Jenny Boucek is huddled over her laptop, engrossed in game film. It’s a Friday morning in early April, and Boucek, an assistant coach for the Indiana Pacers, is analyzing clip after clip, hours before the team’s game against Oklahoma City later that night. She combs through statistical reports, hardly stopping for a beat to rest. Each hour is meticulously planned, and the morning quickly blurs into afternoon. Then she’s hustling through an on-court prep session at 2:20 p.m., meeting with her fellow coaches at 2:50, heading into a team meeting at 3:50, then back to the court for individual workouts at 5. After the game, a 126-112 Pacers win, she breaks down film and edits video late into the night, preparing not just for the next day’s practice, but also for Sunday’s game against Miami.
Boucek is the defensive mastermind for a Pacers team that’s currently down 3-2 in the Eastern Conference semifinals to the Knicks. She’s responsible for in-game defensive decision-making and is constantly orchestrating split-second adjustments. That Pacers defense had its best game in Sunday’s Game 4, a 121-89 blowout win, when they held the Knicks to 33.7 percent shooting. She has her players’ backs, too. You probably saw her sprinting on the court in Game 5 on Tuesday, to help break up a fight in a game the Pacers lost, 121-91.
She had been focused on the team’s offense the previous two seasons but took on the defense this year.
“It’s like going home,” says Boucek, who was a defensive stopper during her career with the University of Virginia and the WNBA’s Cleveland Rockers. All hustle and grit, she grew up playing pickup ball with boys. “I’ve always been the only girl,” she says. “This is my comfort zone.”
As a coach her days are long and her nights are longer, but she loves it. “Coaching in the NBA is not for everybody,” Boucek, who began her coaching career in the WNBA, says. “And each environment requires a little bit different skill set … because people see the glory of it all, but there’s a lot more that goes into it at every level. ”
Boucek is one of the few women to ever serve as an NBA front of bench coach – the exclusive group of coaches who get a courtside seat during games. It’s one of the most coveted, most competitive roles in the league for any gender. “Jenny has taken on what I believe are unprecedented responsibilities for a female, front of the bench coach in the NBA,” says Indiana head coach Rick Carlisle, who is also president of the National Basketball Coaches Association.
Becky Hammon, now the head coach for the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces, was the first woman to break through to the front of the bench when she became the NBA’s first full-time woman assistant coach with the Spurs under Gregg Popovich from 2014 to 2022. In 2015, Hammon served as the team’s head coach during NBA Summer League and won the title. And on December 30, 2020, she became the first woman to serve as a head coach in an NBA game when Popovich was ejected. “With Jenny Boucek and Becky Hammon, you have two women that have made an indelible mark on the NBA coaching profession,” Carlisle says. “You’re talking about two true pioneers of the sport.” Boucek, who also previously served on Carlisle’s staff in Dallas from 2018 to 2021, is, in his words, “an inspiration.”
Women like Boucek have already shattered barriers in the NBA. Many dream of not simply coaching in the NBA, but perhaps one day ascending to the ultimate front seat: head coach. But no woman has yet broken through that ceiling. The number of women in assistant-coaching roles soared just a few years ago, during the middle of Hammon’s tenure in San Antonio, when a record nine women served as assistant coaches during the 2019-20 season. “I was in uncharted territory,” says Niele Ivey, who was an assistant with the Memphis Grizzlies that season and is now head coach of Notre Dame’s women’s basketball team. “I felt really empowered, and confidence was at an all-time high.”
But the number of women who are NBA assistant coaches has quietly decreased over the past few seasons. In 2020-21, there were eight women coaches; in 2021-22, seven; in 2022-23, six. This season, there are just five: Boucek, Mery Andrade (Raptors), Brittni Donaldson (Hawks), Sidney Dobner (Bucks), and Sonia Raman (Grizzlies).
The most notable explanation for the dip is that many of those who made up the NBA’s female coaching talent pool, including Hammon and Ivey, left for head-coaching jobs in the WNBA and the NCAA women’s game. Former Pelicans assistant coach Teresa Weatherspoon is now head coach of the Chicago Sky, former Cavs assistant coach Lindsay Gottlieb is head coach of USC women’s basketball, former Celtics assistant coach Kara Lawson is head coach of Duke women’s basketball, and former Wizards and Mavs assistant coach Kristi Toliver is an associate head coach with the Mercury. And just last week, former WNBA star Candice Dupree left her job as a player development assistant coach with the Spurs to become the head coach of the women’s team at Tennessee State.
