My concern is that culturally we may not be able to recruit many of the players who will end up winning most of the time going forward. Let me be frank. A coach of color and a woman may well have a cultural advantage with a lot of the top women's players of today. Have you heard one of Staley's coaching sessions? It's like a black church with everyone interrupting constantly with amens and all sorts of interactivity. Her team is made up of a lot of Janiah Barker types. Constant banter and you don't see that in Geno's teams. It's like night and day. Can we relate to the top athletes any more if they culturally feel more comfortable in Dawn's environment? Is uconn too much of a pressure cooker? If you watch Staley coach it looks like a pressure cooker there as well but it's a matter of degrees. Maybe with Dawn it's just her rather than the entire media environment nationwide.
Generally, I completely disagree with your point of view, but I think you may be correct in
some of what you say in the above paragraph. As I said in another post, I think Dawn is the first coach since Pat Summitt was in her prime to present a really attractive alternative to Geno among a large portion of top-level recruits. And I think you are generally correct about the kind of players that are attracted to her. She can and probably will build excellent, NC-contending teams from the type of players who are attracted to that culture.
It's worth noting that from about 2005 to 2010, C. Vivian Stringer tried to build her Rutgers teams from the same type of players who are now attracted to Dawn, and she was quite successful. She never won an NC, but then she never had a player like Aliyah Boston.
However, I think it's also quite possible to build an NC-contending team from recruits who are culturally from a different place than that. Aside from UConn's string of Final Fours, what about the consistent success of Stanford (who won an NC last year) and the nearly-similar consistent success of Notre Dame or Oregon? Those schools don't attract the kind of players that you say are drawn to Dawn's teams. Can you imagine Paige, Azzi, Haley Jones, Cameron Brink, Ashlynn Shade, Sonia Citron, Caitlyn Clark, Sabrina Ionescu, or the Hull sisters being drawn to Dawn's culture? I can't. Can you imagine Dawn attracting European players like Dorka, Nika, or Justine Jocyte? Neither can I. What about players like KLS and Napheesa, both of whom were undefeated against South Carolina in their college careers?
I think that you and many others on this board are overgeneralizing from one year's experience, and are failing to appreciate the "sui generis" nature of Aliyah Boston as a player. Take Boston off SC's roster and what do you think the outcome of Sunday night's game would have been (despite all their other very capable players)? I think it would have been a very competitive game that would be decided by single digits, even with UConn's roster limited as it was. If UConn had the fully healthy services of Dorka / Azzi / Evina, UConn would have been favored and would probably have won if SC did not have Boston.
So SC may be "dominant" until Boston moves on (which may not be until 2024 if she uses her COVID year). After that, all bets are off.
Much less importantly, I think you are quite wrong about UConn being a "pressure cooker". I think Geno's sense of humor prevents that, and you see that players like Paige and Nika feel quite comfortable joking around with Geno. You are right that Dawn's players "feel more culturally comfortable" with her than they would with Geno, but it is equally true that Geno's players feel more culturally comfortable with him than they would with Dawn. Are Dawn's type of players going to be consistently more successful than Geno's type of players? Setting Boston aside as a specific, "sui generis" case, I don't think that is clear at all. I think the consistent success of Stanford, UConn, and Notre Dame, and the lesser but still consistent success other programs (Oregon? Indiana? Iowa? Princeton?) makes that apparent.
