Who is Ryneldi Becenti, the woman in the viral video with Dawn Staley?

Impact can’t always be measured in numbers, but 557,000 might be a good place to start.

That’s the tally of views on an Instagram post showing South Carolina basketball coach Dawn Staley giving her NCAA championship t-shirt to a hysterical fan after beating UConn.

“She was the biggest fan that I’ve ever seen,” said Jaryn Garner, a social media manager at Overtime.

Garner captured and posted the video, which has been shared countless times across various platforms. It shows South Carolina fans celebrating the program’s second national title in the last five years, an especially sweet accomplishment for Staley, who became the first Black Division I coach to win two championships.

Staley had been hamming it up with the crowd when she made eye contact with a fan who wasn’t going to be denied.

“There were a lot of people clamoring, just wanting pictures and autographs,” Staley said. “She was the one who had a distinctive voice and persistence.

“I saw her before I was going on the ESPN stage and as I was going off, I heard her again and again and again. I walked over to her, talked to her a little bit and took a picture with her. She wanted me to sign her sweatshirt.”

Staley had a better idea. She took off her own shirt, the brand-new top that said “national champions 2022” around a South Carolina logo. Staley signed it and handed it over to the fan, who put it on, and lost all composure.

“She’s got tears in her eyes,” Garner said. “She can’t contain herself. It was an overwhelming moment for me because I could see how much Dawn meant to her, how much that moment meant to her. It’s something that you kinda can’t explain.”

It set up a pair of mysteries: Who was the woman in the video? And why was she so excited?

Garner decided to follow the anonymous fan.

“I chased her,” Garner said. “I literally chased her around the arena, and I got to the concourse where she was at.”

Turns out, the fan was Ryneldi Becenti, a former Arizona State and Scottsdale Community College star who became the first Native American to play in the WNBA.

“It was amazing,” Becenti said. “That night, you know how kids lose their tooth? … That night, I put Dawn Staley’s shirt under my pillow. This was a one in a million.”

Becenti was in Minneapolis as part of a marketing campaign to draw attention to Native American players. She and others say there’s talent in Indian Country that’s going overlooked.

Native players represent a tiny fraction of the athletes in big-time college basketball. Becenti says the challenges include resources and facilities: Players don’t always have money for travel teams and expensive tournaments since unemployment and poverty rates are disproportionately high on reservations; also, Becenti says, many gyms and weight rooms on Navajo Nation land remain closed to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Books including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s “A Season on the Reservation” and more recently “Brothers on Three” and “Canyon Dreams” highlight the sport’s popularity for national audiences. In Arizona, the Native American Basketball Invitational is one of the most popular events on the prep sports calendar each year.

Becenti is a huge part of that legacy as the first Native player to start for a big-time college program when she came to ASU in 1992.

Staley gets Becenti’s message.

“There’s hidden talent all over this world,” Staley said. “Like all over. There are pockets of hidden talent on every continent, to be quite honest. And not just in sports, it’s in real life.

“If you don’t have the exposure. If you’re not exposed to anything outside of your neighborhood, you’re stuck.”

Becenti and Staley might have crossed paths a time or two in the ’90s, and that’s part of why the connection meant so much. Recent NCAA champion coaches Tara VanDerveer, Kim Mulkey, Muffet McGraw and Geno Auriemma are all older than Becenti and Staley, who are in their early 50s. They’re also all white.

Read more: Arizona State caught up in Title IX numbers game report

It felt good for Becenti to see a player she had so much in common with making it on the biggest stage.

“I got the shirt,” Becenti said. “I was walking up the stairs, I was emotional, I was crying like a little kid … I didn’t know about the video until like two days ago, people were contacting me.”

Becenti, who coaches youth players in Shiprock, N.M., remembers competing with Staley and a slew of other stars from the 1996 U.S. women’s national team in various invitational tryouts. Becenti never made the Olympics, but she won bronze at the World University Games in 1993.

“I was this little ‘Rez kid’ coming out trying to prove myself,” Becenti said, almost as if she wasn’t a two-time All-American honorable mention.

She remembers Staley, Lisa Leslie, Sheryl Swoopes, Jennifer Azzi — “all the big-name players,” Becenti said — as being hugely encouraging.

“They were saying, ‘Get out there! You can’t stand on the side! You’ve gotta get out there and stay on the court!’”

Staley is glad to have made such an impression along with her gold-medal winning teammates. Those sorts of workouts will be highlighted on an upcoming ESPN "30 for 30" documentary about the ’96 team, and the squad as a whole is a finalist for the 2022 U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Hall of Fame class.

These moments of competitive goodwill happen across sports, Staley said.

“But I think they happen in our sport on a deeper level, because at that time, I think we knew that we didn’t really have anything besides those moments,” she said.

“We didn’t know that there was going to be a WNBA. We were just trying to elevate players and trying to elevate our game, not knowing what the future was gonna hold.”

It ended up holding tremendous impact, which can’t always be measured in numbers — although 557,000 might be a good place to start.

Reach Moore at gmoore@azcentral.com or 602-444-2236. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @SayingMoore.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Who is Ryneldi Becenti, the woman in the viral video with Dawn Staley?