Watch: South Carolina Coach Hit with Major Backlash After Saying Men Should Be Able to Play in Women’s Sports
It takes a lot to jerk the women’s sports spotlight away from Iowa’s Caitlin Clark as the Women’s NCAA Basketball tournament gears up for Sunday’s championship game featuring Iowa against South Carolina.
But South Carolina coach Dawn Staley managed that by saying Saturday that men belong in women’s sports.
Staley was asked during a Saturday media event if men who call themselves transgendered females should be allowed to play in women’s sports.
“Damn, you got deep on me, didn’t you?” Staley said, after a sip from a cup and before a parade of facial gestures that indicated this was not a question she really felt like answering.
“I’m of the opinion of, if you’re a woman, you should play,” she said haltingly according to a video posted to X.
“If you consider yourself a woman and you want to play sports or vice versa, you should be able to play. That’s my opinion. You want me to go deeper?” she said.
“Do you think transgender women should be able to participate in women’s college basketball,” a reporter asked.
“That’s the question you want to ask, I’ll give you that. Yes, yes. So now the barnstormer people are going to flood my timeline and be a distraction to me on one of the biggest days of our game, and I’m OK with that. I really am,” she said.
Riley Gaines, an outspoken advocate of the principle that women alone should play women’s sports, rejected Staley’s answer, according to Outkick.
“Dawn Staley knows perfectly well that men’s basketball is a totally different sport than women’s basketball. That’s obvious by the speed of the game, the size of the ball … the sheer amount of layups compared to dunks when a player gets a fast break,” she said.
“I wonder if Dawn Staley also supports 18u playing with 12u, or heavyweights fighting the featherweights, or Olympians competing in the Paralympics,” she said.
Gaines said Staley is backing the wrong cause.
“It always sucks seeing a well-established woman who has broken barriers for women in sports turn into a sellout in the name of ‘inclusion.’ The women’s category was created to be intentionally exclusive by design. Go Hawks,” she said, referring to the Iowa Hawkeyes.
Iowa coach Lisa Bluder was handed the same hot potato, but let it drop.
“My focus is on tomorrow’s game,” Bluder said, calling the transgender debate an “important issue” for “another time.”
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