These were head-coaching opportunities at top-tier destinations that they simply couldn’t pass up, many said; who knows when a similar opening might come around again?
A seismic shift is happening—one with tangible consequences in the coaching world. This is an unprecedented time for women in sports. Women’s college basketball exploded over the past year with the emergence of mega superstars Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese into mainstream media coverage. There were record highs in viewership for both the women’s NCAA championship and the WNBA draft. There’s been steady and now historic investment in both the WNBA and its incoming talent, especially Clark, who recently signed an eight-figure Nike deal without ever playing a pro game. Given the devoted advocacy of superstars like A’ja Wilson, who has been a critical voice in the gender pay gap, last week the WNBA announced that players will now travel on chartered flights for the first time in league history (they’ve flown commercial since its inception nearly three decades ago). A recent report from Deloitte projected that women’s sports would generate more than $1 billion in global revenue this year, up roughly 300 percent from the company’s estimate in 2021.
I’ve always been the only girl. This is my comfort zone.Jenny Boucek
Across the NBA, women have been thriving in powerful front office roles, including Kelly Krauskopf, assistant general manager for the Pacers, the first woman in NBA history to hold this title. There’s also the Suns’ Morgan Cato, the first Black woman to be an assistant GM in the NBA; Asjha Jones, the Blazers’ director of basketball strategy; Swin Cash, the Pelicans’ vice president of basketball operations and team development; Allison Feaster, the Celtics’ vice president of team operations and organizational growth; Sheri Sam, the Blazers’ scouting manager; Jeanie Buss, the Lakers’ owner and president; and Cynt Marshall, the Mavericks’ CEO, the first Black woman to hold that position in the NBA.
In 2023, the NBA league office boasted its highest percentage of women in professional staff roles in more than a decade, with 43.3 percent. There are currently more than 50 women in basketball operations and basketball-facing roles for NBA teams. Ijeoma Ofomata started in a scouting role with the Bucks this season after helping to launch the Basketball Africa League. And last month, Ashley Moyer-Gleich became the first woman selected for the NBA playoff officiating roster since 2012.
More than excitement, more than momentum—there’s a tantalizing feeling of genuine possibility for women in basketball. But these gains for women in positions across the NBA have been slow to translate to more bench-coaching roles, despite the significant progress in that area earlier this decade. Just 16 women have served as assistant coaches in NBA history. And while there are now many more meaningful and exciting possibilities for women in basketball, these shifts raise a question: Has the NBA moved further away from the historic first of a woman head coach?
The Ringer interviewed 18 people, including women who are current or former NBA coaches and executives, as well as male NBA head coaches and personnel, to better understand not just the landscape for women coaches in the NBA today, but also the league’s efforts to increase representation among coaches in the future. “It’s the last frontier,” says Lindsey Harding, head coach of the G League’s Stockton Kings.
Earlier this month, Harding was interviewed for the Hornets’ head-coaching position after leading Stockton to the best record in the G League and advancing to the Western Conference finals. (Last week the Hornets hired the Celtics’ lead assistant coach Charles Lee for the role.) “I’d love to be a head coach in the NBA,” says Harding, who played in the WNBA for nine years and was the 2024 G League Coach of the Year. “I want to see how far this is going to go for me.”
While many coaches like Harding are ascending, continuing to make their mark in the league, it doesn’t seem as if the hiring of a woman head coach is imminent, according to several people interviewed for this story. At the same time, much work is currently happening behind the scenes to shift this reality, to help women coaches dream up new possibilities for themselves and the next generation.
“We do have to constantly prove ourselves,” Harding says. “Being one of the few doing this, it’s just a little bit more difficult and challenging.
“You want to get to that point where you’re just a coach,” she continues, “and a man or woman, whoever’s best for the job, will get the job.”
In 2017, NBA commissioner Adam Silver told ESPN he wanted the league to have a woman head coach “sooner rather than later”; in 2022, he said on a podcast with journalist Bonnie Bernstein and WNBA commissioner Cathy Englebert that he’d like to see it happen within five years. That timeline might be unrealistic given the current landscape for women coaches, but from the top of the league, there has been a steady drumbeat for that history-making moment to happen.
