City of Basketball Love

By David Comer
—

It would have been easy for Tiffany Davis to give up, to put the basketball down, to move on with the rest of her life. 

And nobody would have blamed her.

Not after she suffered two torn ACLs — one in each knee — while playing at South Carolina for the legendary Dawn Staley. Not after she went through a long and painful rehab — not once, but twice — to get back on the court. Not after she realized that her dreams of playing in the WNBA would not become reality.

But Davis, who last month was named the head girls’ basketball coach at Abington Friends School, never quit. 

She knew that she wasn’t the player she was before the injuries, so she found ways to help her team that didn’t involve her being on the court for significant minutes and scoring lots of points. And it paid off. She became a leader and a captain on South Carolina’s 2017 NCAA championship team — the first of three national titles Staley has won during her storied coaching career — and she earned that ring she so desperately wanted. All of her hard work had been worth it. She had the ring to prove it.

Then she moved on from basketball.
But, now, after several years away, she’s back — back in the game she fell in love with as a child watching her father, Emanual Davis, a Philadelphia native and Kensington High grad, play in the NBA for the Rockets, SuperSonics and Hawks.

She’s at her new school every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoon, holding workouts for her team, preaching the fundamentals first and foremost, teaching her players what she learned — both on and off the court — during her unique journey that has taken her to this gym on the AFS campus in Jenkintown. 

She is just weeks into her first head coaching job, and she is enjoying every minute of it.

“I love it here,” she said.

~~~

An 18-year-old Davis arrived at South Carolina in 2012 as one of the top incoming point guards in college basketball. After a stellar high school career in Houston first at Westside High and then at Westbury Christian, she was ranked 29th nationally at her position in her class by ESPN Hoopgurlz.

“When I got to South Carolina, I believed I would go to the WNBA,” Davis said.

And then three games into her freshman season in a game against Savannah State she tore her right ACL.

“That’s when I realized you have to have a Plan B,” she said.

Davis credits Staley with helping her through a difficult time.

“She always kept me engaged and involved,” Davis said. “I was always at every practice. Kids that were injured had to be. I was required to come to everything. It kept me involved. It kept me happy. For her to help me and to push me to be there everyday is rare for a coach. I want to do that for other people.”

Davis was back on the court the next season after taking a redshirt year as a freshman, and she was a contributor. She played in 32 games, making seven starts, as South Carolina reached the Sweet 16. She again credits Staley with her development.

“She had a very big influence on me,” Davis said. “She was a point guard. I was a point guard. She’s very hard on her point guards. She’s inspiring. You want to play for her. You want to run through a wall for her.”

Davis was again limited the next season because of injuries and then returned for her redshirt junior year on a team coming off a Final Four appearance that featured players such as A’Ja Wilson and Alaina Coates.

But in September 2015 during the preseason she went down, and she knew right away it was her ACL. Again. This time in her left knee.

“I worked so hard, and as soon as you get there it gets taken from you,” Davis said. “I had a completely different path than your typical basketball player. I was a little heart-broken. I was a little salty. I loved basketball so much, but basketball didn’t love me. I kept getting injured.”

She returned for her final year at South Carolina and right away tweaked something in her right knee, but, again Staley made sure she was an integral part of the team.

“She kept me involved; she kept me around,” Davis said. “I was able to be a player-coach. I was right under her. I was more of a voice in the locker room. I became a captain. I was respected.”

She played in 19 games that season. Her name appears in the box score for the 2017 national championship game, a 67-55 win over Mississippi State, that was played in Dallas. She entered the game with 43 seconds left and was on the court when she and her teammates became national champions.

“I definitely felt that ring was my gratification, my glory,” Davis said. “You have to put respect to my name. I went through a lot. It was all worth it. I had thought that maybe this isn’t my path, but that ring meant everything. It glorified everything I went through. Everything I worked for was to get a national championship.”

~~~

Davis didn’t grow up in Philadelphia, but her parents, Emanual and Nitza, did. She said that they met when they were 13 or 14.

“They’ve been inseparable ever since,” she said.

Growing up, she spent summers in Philadelphia visiting family and liked it there. She rooted for the Phillies and Eagles.

“I had no choice,” she said.

So after she graduated from college in 2017, with degrees in both retail management and psychology, she moved to Philadelphia. Using her degree in retail management, she worked as a cashier at what was then SugarHouse Casino and is now Rivers Casino Philadelphia. 

After COVID arrived, she quit her casino job and took one at Target. Ultimately, she became the manager of the Target in Bridesburg. In August of 2024, she took on a second job — as a part-time assistant coach for the women’s basketball team at Community College of Philadelphia. 

She knew the head coach there. It was her father. He had just been hired to take over a program that had to be rebuilt from the ground up.

“It was my first time coaching,” she said. “I was able to make mistakes freely and learn from it. I enjoyed every part of it.”

As did her father.

“It was an awesome experience,” he said. “I leaned on her and what they did at South Carolina that produced winning. It was the details. It does matter if you’re six inches to the right or left. We were repetitious every day. She’s absolutely a detail-oriented person. It helped me so much. It took the pressure off me.”

Davis, who will be returning to CCP for his second season in 2025, said that when he was out recruiting, he would turn the floor over to his daughter to lead practice.

