Dawn Staley's Journey from Projects to Podium

0:00It's April 3rd. Entertainment and celebrity news. Today starts now. AI-powered and trending. Dawn Staley, the championship-winning coach at South Carolina, always points back to her North Philadelphia roots for the discipline that fuels her. Success. Raised in the Raymond Rosen Projects by parents Clarence and Estelle, she was the youngest of five kids, three boys and two girls, and a tight, three bedroom row house. Her folks instilled tough life lessons that stuck, shaping her from the projects to the top of women's basketball. Her parents fled South Carolina as teens in the 1950s, chasing better chances amid segregation. Estelle worked as a domestic cleaner while Clarence did part-time carpentry. They built a foundation of hard work and rules, and Estelle even moved back to South Carolina later when Dawn took the head coaching job there. Full circle nod to bridging old divides. Growing up poor, Dawn feared her mom's strict hand, but earned basketball time with straight A's. Her four older siblings kept her in check too,

1:03pushing her to follow the code. That grit paid off when her sister Tracy got hit with leukemia in 2020. Dawn rallied the family and brother Lauren stepped up as a stem. Cell donor helping Tracy recover enough to cheer at games. Tragedy struck hard, though. Clarence passed from illness in 2006, Estelle from Alzheimer's in 2017, and Anthony from COVID. Complications in 2020 after a stroke. Dawn stayed by his side, singing gospels and sharing love to the end. Through it all, she leans on controlling what she can, channeling pain into her coaching grind, with more wins ahead that family fire keeps burning bright in Columbia.