Speaking to Fox News Channel’s Brian Kilmeade during an appearance on “Fox & Friends,” former NCAA women’s swimmer and current OutKick contributor Riley Gaines, a women’s rights activist, said that South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley is either “incompetent or a sellout.” Gaines’ comments came on Monday, April 8, after Staley said that transgender individuals should be allowed to compete in women’s sports.
As background, when asked about transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, Coach Staley said, according to CBS. “I’m on the opinion of, if you’re a woman, you should play. If you consider yourself a woman and you want to play sports or vice versa, you should be able to play. That’s my opinion.” Then, when pressed on whether that stane applied to college basketball, she said, “Yes, yes.”
It was against those comments that Gaines was speaking during her interview. Speaking about Coach Staley’s record and questioning her motives, Gaines said, “In three years at South Carolina, she’s won two championships. I think her record is 109 and three. That’s unprecedented, so clearly she’s great at what she does, and she’s developed many incredible athletes whom I admire, but she’s either proving herself… to be entirely incompetent or a sellout, and personally… I don’t think she believes what she said.”
Continuing, Gaines alleged that Coach Staley’s hesitation before answering showed that she decided to take the “politically correct” path instead of answering honestly, saying, “If you watch the video, her silence, the hesitation and that drink of water, I think it spoke volumes. I think she knew she had to be politically correct, and I know about as good as anyone that that pressure exists and it’s real.”
Gaines wasn’t done. Continuing, Gaines argued that men’s basketball is a very different sport from women’s basketball, telling Kilmeade, “The bottom line is she knows perfectly well that men’s basketball is a totally different sport than women’s basketball.”
Explaining what factors in the game make that different obvious, including both differences in playstyle and the three-point line being in a different spot, Gaines told Kilmeade, “That’s obvious by the speed of the game, the size of the ball, the sheer amount of layups in women’s basketball compared to dunks when a player gets a fast break in men’s basketball, the distance of the three-point line, the list goes on.”
Then, after explaining as much, Gaines told Kilmeade that Coach Staley threw away what would have been an opportunity to describe what needed to be considered when deciding who can compete in women’s sports. She said, “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for her and she blew it, and truthfully, my guess is she’s okay with it until her team [is] defeated by one or more men playing on the opposite team.”
Watch Gaines here:
Gaines later defended her comments on X, writing, “And I stand by that 3000% Personally, I think she’s a sellout. I also think she’s a dang good coach. 109-3 over three seasons is unheard of. She can be both at the same time. Neither is mutually exclusive. Thanks for posting the clip. Watching it back, I hit the nail on the head.”
Featured image credit: By Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America – Riley Gaines, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=132979681
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