It was there that Davis used the lessons she learned not only from her basketball career at South Carolina but also from her job managing people at Target to connect to her players.

“It translates to coaching,” she said. “It prepared me to deal with young people.”

~~~

It is not surprising that Davis has persevered through adversity and injury. She had a model of perseverance in her father, who went from being undrafted out of Delaware State to playing in the United States Basketball League to the Continental Basketball Association to Italy to the NBA to overseas again and back to the NBA. He played two seasons each for the Rockets, SuperSonics and Hawks.

Davis said that some of her first memories around the sport are from when her father was playing for the Rockets with a team filled with Hall of Famers and a mascot named Clutch.

“I remember Charles Barkley holding me,” she said. “I remember Hakeem Olajuwon. Clyde Drexler.”

She said she was friends with current NBA player Gary Payton II — son of Hall of Famer Gary Payton — when they were both little kids growing up as children of NBA players and recalls playing at his house during her father’s time in Seattle.

“It’s amazing,” she said. “I have so many memories. As I get older, I realize how lucky I am. I’ve had a good life. I’m blessed.”

Her father remembers she started to show a real interest in basketball when she was around 9 or 10 years old.

“She said, ‘I want to play basketball. I want to be good like you,’” Emanual recalls. “I told her that if you want to be good then it’s not play, it’s work. She’s always had that passion.”

Her father also remembers going with her to basketball tryouts when she was going into 7th grade.

“When they went through dribbling drills, I saw her coach’s eyes light up,” he said. “At that point, I knew she was special.”

~~~

Davis did not know much about AFS when she heard about the job opening.

“I really and truly believe it fell into my lap,” she said. “I came to the campus and fell in love with it instantly. I felt at home as soon as I walked through the door. The first thing was the culture. There’s a lot of support here. I felt comfortable right away.”

As the AFS website provides, AFS was founded in 1697 and is one of the oldest schools in Pennsylvania to have operated continuously on the same parcel of land. The AFS website also notes that AFS is one of the oldest Quaker schools in the world; currently, it provides education for students in preschool through 12th grade. 

“We are thrilled to welcome Tiffany to the AFS community,” athletic director Jeff Bond said in a prepared statement. “From the moment that she stepped on campus during the interview process, Tiffany impressed all of the stakeholders with whom she met with her authenticity, her passion for mentoring young female basketball players and her vision for an exciting future for AFS girls’ basketball. Tiffany’s own playing career, including its challenges, and the time she spent learning from Dawn Staley at South Carolina have prepared her well to lead the Roos.”

Davis will be taking over a program with a history of success that has struggled recently. The girls’ basketball team, since the Friends School League started in 1982, has appeared in 13 FSL championship games and won six FSL titles. In 2020, the Kangaroos captured the Pennsylvania Independent Schools Athletic Association state championship.

Davis will be taking over a program that went winless in the FSL last season. She is the team’s third coach in three years.

Those who know Davis are confident she will change the course of the program.

“Coaching is in Tiffany’s blood just as much as playing,” Staley said in a prepared statement. “Her basketball experience will allow her to impact not just her players but their parents and the entire community. Abington Friends School got a good one in Tiffany Davis.”

Davis spoke with her Hall of Fame coach after AFS hired her and went to her Philadelphia book signing in May when she was promoting her new book, “Uncommon Favor.”

“She was ecstatic,” Davis said. “She was overwhelmingly happy for me.”

Davis, who left her job at Target in April, will also serve as a physical education teacher and athletics department associate at AFS. She will be immersed in the school she is enamored with in her short time on the job.

“Just her whole experience will help her,” her father said. “She wants to win yesterday, but this will take time. She understands what winning looks like, what winning sounds like. She has to stay true to herself, She has to trust her eyes — she has to recognize people who make good basketball plays. She has to be able to trust her eyes instead of a person telling her someone is good because they are ranked. It’s her time to fly. She’ll be great.”

And he’ll be there to help his daughter however and whenever he can. He was at a workout recently and introduced some shooting drills to the team.

“He’s been a big help,” she said.

Davis is already building her first team. The three leading players from last season — Ella Hawkins, Rhyane Rogers and Ava Ruff — all return. She is looking to add to that group. AFS will be hosting a summer league at its campus this July, so she will have a chance to coach her team in live games.

“They’ve been coming everyday, and they’re willing to get better,” said Davis, who turned 31 in April and lives in Fishtown but anticipates relocating closer to AFS. “We’re building a foundation. We need to dribble, pass, shoot, play defense, make layups, make our shots — the simple things.

“My goal is to build a team that can compete with the teams in our league and beat them. My mentality is to be a winner.”

Every once in a while Davis will pick up a basketball and show herself and her players that she can still play. After all, she is a basketball player before anything else.

She’ll play 1-on-1 against her players. They’ll see glimpses of the star point guard who arrived on campus at South Carolina more than a decade ago only to suffer injury after injury.

“They do know I’m good at basketball,” Davis said. “I’m healthy now.”

Her career didn’t go as planned, but she has carried on. Her page on the South Carolina website from her senior season described her as a “great teammate with positive attitude.”

No matter how many injuries or how many rough days she had, Davis stayed positive. She said that was the idea behind pursuing a major in psychology.

“I was hurt so much in college,” she said. “My goal in life going through what I went through was to help someone get through what I went through and be happy and be OK."