Gamecocks are building a dynasty in women’s college basketball, and a big part of their success is their impressive health streak under athletic trainer (and Sanford native) Craig Oates
By Billy Liggett
Craig Oates hit the big time in his field in 2019 when he was brought on as athletic trainer for the powerhouse University of South Carolina women’s basketball team. The program was two years removed from a national championship, and joining Oates that year was a group of young women considered one of the best — if not the best — freshmen classes in the history of the sport.
That team — led by future WNBA stars like Aliyah Boston, Zia Cooke, Mikiah Herbert Harrigan, Tyasha Harris, Destanni Henderson and Brea Beal and coached by the legendary Dawn Staley — would go 33-1, and under Oates’ supervision, that crop of freshmen wouldn’t miss a single game due to injury that year (or the three years that followed).
The only thing that could take out the Gamecocks in the spring of 2020 was COVID-19, which put a halt to all college athletics just as South Carolina was preparing for another NCAA Tournament run.
But even during a pandemic, Craig Oates proved his worth.
The following season, one that saw countless missed games and even cancellations across all sports due to positive COVID tests from athletes and coaches, South Carolina went 26-5 and advanced to the Final Four. More impressively, not one player or coach missed a game because of COVID.
When the Gamecocks would go on to win their second national championship in five years that following season in 2022, Staley would credit Oates and performance coach Molly Binetti for keeping her team together and healthy through uncharted waters.
She would call them South Carolina’s “secret sauce.”
“If [our players] are ill or hurt, he gets them right,” Staley told The State before the team’s Final Four appearance in 2023. “And the most important thing is he and Molly have a tremendous relationship. They work extremely well together. They’re probably the secret sauce behind our success.”
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Back in his hometown of Sanford, there is a growing contingent of garnet-wearing South Carolina basketball fans interspersed with the light and dark blue jerseys that cover the area. Craig Oates has his mother — Mary Hawley Oates, a longtime (now retired) nurse for Lee County Schools — to thank for his cheering section one state away.
“A lot of people here are watching South Carolina basketball because of Craig,” says Mary. “They just get so excited watching these girls play, because they just play so well, and they never get ruffled. And, of course, they’re looking for Craig. They’re always asking me to tell him to stand up and wave at the camera. We can’t always find him on the bench.”
If Craig keeps a low profile during games, it’s on purpose. “If you see me [on TV], that’s a problem,” he told The State.
Craig Oates fell in love with sports at a young age. His mother says he learned to read and do math by picking up newspapers and poring through baseball stats. He played soccer and basketball throughout his childhood, but his first “behind-the-scenes” help with a team came in middle school when he did stats for his school’s basketball team. He helped Lee County High School head basketball coach Reggie Peace as a statistician as a freshman and sophomore before transferring to the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham as a junior (where he also kept stats for the basketball team).
Oates attended the University North Carolina in Chapel Hill with the intent of going on to medical school after graduation. He remained a fixture on the basketball sidelines, becoming a manager for UNC’s junior varsity basketball team, while occasionally working the varsity games as security (during timeouts, he could be seen helping shield the coach and players while they talked strategy).
As a sophomore at UNC, he shifted his attention for pre-med to sports medicine and sports management. Instantly, he was hooked.
“He fell in love with it. That’s what he wanted to do,” Mary says. “When he left for the University of Delaware to earn his master’s, he worked as an athletic trainer for field hockey and baseball. He just loved the clinical side of it.”
After Delaware, Oates looked for jobs closer to home and found an opening at nearby Campbell University, where would work several sports, with a big focus on women’s basketball for longtime coach Wanda Watkins.
“I got a lot out of my time at Campbell,” Oates says. “And getting to know Wanda, I’ll always cherish that relationship. She’s one of the most genuine, kind people I’ve ever met. I considered this my first ‘real job,’ and the team we had there was just great. I learned how to communicate with coaches and athletes, I learned all about preparation and approach, and I developed skills that have stayed with me to today. Most importantly, through Wanda, I met a lifetime mentor and friend. Someone who will always be in my corner.”
He calls his move to South Carolina in 2019 a matter of being in the right place at the right time. After Campbell, Oates worked for the athletic department at the University of Virginia, and while there, a colleague informed him of an opening with Dawn Staley at USC.
“They told me, ‘If you know of anyone who is interested, pass it along,” he says. “They didn’t realize I’d be the one who was interested. It was a little closer to home, and I knew what [Staley] was building down there. It just seemed like a great, unique opportunity.”
At his previous stops, Oates was required to take on several sports, because of the size of the athletic trainer programs there. At Virginia, he was able to focus more on women’s basketball, while also helping with women’s tennis. At South Carolina, his focus would be one team — a women’s basketball team with a historic incoming class and a chance at a multi-year championship run. He attributes his success as an athletic trainer at USC to the program Staley has built.
“She’s as good as advertised,” he says. Everything you hear about her in a positive light, I can attest to. She’s authentic and real. And she’s excellent to work for. She can be intense — and I know that’s the persona that comes across publicly — but when she says her job as a coach is to be a ‘dream merchant,’ she means it. She’s there to set those women up to achieve their goals. She’s preparing them for possible generational wealth in professional basketball. If that’s what they want to do, she helps them do it.”
As for Oates’ role as athletic trainer, he says Staley lets him do his job without hovering and questioning his every decision. Trust and autonomy, he says, are important in sports medicine. Coaches who let professionals make health-related decisions — and coaches who trust those decisions — are every athletic trainer’s dream.
“The talent [at South Carolina] is undeniable, but their ability to stay healthy and on the court is important,” Oates says. “Look across the country, and you’ll see programs that have been devastated by season-ending injuries. We’re knocking on wood, of course, and there is certainly some luck to it. But it’s also all about preparation and buying into what we do as trainers.
“We’ve only seen two season-ending injuries in my five years, and one of those was at the end of the season in the SEC tournament.”
It’s not just Stayley (and Craig’s mom) who are singing his praises. Recent Las Vegas Aces draft pick Brea Beal told The State, “I love Craig. He’s always there. He’s always ready to go.”
Added Zia Cooke of the Los Angeles Sparks before she left USC, “Craig has been here ever since I got here and is literally the best trainer in the world. It’s gonna be very hard for me to find someone as good as him. He does his job the right way. … It’s nothing that he doesn’t know the answers to.”
Women’s basketball is enjoying unprecedented ratings and success, thanks in large part to superstars like Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and current dynasties in the sport like South Carolina, which won its third national title since 2017 in this year’s NCAA Tournament. Oates says he’s happy to be a small part of all of it.
“In 2021, when teams were playing in ‘The Bubble,’ there were a lot of stories coming out about the disparities between weight rooms for the men’s tournament and the women’s tournament,” he says. “At USC, we had Molly and our social media people highlighting it. I think the sport has invested in resources for women’s basketball, and that’s part of why we’re seeing growth. We got 19.4 million viewers against Iowa in the championship game. That’s more than the men got.”
A small (but growing) chunk of those viewers reside in Sanford.
“I think my mom is running a Ponzi scheme to get more people to watch,” Oates says with a laugh. “She’s a very proud mother, and because of her, I feel like half of Sanford is hooked on USC women’s basketball now. Cousins, church friends. People who’ve never watched the sport before. At first, it was just so they could find me, but now they’re all invested in it. My girlfriend made a shirt with my face on it as a joke, and now there’s a bunch of ladies in Jonesboro watching games wearing my face on their shirts.
“It’s a bit absurd, but hilarious.”