No one has come closer than Hammon.
She’s interviewed for enough NBA head-coaching jobs that she’s said she lost count. But even though she served eight years under Popovich, not to mention 16 years as a point guard in the pros, she never received the ultimate call-up, unlike former NBA guards with similar on-court résumés. Doc Rivers, who played 13 seasons, and Jason Kidd (19 seasons), and Chauncey Billups (17 seasons), all got their first head-coaching gigs with limited—or no—assistant-coaching experience. Now, J.J. Reddick (15 seasons) is reportedly a leading candidate for the Lakers’ opening even though he has no coaching experience.
“If you give me my 16 years as a player that you do to any of these other people, all of a sudden I jump to the top of the list right away,” Hammon told Time in 2023. “If I had a 16-year NBA career and my name was Brian, I’d probably be hired and fired a couple of times by now.” She also said in that interview: “I’m not going to beg for a job anymore.”
With the increasing popularity of women’s basketball, the NBA is not necessarily seen as the ultimate goal for all aspiring coaches anymore. The freedom and financial security of becoming a head coach outside the NBA are alluring. That Hammon chose to leave for an opportunity to coach women in the WNBA, and that she quickly built the Aces into a superteam in the most exciting chapter of that league’s history, has helped make this path not just a viable option—but a celebrated one.
And given the lack of job security in the cutthroat NBA, where the constant shuffling of coaches has become routine, there are also many benefits to coaching at the collegiate level. Hall of Famer Dawn Staley, four-time women’s college basketball Coach of the Year, seven-time SEC Coach of the Year, and head coach of South Carolina, this season’s national champion, has long had her name mentioned in conversations about becoming an NBA head coach, especially for her hometown Philadelphia 76ers. The Trail Blazers interviewed her in 2021. At the time, she said it was a “great experience” and that she thought she was treated “like a real candidate. Whether or not they seriously considered me, I felt like it wasn’t a fluke.”
Recently, Staley was asked about the Hornets’ opening during a Charlotte radio interview, given that she played for the Charlotte Sting in the WNBA. Staley said she hadn’t been contacted by the Hornets, despite speculation that they might be interested. “I don’t have a passion to coach at the pro level, NBA or WNBA,” she said. “My passion has always been young people. I consider myself a dream merchant for my players, and I really feel like this is my calling. Although I’ve never had the itch to go to the next level, I do think of it as a challenge, and I am drawn to challenges. But my passion lies right here on the collegiate level.”
Indeed, Staley is quite content with college basketball; in 2021, she signed a historic seven-year, $22.4 million contract extension with the Gamecocks.
“Our market value in this world [NCAA] is higher,” Gottlieb says.
“Some of it speaks to where the women’s game is and the value that coaches are placing on us now,” she says. “So they’re coming with money, and they’re coming with opportunity.”
Gottlieb, who led the Trojans to a Pac-12 conference championship and to the Elite Eight in March—the furthest USC has advanced since 1994—recently signed a contract extension that will keep her at the school through 2030. She says she loved her time with the Cavs but felt she couldn’t pass up a head-coaching opportunity, especially with a program like USC, where freshman phenom JuJu Watkins plays. “I don’t just want to be a head coach anywhere,” Gottlieb says, “but it’s hard to turn down an opportunity to be at a place that can win a national championship.”
There are likely other factors involved in women coaches’ decision to leave the NBA pipeline for the WNBA or college basketball, including lifestyle, location, and family planning. But finally, these jobs are offering a more competitive salary and a chance for advancement. “There’s a monetary factor here,” says Lisa Boyer, an associate head coach for South Carolina who became the first woman to ever serve on an NBA coaching staff when she joined the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2001-02. (Stephanie Ready became the first full-time assistant coach of an NBA G League team in ’01).
“You’re asking a female to potentially stay in a position [in the NBA] where nobody has been able to break that ceiling of becoming that head coach,” Boyer says, “and then you have somebody else that’s literally wanting you to come and be their head coach and willing to pay you. … It’s almost like a business decision, right?”
