Dawn Staley, a Hall of Famer and the current coach of the South Carolina Gamecocks’ women’s basketball team, said that she had a formal interview with the New York Knicks for the franchise’s head coaching vacancy before the organization hired Mike Brown.
“I interviewed for the Knicks. I did,” Staley said during a recent appearance on the Post Moves podcast hosted by the Indiana Fever’s Aliyah Boston and former basketball great Candace Parker. “It was the same interview that everybody else [had] that was in their candidate pool. Same thing.”
Staley, who has won three national championships as the head coach of South Carolina, discussed how that conversation went with New York’s premier basketball team.
“It was like hours. But in the interview, I thought I did pretty well,” she explained. “I was well prepared for the interview.”
Staley even went on to say that she would have accepted the position had she been extended an offer by the team.
“If the Knicks would have offered me the job, I would have had to do it,” she said. “Not just for me. It’s for women. Just to break open that [door], I would have to. It’s the New York Knicks, and I’m from Philly, but it’s the freaking New York Knicks. And I did say that in the interview.”
Although Staley described how she would not take any NBA job, there would have been immense pressure on her as the first female head coach in league history. She also would’ve been under constant scrutiny working in the United States’ largest media market.
“The NBA has to be ready for a female head coach,” she elaborated. “You can’t just interview somebody and say, ‘We’re gonna hire her.’”
Interestingly, Staley claimed that she “probably lost the job” after asking questions about the franchise and the league’s readiness for a female head coach.
“I think I probably lost the job by asking this question… ‘How – if you hired me as the first female coach in the NBA – would it impact your daily job?’ Because it would. It would because you’re going to be asked questions that you don’t have to be asked if you hire a male coach,” she said. “There’s going to be the media. There’s going to be all this stuff that you’re going to have to deal with that you didn’t have to deal with, and you don’t have to deal with when you hire a male. And then that got them to thinking. That really got them to thinking about, ‘Hm, maybe she’s right?’ And then, I felt the energy change after that.”
Staley jokingly blames herself for asking too many questions.
“So I shot myself in the foot by being inquisitive,” she concluded. “Asking all those darn questions.”
