Diana Koval

Diana Koval came to South Carolina in September 2007 as an assistant director and has steadily been promoted to her current associate athletics director title in November 2024. She has worked with the women’s basketball program throughout her tenure, creating and executing the program’s overall communications strategies, including running the social media accounts, 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 six NCAA Final Fours, three National Championships, eight SEC regular-season championships, eight SEC Tournament titles and its first final No. 1 national ranking in 2019-20. Koval also executed campaigns to promote A’ja Wilson and Aliyah Boston for national player of the year honors, which they both received in their careers.

In her nearly two decades at South Carolina, Koval has taken on a leadership role within the communications/public relations department, from hiring and supervising student assistants to now overseeing three full-time staff members. She also leads the athletics department’s awards committee, which ensures the department identifies and promotes the best candidates for all multi-sport conference and national awards. In the beginning of her tenure at South Carolina, she worked with the golf programs and men’s tennis, including promoting the hire of first-time head coach Josh Goffi and helping ensure his team culture was supported by the outward messaging. She also served as a secondary contact for football, assisting with player interviews and game-day media operations, including traveling with the team.

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).