Why The Best Black Women Basketball Coaches Are In NCAA Hoops

As the women’s college basketball season gets underway, WNBA fans are likely to see familiar faces on the sidelines. Skylar Diggins, a seven-time WNBA All-Star, has returned to her hometown roots and alma mater as a special advisor to head coach Niele Ivey at Notre Dame University. Noelle Quinn, a former WNBA champion as both a player and a coach who recently led the Seattle Storm, has returned to her alma mater, UCLA as an assistant coach. Nykesha Sales, an eight-time WNBA All-Star and UConn legend, has also made a major homecoming by joining Geno Auriemma’s staff as an assistant coach at her alma mater, UConn.  

Bringing current and former WNBA Black women stars and their brilliant minds back to school isn’t a new trend. Kara Lawson, a former WNBA champion and All-Star during her extensive playing career, continues to spearhead the program at Duke after a standout collegiate career at the University of Tennessee. Beyond her work on the collegiate level, Lawson has ascended to the pinnacle of international leadership as the head coach for Team USA, where she led the women’s national basketball team to a gold medal this year at the FIBA Women’s World Cup.

Former WNBA star Dawn Staley has long been the standard at the University of South Carolina. Staley took over South Carolina’s program nearly two decades ago, taking a program without any national titles and turning it into a powerhouse, capturing multiple national championships while pouring into the development of her players on and off the court. 

Staley has consistently used her platform to demand equity, command top-dollar resources, and build an ecosystem where Black players feel fully supported as Black women. Financial differences between the NCAA and the WNBA are part of the reason why college programs continue to be a premium destination for talented Black women coaches. 

While the highest-paid WNBA head coaches max out around 1 to 1.2 million dollars per year, top collegiate programs maintain higher financial tiers. Staley is the highest-paid coach in women’s college basketball, commanding a historic $4.25 million dollars annually at South Carolina. Even lower-tiered college programs consistently pay their women’s basketball coaches six-figure salaries and are often backed by multi-year contracts that outshine what the WNBA offers. 

College athletic departments around the country understand that securing a former collegiate and WNBA player who has an established name in basketball circles and who has competed in the WNBA provides them with a competitive advantage. Recruiting is the lifeblood of the survival of all collegiate basketball programs, and universities recognize that players turned coaches with already established names can pull in top-tier talent simply by being who they are. 

For Black women coaches, college programs also provide job security that the WNBA has proven thus far it cannot match. The WNBA has proven, with rare exceptions, unable to retain Black women coaches for more than three to five seasons. 

According to a NewsOne analysis, close to a dozen non-Black female head coaches in the WNBA’s history have spent ten or more years as head coaches in the league. Among all Black women coaches in WNBA history, only one, Pokey Chatman, has made it to more than half that ten-year mark. The Black women head coaches in the WNBA usually spend a year or two as head coaches, with almost all staying no more than three to five seasons. 

In college women’s hoops, it’s easy to rattle off a number of Black women head coaches like Dawn Staley, Vivian Stringer, Freda Freeman Jackson, and Tanya Warren who have all enjoyed head coaching tenures at the collegiate level that have spanned a decade or more. 

WNBA leadership regularly defends the lack of Black women coaches by passing the buck to individual WNBA team owners responsible for hiring coaches, who often conclude there aren’t enough Black women coaches in the pipeline to choose from. 

Sociological and organizational studies have long debunked the “pipeline problem” in workplaces more generally, showing that institutions routinely use it as a defensive scapegoat to divert attention from underlying hiring biases and processes rooted in systemic discrimination. 

This year, during its 30th season, the WNBA had no Black women head coaches on any of its teams. This void persists, even as the WNBA expands, with plans to grow from 15 to 18 teams by 2030.  

While there are vastly more teams and opportunities to become a head coach at the collegiate level, WNBA’s competitor league, Unrivaled, has proven that hiring Black women coaches can be easily done. Last season, out of eight head coaching slots for Unrivaled, five were occupied by Black women. As Unrivaled’s 2027 season approaches, the league announced its new roster of head coaches, and five are Black women. Among them is Barb Turner, who is making her head coaching debut after two seasons as an assistant coach for the Washington Mystics. 

For the WNBA, the pipeline excuse falls apart even faster when WNBA franchises have amassed a track record of overlooking decorated Black women like Lisa Leslie, who have a long track record of success as players. Instead, the WNBA has repeatedly hired lackluster male coaches of all races plucked from secondary assistant roles in the NBA or lower-tier college programs who ultimately prove incapable of leading WNBA teams but are often still retained for multiple years. Black women head coaches in the WNBA are given less time, usually no more than a year or two, to show they can transform a team.

The real tragedy in all of this is that the players bear the brunt of these hiring practices. WNBA rosters are predominantly Black women, yet they are being denied the leadership they deserve. They are missing out on coaches who possess the experience, basketball knowledge, and tactical brilliance to protect and develop women whose top-tier skills have placed them at the pinnacle of the sport. 

The ultimate irony in all of this is that these brilliant Black women and their tactical minds and longtime experience are being entrusted to build the collegiate pipeline that feeds into the WNBA, yet are not valued enough to coach them once they get there. Until the WNBA gets out of its own way, the highest standard of coaching in women’s basketball might just be found on the sidelines of women’s college hoops.

SEE ALSO:

Sandy Brondello’s Words Reveal The WNBA’s Deeper Coaching Problem

On Dawn Staley, Black Women, And Disrespect In The Workplace