Still, leaving the NBA pipeline for other opportunities was a difficult decision for many of these coaches. Gottlieb worried what would happen to up-and-coming women in the NBA after she and others left for gigs in other leagues. “I definitely had some trepidation about ‘Where’s the pool going to be if none of us are willing to stay?’” Gottlieb says. “Where’s the pool going to be if our market value is much higher in women’s college basketball?”
Other questions are up for exploration, too: How can the NBA increase the number of women assistant coaches rather than continue on the current downward trend? Many male coaches land those jobs after years of experience coaching in the NBA, but how can women gain those years of experience if they aren’t getting their foot in the door as frequently? How can they work their way up in the video room, like Heat coach Erik Spoelstra did, to eventually land a front of bench gig? And can women who pursued jobs in other leagues find their way back to the NBA?
You want to get to that point where you’re just a coach, and a man or woman, whoever’s best for the job, will get the job.Lindsey Harding
“There are many positives with coaches enjoying lengthy careers on NBA benches and leaving to gain invaluable head- and associate head–coaching experiences,” says David S. Fogel, executive director and general counsel of the National Basketball Coaches Association. “There is also more work to be done, and we all [NBA, teams, NBCA] need to continue to increase the pipeline to identify, develop, and help these coaches network and gain exposure to NBA decision-makers.”
Many of the women interviewed for this piece have nothing but positive things to say about their time in the NBA. They say they felt affirmed and respected, that they were given meaningful responsibilities and developed long-lasting relationships. They just want other qualified women to have the same opportunities. And they stress, again and again, that they don’t want progress to come via anything gimmicky or a quota system like the NFL’s Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview diverse candidates for top coaching and front office positions. They say they don’t want to tell sob stories about their career paths, either. They simply want to work—and they want to be seen and respected solely for how they perform in their jobs.
“I don’t want to get a job because I’m a woman,” Boucek says. “I just don’t want to not get a job because I’m a woman.
“We’ve come a long way,” she says. “I think we have a long way to go. And I don’t think there’s any way to rush it because I really believe it has to happen organically and one interaction at a time.”
Many of the people interviewed by The Ringer for this piece said that first, there must be a shift in the framing of this topic. The question they’ve often been asked—“Will we ever see a woman become a head coach?”—is far less fruitful than more concrete, solution-oriented questions, such as “How can more decision-makers see how qualified women coaches can help a team win, and how can these qualified women coaches get on the radar in an organic way?” And, they say, decision-makers must contemplate, “If a woman were qualified and had everything your team was looking for, would you hire her?”
Progress is happening at the ground level and in the front offices of the NBA, but many of the coaches who spoke to The Ringer say that true, enduring change in the coaching ranks will take time. The NBA is 77 years old. The WNBA is only 28. Young girls in this era are seeing women on NBA benches for the first time; the previous generation could never have dreamed of such a thing. The landscape for women in men’s sports is rapidly evolving—and the NBA doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The NFL didn’t see its first woman on the sideline until 2015, when Jen Welter served as an intern for the Arizona Cardinals in the preseason; there were 10 women in full-time assistant-coaching roles in the NFL last year. In MLB, 19 women held on-field coaching or player development roles at the start of the 2023 season. The entire coaching landscape is changing, but not as quickly as those who have been historically excluded would like. “Everybody looks at the NBA and thinks, ‘Oh, we should be there by now,’” Boyer says. “I just think that we need more time. It’s evolving.”
There is reason for optimism but also motivation for a rejuvenated focus, says the Blazers’ Asjha Jones, who keeps her own database and spreadsheets of qualified women coaches to help spread the word. She further organizes her lists by aspiration: head coach, front office role, scout, and so on. “So when teams do ask, I have legit names to offer them,” Jones says. “People are asking; people are interested.
“This thing is not going to be linear,” she says. “It’s going to be, take two steps forward, one step back. … As long as we keep talking about it and working at it and keep adding, I think we’ll be OK, because people do care. No one’s really giving up the fight.”
