Long before the winning streaks, broken records and National Championships, Dawn Staley had a vision for player development. She cultivated ideas through her career as a point guard, first in four seasons at the University of Virginia and then over a decade in professional basketball.

Ideas pulled from her own game and beliefs of how a point guard should operate. Through painstaking years of program building, players noticed.

One such player was Khadijah Sessions, a 5-foot-8 point guard from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Eventually, Staley landed the commitment. That vision, and her personal experiences as a point guard, were critical to the process.

"It factored a lot," Sessions told GamecockScoop about her recruitment. "She pretty much did everything I wanted to do as a basketball player as far as being a point guard. I knew she was going to be more than just a coach to me once I got there. That kind of played a big role."

Sessions played 134 games for the program across four seasons, including 36 as a starter on the 2014-15 team, South Carolina's first Final Four in school history. She is one of many who has played the position for Staley between Temple and South Carolina, learning what the development track looks like from one of the best.

It is a very specific one, a "highly detailed" process, as her first point guard at South Carolina, La'Keisha Sutton, told GamecockScoop. It is an all-encompassing approach to directing traffic on the basketball court, trying to run the game and impact players around you in a way only point guards really can.

"I think she takes a special interest because that was her position," Sutton said. "She took pride in being the coach on the court. She took pride in being the vocal leader of her teams, and I think that she does the thing with the point guards that she recruits. I know that's something that she taught me is how to be a vocal leader. How to just kind to be like the team's manager, in a way."

It starts in the confines of practice. A controlled environment without immediate game consequences is the perfect breeding ground for teaching. Practice is where the nuts and bolts of Staley's point guard theology spill out.

"I think with coach you just have to know what she wants," senior Zia Cooke told GamecockScoop. "She's very disciplined into what she wants from players, and she doesn't go around what she thinks is best. I think point guard is probably the hardest position to play for coach, just because she was a point guard and she knows how things need to be run."

She stops practice when a particular set or play call goes astray, as Cooke and freshman guard Talaysia Cooper said. Peripheral vision comes into play, with the speed of a college offense shrinking how long a point guard has to see the whole floor. A sloppy post pass can derail a possession, so she scrutinizes post entry angles.

"You have to be a mini-coach," Sessions said. "You have to be a mini-her. You have to know everything. Talking, communication, understanding the offense, understanding what plays to call without always going to her, understanding the defense, the position schemes, the late shot clock schemes, I could go on and on all day. It's about being a true point guard under a coach."

For Staley, who last played in a basketball game in 2006, it is about getting herself back in a player's mindset. Conveying a coach's message like she would while running the point at Virginia or for the U.S. Olympic Team.

"What I do with our point guards a lot is I'll ask them, 'what did you see?'" Staley told GamecockScoop. "Because I want to understand how they process and what they see. And then I like a point guard that talks. I'll ask the questions, and if you can just verbalize how you process it, that's half the battle. If somebody gives you an answer, you know how far you can go asking the questions. If they just give you an outlandish answer, I have to tone it back.

"I've got to give them what they can process. It's more just feedback, feedback, feedback."

Feedback is constantly evolving. The goal is to stack skills and positive developmental traits on top of one other, using one tool in a player's locker to help formulate another.

The Gamecocks are currently getting a lot of point guard minutes from redshirt freshman Raven Johnson, the electric bench boost Staley admitted is a better passer than even she was. She is learning to take her unique attributes — vision, strength, speed — and mold them into something applicable to Staley's offense.

The starter is Kierra Fletcher, a senior who transferred from Georgia Tech. Four years of college basketball meant she arrived in Columbia with more of those layers built in, so the development was different. Her biggest challenge was to "take on the identity of the team," according to Staley.

"It's not just on the court, it's developing a relationship off the court," said Cynthia Jordan, who played point guard for Staley at Temple from 2001-2004. "Making sure you're coming in and watching film, and just [having] non-basketball conversations so that both parties know how the other is thinking and then that just carries on over onto the court. As you've been there longer, you'll know how she thinks. It'll become second nature pretty much."

You can visualize Staley's core tenets like a pyramid.

The rules are the base: the dos, the don'ts and the pet peeves. Avoiding bad turnovers, and even more so "repetitive turnovers," where the same mistake happens more than once. Taking good shots. Making the correct decisions in transition. Picking up the opposing team's point guard defensively when a possession starts.

