecocks. He was also an assistant for the WNBA’s Charlotte Sting in 2005 when Staley was a player there. Chmiel said “80 to 90%” of what he does at Bowling Green he learned during his time with Staley, joking that sometimes it happens without even knowing he’s doing it.
“I stole everything from Dawn,” Chmiel said. “I took everything. ... I’m different from her, clearly. You’ve always got to put your own little spin on it, but the origins of it, pretty much the majority of it, a lot of it is Dawn.”
Gandy said his biggest takeaway from his time at South Carolina was learning how hard it is to win. South Carolina was 72-4 in Gandy’s two seasons as a Gamecock, which included a national title win and two SEC tournament championships.
“That’s something that I hadn’t gotten until, obviously, I was fortunate enough to be there,” Gandy said. “Once you see how much it takes, you then are able to kind of see the difference.”
Both Gandy and Chmiel are building programs with their own image, but both still emulate what Staley does at South Carolina. Gandy specifically said he tries to emulate her consistency, the way she’s involved in the local community and her leading by example.
“With Dawn no job is too small, no job is too big,” Gandy said. “There’s not very many times you see head coaches that will help get bags off a plane, bags off a bus, sweep the floor, go and sit down with (and) eat lunch with the managers and stuff like that. There’s a reason why people are so connected to her.”
Who could be next?
The easy answer to who will be the next Gamecock assistant to earn a head coaching job is Staley’s newest assistant, Wendale Farrow.
Farrow was hired from Southern Cal shortly after Gandy left for Grand Canyon, in Phoenix. Staley said she wasn’t shy about using that trend as a tactic to convince Farrow to leave the West Coast for Columbia.
“The two guys sitting in your seat got jobs, head coaching jobs,” Staley recalled telling Farrow last week.
Farrow told The State in June that he’s aware of the trend of assistants in his spot being plucked away for head coaching gigs. He said he’s focused on his time at South Carolina for now, but knows there aren’t many better people to learn how to be a head coach from than Staley.
“Whatever soil I’m in, I want to grow from that soil,” Farrow said. “I never try to forecast what’s next, and it’s always led me to what should be next for my career. I think that’s the same with Coach Staley. I feel like she’s going to water me in a lot of ways that naturally, becoming a head coach will be my next step. ... If I do what I’m supposed to do here, I feel like I’ll be equipped for that next call.”
Other candidates could be veteran assistant Jolette Law, who was the head coach at Illinois from 2007-12, and younger assistants Khadijah Sessions and Mary Wooley.
Regardless of who comes next, Chmiel said he feels like Staley’s coaching tree is a bit “diluted.” It could be bigger, but assistants simply opt to not leave what he called a “utopia” for assistant coaches in Columbia. The prime example is Lisa Boyer, who has been an assistant with Staley since 2002, has worked as a college coach in the past and surely has had quality head coaching offers in the last 20 years.
“Nobody wants to leave her,” Chmiel said. “If you were at a different university and you were working for somebody else, man, you’re climbing the ladder and it would be so easy to just jump ship and go take a head coaching job.
“But here, you want to be selective. You want to put yourself in a great situation … You want to make sure that when you leave, it’s for the right job and the right reason, because being there, that’s the utopia of being an assistant in college basketball.”
This story was originally published November 7, 2025 at 7:00 AM.
