‘Louis Vuitton Daybreak’s’ finest match suits (0:16)
Take a look at Daybreak Staley’s finest outfits from South Carolina’s run by final season’s NCAA match. (0:16)
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Michael VoepelJan 17, 2025, 12:56 PM ET
- Michael Voepel is a senior author who covers the WNBA, girls’s faculty basketball and different faculty sports activities. Voepel started protecting girls’s basketball in 1984, and has been with ESPN since 1996.
South Carolina introduced Friday that Daybreak Staley has acquired a contract extension by the 2029-30 season that can make her the highest-paid coach in girls’s basketball.
The contract, permitted by the college’s board of trustees, begins with an annual wage of $4 million, features a $500,00 signing bonus and has an annual $250,000 escalator, bringing the whole worth to roughly $25.25 million.
“Daybreak Staley is a once-in-a-generation coach who has made an incredible affect on the College of South Carolina,” athletic director Jeremiah Donati mentioned. “She has elevated the game of girls’s basketball on the nationwide degree and right here on campus, and I’m excited that she can be representing our College for a few years to return.”
Staley has gained three nationwide championships since taking up this system in 2008, together with final season’s 38-0 title staff. Going again to the 2013-14 season, the Gamecocks are 165-15 in SEC regular-season play. They’ve gained or tied for the league regular-season title eight occasions in that stretch, and gained eight SEC match titles.
Staley was making $3.2 million this season earlier than the extension went into impact. UConn’s Geno Auriemma, who has gained 11 NCAA titles with the Huskies, is making $3.34 million this season. LSU’s Kim Mulkey, who gained three NCAA titles at Baylor after which led LSU to its first in 2023, is making $3.25 million this season.
Staley, Auriemma and Mulkey and Maryland’s Brenda Frese, who led the Terrapins to the NCAA title in 2006, are the one energetic head coaches who’ve gained the nationwide championship in girls’s basketball.
Staley additionally guided to the USA girls’s basketball staff to the gold medal within the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
South Carolina’s solely loss this season got here in November to UCLA. The No. 2 Gamecocks are 17-1 total and 5-0 within the SEC, they usually host No. 13 Oklahoma on Sunday (ESPN, 3 p.m. ET).
“I am proud to characterize the College of South Carolina and of its funding in girls’s basketball,” Staley mentioned. “What we have been capable of accomplish on the courtroom is a testomony to what can occur whenever you convey collectively the fitting folks from a staff perspective but additionally have the fitting dedication from the college, the athletics division and the group to offering that staff with every little thing it must be profitable.”
In line with the Charleston Publish and Courier, if Staley terminates the contract earlier than its finish, she would owe the college the complete quantity of the remaining contract, with one exception: if she takes a head teaching or assistant job within the WNBA or NBA.