The WNBA is growing, so where are the Black woman head coaches?

When Noelle Quinn was introduced at a news conference as the first Black head coach of the Seattle Storm in 2021, she paid homage to every Black woman who’d been a head coach in the league’s 24 seasons that preceded her own opportunity. The list even included Black women who had been interim head coaches.

It took her just 17 seconds. 

If Quinn had updated her list in 2025, she would have added only two names. When the Storm fired Quinn in September, it left the league without any Black female head coaches in its ranks.

When the WNBA begins its next season, it’ll do so without a Black female coach leading any of its 15 teams, as none of the five head coaching vacancies this offseason were filled by Black women. This marks two straight hiring cycles, and 12 coaching vacancies where a Black woman has not been hired as a head coach.

For a league that since its inception has been represented by a majority Black workforce, there exists a continual sense of reinforcement that Black women can play, but they can’t lead in a league that they have shouldered for the past 28 seasons.

When listening to general managers publicly discuss their outlook on head coaching hires over the past two hiring cycles, there’s a prevailing theme among them centering on the need to evolve along with the league’s style of play. They said they wanted candidates who were distinctive and innovative. However, who is deemed to be capable of innovation?

In the past, words like “innovative” have rarely been attributed to Black female head coaches. It’s a part of the ever stale X’s and O’s conversation, often seen at the collegiate level, that has served only to overshadow the competency of Black female coaches in the field. There is this false equivalency that exists in which those who “run the best stuff” are also the best coaches. If Black women are never given a seat at the table, what does that mean for their chances to get a shot at those opportunities to lead?

In 2023, The Athletic, a subscription-based digital media company, polled 30 collegiate coaches asking who they thought were the best X’s and O’s coaches in the country. A good chunk of votes expectedly landed on Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer and UConn’s Geno Auriemma, the two winningest coaches in college basketball. Dawn Staley, who is Black and who at the time of the poll had South Carolina at 33-0 overall and had just led the Gamecocks to their seventh SEC title in nine seasons, received one vote.

The poll added a disclaimer stating that defensive-minded coaches, like Staley, were likely left out due to the coaches polled associating X’s and O’s with offense instead of defense.

“If we’re not an X’ing and O’ing staff, how are we beating the X’ing and O’ing coaches, programs?” Staley told Andscape moments after winning the national championship in 2024.

As the WNBA’s stock has risen, that also has noticeably widened its interest from candidates in other leagues and on other levels that did not place value in a WNBA head coaching job just a few years ago – with many of those candidates now spawning from the NBA. 

ESPN reported that the New York Liberty’s shortlist for head coach came down to four candidates. Three were male assistant coaches in the NBA. The other was Kristi Toliver. Entering this cycle, Toliver was viewed by many as one of the strongest candidates to fill a vacancy – and rightfully so. She was coming off a WNBA season in which she was an associate head coach for a Phoenix Mercury team that made the Finals. Before that, she spent four years as an assistant in the NBA. As a WNBA player, she was a two-time champion and a three-time All-Star.

The Liberty ultimately chose Warriors assistant coach Chris DeMarco. 

DeMarco and Portland Fire head coach Alex Sarama, a former Cleveland Cavaliers assistant, will lead their teams having not previously coached in the WNBA. The same can be said for Phoenix head coach Nate Tibbetts, who in his first year with the Mercury in 2024 was the highest-paid head coach in the league.

Are DeMarco and Sarama qualified to be head coaches? Yes. If the argument is that they’re not ready to be NBA head coaches but can coach in the WNBA, well, that’s exactly the point. 

When these NBA candidates, the majority of whom are men, flood the WNBA vacancy pool, it undoubtedly shrinks the opportunities for aspiring female head coaches – especially as the ability to become a head coach in the NBA remains nonexistent. Those who may have been strong WNBA head coaching candidates before may now go overlooked.

Take Rena Wakama, for example. Wakama, an assistant for the Chicago Sky, previously served six years as an assistant coach at the collegiate level. She is currently the head coach of the Nigerian women’s national team, which she has led to back-to-back African championships.

At the Paris Olympics in 2024, Wakama led Team Nigeria, a team then without any active WNBA players, to group play wins over Australia (which touted six active WNBA players and was coached by new Toronto Tempo head coach Sandy Brondello) and Canada, a top 10 team in the world.

Wakama was named coach of the tournament after leading Nigeria to the quarterfinals – the first time an African team (men or women) had done so. The point is not that Wakama wasn’t hired to be a WNBA head coach as much as it is that she wasn’t reported to have even been a candidate for teams.

It should be head-scratching that a candidate like Toliver, or someone like lauded Indiana Fever assistant Briann January, who has coached at three different levels, hasn’t gotten a chance to lead. It’s as if today’s assistant WNBA coaches are being told they aren’t invited to participate in the league’s exciting new “evolution.”

“People may see Black female coaches, but we’re coaches who understand the game and can lead. All we want to do is grow the game,” former Sky coach Teresa Weatherspoon said in November while representing Unrivaled as one of the league’s five Black female head coaches, a group that includes Wakama and Quinn.

This is not to argue that Quinn’s exit from Seattle after five seasons was unwarranted. The same can be said for former Atlanta coach Tanisha Wright, who seemingly couldn’t put the pieces together with the Dream during her three-year tenure. (Perhaps less so for Weatherspoon’s one-year stint as Chicago’s head coach.) However, their inability to achieve consistent success as head coaches in the WNBA shouldn’t hamper another Black woman’s chances at landing a head coaching job.

So often, though, it feels as if that is the case. It’s why so many Black female coaches carry the invisible weight of an entire demographic on their shoulders. You hear it from Black female head coaches, at both the professional and collegiate levels, time and time again – the worry that their potential failure will impact the next in line. 

This is not to discount the other forms of representation currently traversing WNBA sidelines. There are two women of color leading teams – Natalie Nakase (Golden State) and Sonia Raman (Seattle), who is the first person of Indian descent to be a head coach in league history. There are also two Black men leading teams in Tyler Marsh (Chicago) and Sydney Johnson (Washington). Three of these coaches had NBA experience and all four had prior experience coaching in the WNBA.

Surely, the lack of representation is an issue that predates this new era in the WNBA, but it’s one that feels particularly exacerbated during this period of immense league growth. 

The league office has focused on building a pipeline for former WNBA players to gain pro coaching experience, implementing a new policy in 2020 allowing teams to add a third assistant coach if that assistant is a former WNBA player. That pipeline and experience, however, takes time to build. For a prospective head coach focused on gaining experience as an assistant on a WNBA bench, you have to wonder if that experience alone even makes you a competitive candidate.

As the WNBA continues to grow and expand, qualified Black female coaches are seemingly being left behind. Whether the league sees an eventual need to intervene remains to be seen. 

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