Diana Koval

Diana Koval came to South Carolina in September 2007 as an assistant director. Promoted to associate director in July 2013 and director in July 2017, she has worked with the women’s basketball program throughout her tenure, creating and executing the program’s overall communications strategies and working with student-athletes on scheduling and preparing for interviews with national, local and internal media.

While with the Gamecocks, Koval has managed the emergence of the women’s basketball program on the national stage and encouraged head coach Dawn Staley to become an early adopter of Twitter, a platform on which she is the most followed women’s basketball head coach in the country. In addition to accommodating the program’s many external media requests, Koval has been at the forefront of establishing the program’s brand through carefully selected profiles with national media and in establishing a clear, strong social media presence in conjunction with the department’s internal media resources. She has helped the Gamecocks capitalize on five NCAA Final Fours, two National Championships, seven SEC regular-season championships, seven SEC Tournament titles and its first final No. 1 national ranking in 2019-20. Koval also executed a campaign to promote A’ja Wilson and Aliyah Boston for national player of the year honors, which they unanimously collected in 2018 and 2022, respectively.

Koval has worked with a variety of sports throughout her communications career, which includes stops at three other universities. In eight years at Saint Louis (1999-2007), she worked most closely with men’s basketball, women’s soccer and baseball, with the latter two collecting multiple Atlantic 10 titles and NCAA Tournament appearances. Her first full-time position was as the women’s sports information director at Western Carolina (1998-99) where she oversaw all six women’s sports in addition to supervising the interns and the department’s budget. During her internship at Elon (1997-98), she was part of a staff that helped the athletics department transition to the NCAA Division I level.

After earning a bachelor’s in business administration from North Carolina (1993), Koval worked for three years at a brokerage firm in Charlotte before changing career paths by pursuing her master’s in sport management at Connecticut (1997).