How Winston Gandy’s love for basketball and authentic people led him to South Carolina

Shatori Walker-Kimbrough “would take a bullet” for Winston Gandy.

“I am nowhere near a professional or even the person I am today without him,” she said. “I want to start with that.”

Walker-Kimbrough plays for the Washington Mystics of the WNBA. Before winning a championship in D.C. or being named to the league’s All-Rookie team in 2017, she was a 2013 summer enrollee at Maryland, and Gandy was the Terrapins’ director of recruiting development.

By investing so much of his time, Gandy got to know Shatori the person and basketball player. He challenged her, pushing past her youthful hubris and hardheadedness. He taught Walker-Kimbrough how to break down film, guiding her along the path from talented young guard to an educated basketball mind.

Gandy has since served as coordinator of player development with the NBA’s Washington Wizards (2014-17) followed by stints as an assistant coach at Rice (2017-20) and Duke (2020-23). South Carolina announced him as an addition to Dawn Staley’s staff in April.

Gandy’s entire coaching career has been guided by his love for basketball — and people. Surrounding himself with genuine people and helping to develop those around him has always been his motivation.

“I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a job of, ‘Oh, I can get here,’ or, ‘I can get there.’ I don’t look at it like that,“ Gandy told The State. “Just try to continue to grow and try to leave places better than when you got there.”

Lasting friendships from Maryland to the NBA

Walker-Kimbrough didn’t think she was a highly touted recruit, though her four-star ESPN ranking says otherwise. But Maryland was the only “big-time school,” she said, that showed interest. So the first thing Walker-Kimbrough sought out when she got to campus in 2013 was the gym.

She reached out to then-Maryland assistant coach David Adkins on her second day in College Park and asked if they could meet up to get some extra work in. Adkins directed Walker-Kimbrough to Gandy, as other coaches were off campus for the summer.

“From Day 1 I loved it,” Walker-Kimbrough said. “I loved always being in the gym, but then he made me love the process.”

Even after he left the Terrapins to work for Adkins in the NBA, Gandy met Walker-Kimbrough at Maryland for early-morning workouts before reporting to the Wizards’ facility. Whether he’d just flown back from an away game in Portland or Miami the night before, Walker-Kimbrough can’t remember a single morning he said, “no.”

Gandy became one of her best friends in college. They don’t speak as often now, but when they do it’s like they never stopped.

Adkins shares this sentiment. He first met Gandy while he was a practice squad player for the women’s basketball team at Maryland in 2009. Adkins said he was instantly taken aback by Gandy’s strength of character and basketball skills, saying he thought Gandy could have been a Division II or lower-Division I player. Once Gandy graduated and joined the Maryland staff, Adkins taught him how to develop, coach and work out players.

NBA players like Kevin Durant, Michael Beasley and Victor Oladipo and WNBA players Kristi Toliver, Marissa Coleman and Crystal Langhorne would come to Maryland in the summer for early-morning workouts with Adkins. Gandy became part of that.

“I think that’s where he caught the bug,” said Adkins, who made Gandy his first hire upon joining the Wizards’ staff.

Gandy’s strength lies in his ability to earn people’s trust. Walker-Kimbrough is living proof, as are many of Washington’s alumni. Adkins described Bradley Beal as the most distraught member of the Wizards organization when Gandy took his first assistant coaching gig at Rice in 2017.

That impact reached beyond the players.

“He’s made me a better coach,” Adkins said. “He’s made me a better man, a better father. Just being around him. I’m very, very thankful for that.”

Passion and selflessness

Maryland head coach Brenda Frese first met Gandy in 2009. After he spent all four years of college on the scout team, Frese viewed hiring him as a “no-brainer.”

“He was always in the gym,” she told The State. “He was always wanting to be involved. Whether that was rebounding extra shots for our players or watching an assistant coach putting a player through. … He’s really passionate about basketball and wanting to learn from others and also was just a really ... selfless person.”

