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COLUMBIA — South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley got a new contract on Friday which made her the highest-paid women’s coach in college history.
According to the contract, if Staley takes another college coaching job before her contract expires on April 15, 2030, she will owe the school “an amount equal to the coach’s guaranteed annual compensation, pro-rated, for the remaining term of the agreement as if it naturally expired on April 15, 2030.”
However, if Staley accepts a job coaching a WNBA or NBA team, she will not be obligated to pay anything to South Carolina.
Staley was asked about that after the 101-60 win over Oklahoma at Colonial Life Arena on Sunday.
“It’s a give and take,” Staley said. “It was important for me to have a guaranteed contract, but to have a guaranteed contract you have to give them something. I will never leave here to coach another college job. I have the best of the best here. I really don’t have a passion for the next level, I don’t. I would have been gone, seriously. So to have it in there, it was just something fancy to have (a reporter) ask me that question.”
Staley’s new contract takes effect immediately will run through the 2029-30 season, and she will receive a salary of $4 million with a $250,000 increase every season and a $500,000 signing bonus that makes the total value approximately $25.25 million.
Before Staley’s new contract, LSU coach Kim Mulkey was the highest-paid coach at $3.264 million.
Staley’s salary was the third-highest among women’s college basketball coaches, according to the USA TODAY Sports database from March 2024 but both she and UConn coach Geno Auriemma were making $3.1 million in terms of total pay.
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Staley played basketball at the University of Virginia then spent 10 years in the WNBA. She arrived in Columbia in 2008 after coaching at Temple for eight years.
Lulu Kesin covers South Carolina athletics for The Greenville News and the USA TODAY Network. Email her at lkesin@gannett.com and follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, @Lulukesin