Then the pyramid narrows, where being that vocal leader and winning the practices comes into play. But at the very top, one fundamental belief on what good point guard play looks like dictates everything below.

Flow.

A Staley offense has to flow, and the point guard is responsible for making it happen.

"It's like dancing," she said. "When you're passing the ball and there's ball movement, it's beautiful. You know when it stalls, when somebody is holding it just a second too long. We call them 'rhythm takers' when you hold it too long. As a point guard, you have to feel that rhythm being gone, and then you have to transition to calling out a set."

The usual image of flow is ball movement. Working a possession around, moving their defenders off their spots and making those classic extra passes within the floor's geography. But it also means being able to manage a game and more specifically, manage your teammates. Keeping everyone engaged, and working players fresh off the bench into the rhythm if necessary.

Flow changes within the game like a stream of water taking on the shape of its container. If a teammate who was not a vital part of the initial game plan is suddenly shooting well, flow entails finding more ways to get them the ball. If an opposing coach moves to a bigger or smaller lineup, flow is adjusting the game plan on the fly. Recognizing when a certain player might be tired, or if an off-ball screen switch generated a different positional advantage somewhere. Not just knowing the playbook, but using it like a Rolodex to flesh out precise positives for any situation.

"They've got to be able to have a pulse of how they're scoring," Jordan said. "She's [Staley] not calling every play, every set. You have to know your personnel sometimes. Certain people, if they haven't touched the ball in a while, you have to put them in a position to get an easy look. And at the same time, take advantage of mismatches and whoever has the hot hand. So that's where the flow is going to come into play."

There is nothing worse for Staley than 'rhythm takers' thwarting offensive flow. And by default, there is nothing better than when her team can take away an opponent's rhythm. You can understand her defensive principles if you view them through the lens of striving to create a 180-degree flip from her offensive ones.

"Your duty is to pick the ball up full court and disrupt," Staley said. "When we're able to play our point guards on other team's point guards, it allows us to stay true to our matchups."

Staley says Sessions was "without a doubt" the best defensive point guard she has ever coached. She attributed it to her work ethic, both in being active at trying to break up offenses and in how she knew and understood opposing offensive schemes.

"In my opinion she likes 94 feet [of defense]," Sessions said. "Putting pressure on the guards, putting pressure on the ball so we can disrupt their offense and they can't fluently run their offense. It's being understanding and aware of what's going on. Understanding what other teams are doing and where the mismatches are."

So far in the 2022-23 season, South Carolina has held opponents under 40 points eight times and below 50 in another five games. Right now the Gamecocks are allowing just 48.3 points per game, the nation's best clip. Most people think of the success with regards to their bigs, currently leading the country in blocks by a wide margin with 9.5 per game.

But for a "defensive-minded coach," according to Sessions, getting stops starts at the tip of the sword.

"If we've got teams going deeper into their offensive possession, they're not going to get their first option," Staley said. "And we're probably not going to give you your second option; you have to be a little bit more patient against us and our halfcourt defense."

The point guard development will continue, and timelines will start to overlap. When Cooke and Fletcher leave the program, Johnson and Cooper will have point guard responsibilities. The highest-rated recruit in South Carolina's 2023 recruiting class is a point guard from Columbia, Malaysia Fulwiley.

"I can finish a sentence for her," Cooke said. "I remember my freshman year, [point guard] Ty [Harris] always knew what to say, and Ty knew the answer. And I was like, 'man, when I'm a senior I hope I can do that.' I will say she was on me a lot more when I was a freshman. Towards the end of my junior year was when I was able to start figuring a lot of things out."

It might be why so many of her former point guards have coached themselves. Jordan spent 14 years on Staley's staff at South Carolina before taking an assistant job at Florida. Sessions coached at Ridge View high school in Columbia and still frequently comes back to Staley's practices to the point where "she can't help it" and tries to coach them from afar. Sutton coached at George School, a high school just outside her hometown of Trenton, New Jersey.

Staley needs her point guards to be "mini-coaches." She wants them to be extensions of her on the floor. They learn the concepts — flow, vision, defensive pressure, vocal leadership — and coach them to their teammates. And in a lot of cases, the coaching never leaves.

It is exactly what she wants. And for a lot of players, exactly what they wanted.

"I wouldn't have had it any other way," Sutton said. "I literally got to learn from the greatest point guard in the game. She's achieved success at every level."

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