The passion and selflessness shows in the way Gandy carries himself, the way he talks — always smiling and laughing. When asked about himself, Gandy is quick to deflect, instead musing over the greatness of those around him: Staley, his fellow assistant coaches, the players that make South Carolina basketball and other folks he’s worked with previously. They are the driving force behind the career he’s built.

Though he’d never met Staley before she called him about the USC job, Gandy said he was drawn to her authentic character.

“The coolest thing about her is, I think, when I first spoke on the phone with her till now, she’s the exact same,” Gandy said. “How she engages people, recruits, fans, donors, alumni, people she knows … A lot of people have different sides that you see depending on their environment, and she’s been the exact same.”

South Carolina hired Gandy away from Duke to replace Fred Chmiel, who is now head coach at Bowling Green State University. Gandy became Staley’s first new assistant coach since Jolette Law in 2017.

Gandy’s responsibilities include a little bit of everything: recruiting, player development and “just impacting young women that we have here,” he said. Everyone on the coaching staff works with everyone on the team.

His main job, though, is to make Staley’s life easier.

At Maryland, Gandy always made himself available to everyone, Frese said. Sometimes he would hop on a golf cart to drive a player to class. Whenever Frese’s young twin boys Markus William and Tyler Joseph would visit the facilities, Gandy would be the first to throw a football or play basketball with them.

“He really had a phenomenal understanding of just making people feel really comfortable, really happy,” Frese said.

Those skills translate to Gandy’s ability to recruit and form lasting relationships with athletes.

Fostering greatness

Recruiting is a never-ending, ever-evolving job. What appeals to folks one year may not the next. The talent hotbeds aren’t always in quite the same place. Numbers next to names don’t always indicate the best fit.

As for this year’s freshman class and the transfers Gandy helped bring in, he hopes for continual growth — from July to November and November to March.

Premier Basketball ranked South Carolina’s 2023 recruiting class second in the nation behind LSU. South Carolina had the No. 1-ranked recruiting class in 2021.

They’ll all be needed in 2023.

South Carolina had five players selected in the 2023 WNBA Draft and only six players from last year’s roster are back — most notably guard Raven Johnson, center Kamilla Cardoso and wing Bree Hall — along with five new faces. As a result, expectations are tempered — compared to recent years — for this Gamecocks squad seemingly everywhere other than Columbia.

Count Gandy among those expecting greatness.

“Everybody one through 11 were all highly touted,” he said. “When you’re as highly touted as all the individuals were coming out of high school, I don’t think anybody will — you could say you’d be surprised, but they’re all really good players.”

Gandy has spent time as a step-in practice player this summer — a callback to his time as a student at Maryland. He’s found that when players see an assistant coach subject themselves to parts of workouts, it humanizes them. It also motivates the athletes to push themselves further.

“Whether that makes them run a little bit harder or set screens with a little bit more force or — if nothing else — just have a little bit more fun,” Gandy said. “I think I’m a big proponent of you gotta be able to laugh at yourself and understand that, ‘Hey, they’re really good at what they do, too.’ ... I mean, all of us coaches, whether it’s jump-roping with them or stretching with them, whatever it is, it does give you the ability to kind of relate with them.”

Outside of basketball, Gandy enjoys playing golf. It’s not an in-season activity, but during the off months it’s something that gets him outside. He also uses it as a space to knock out the occasional recruiting call. Columbia Country Club is his favorite course in town, and he typically shoots around the mid-70s.

“It humbles me,” Gandy said. “... I gotta remind myself it’s not my day job.”

Golf isn’t Gandy’s day job. Coaching basketball is. Luckily for him and USC, he found and ran toward that passion. Walker-Kimbrough said she felt like he could succeed in any basketball environment, but she projected the Staley-Gandy tandem as “a force to be reckoned with.”

“As much as I love the University of Maryland, and I’m a Terp till I die, wherever he goes I’m always cheering him on,” Walker-Kimbrough said. “What did you guys say? ‘Go Cocks?’ ‘Go Gamecocks?’ I guess I’ll be saying that, under my breath of course.”