Coaching in the NBA is a fight—for anyone. Jobs are hard to come by and even easier to lose. The odds of becoming an NBA assistant coach—let alone one of the 30 head coaches—are slim. One ascends via a complicated mix of connections, talent, knowledge, and sheer luck. Traditionally, it’s been a who-knows-who game. Owners want to hire someone with a proven track record and someone they know. But there is no clear road map to a position. Some men—even those with the best relationships around the league—spend decades as assistant coaches and will never get a shot at head coach. It took Lee, for example, 10 seasons as an assistant to land his first head-coaching job with the Hornets. But it can be especially challenging and frustrating for those highly qualified women who haven’t gotten invited for interviews during the hiring process or who felt they needed to leave the NBA ranks to advance their careers. No woman has yet been named as a potential interviewee for the Lakers’ head-coaching job after Darvin Ham was fired earlier this month. The Suns recently hired former Bucks head coach Mike Budenholzer to replace Frank Vogel, who was fired after one season. No woman was linked to an interview for that job, either—at least not publicly.
Nancy Lieberman, the first woman to ever play in a men’s professional league when she joined the United States Basketball League’s Springfield Fame in 1986 following her time suiting up for Pat Riley and the Lakers during a summer league in 1981, says she has never had a head-coaching interview in the NBA, despite her Hall of Fame résumé in both men’s and women’s hoops. “I’m a lifer,” she once told David Stern, the late NBA commissioner. “Will I ever get a chance to coach in the league? I feel like I’m paying my dues. I’ve worked hard.”
She eventually served as an assistant coach for the Kings from 2015 to 2018 and now coaches in the Big3 League. “You have to allow us to go through the [interview] process,” Lieberman says. “You don’t have to hire me, but find out if I know something. … How do you know what I know if you don’t give me the opportunity to just interview me?” She continues: “It can’t just be these one-offs. I’m not saying it’s Skittles and every team has to have [a woman]—but I am saying that there has to be an opportunity once you’ve paid your dues and you’re qualified to seriously be considered a head coach.”
Shifting perceptions about women coaching in the NBA involves altering what kinds of questions these coaches are asked. A common one—“Will men’s players respect you?”—is not only out of touch but insulting, several said. The implication is that men wouldn’t respect or listen to a woman. The women interviewed for this piece say they felt respected as soon as they joined their respective NBA teams. “Everyone knows how to conduct themselves in a locker room setting,” says Karen Stack Umlauf, who served as an assistant coach for the Bulls from 2018 to 2020 and is now part of Northwestern’s women’s hoops staff.
Gender simply wasn’t a concern for NBA players. Gottlieb puts it more bluntly: “Elite basketball players don’t give a shit. They care if, no. 1, you know what you’re talking about. … They really are aware if you care about them as a human being.”
When Ivey first arrived in Memphis, she received a DM from Ja Morant. It read, “Coach, I can’t wait to learn from you.” Ivey says he texted after games throughout the season asking her how he did and what he could work on.
It’s simply about the work. Players see and respect how hard their coaches work, and expanding the pool of hardworking, qualified coaches is a focus of the NBA and the NBCA. They’re implementing partnerships such as the Coaches Equality Initiative to be more proactive about leveling the playing field and making those aspiring coaches from underrepresented groups more visible to GMs and ownership groups in the hiring process. The CEI was initially established in 2019 after a number of Black assistant coaches in the NBA felt they weren’t being considered for interviews for head-coaching jobs. Indeed, in 2017-18, 70 percent of NBA head coaches were white; just 20 percent were Black. But in 2021-22, two years after the implementation of the CEI, there was more parity; 50 percent of head coaches were white, and 46.7 percent were Black.
In November 2022, the league reached a record high for head coaches of color (17) and Black head coaches (16), and the NBA received an “A+” grade on the 2023 NBA Racial and Gender Report Card released by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, which keeps track of this data. There are currently 12 Black head coaches in the NBA—several who were in place at the beginning of the season are no longer in those roles, including Ham, Adrian Griffin (Bucks), and Jacque Vaughn (Nets), each of whom was fired, and Wes Unseld Jr. (Wizards), who has been moved into a front office job.
The CEI is dedicated to continuing to identify and showcase talent from all underrepresented groups, including women. The initiative facilitates in-person networking opportunities to help foster authentic relationships between coaches and decision-makers so that those with hiring power may become more comfortable with finding talent outside their networks. It holds clinics and development programs in the summer, including a summit with networking opportunities and a speaker series about the hiring process. “We want to create a situation where everyone has an equal opportunity to develop their skills and that we are making people aware of people’s qualifications,” Carlisle says. “And then from there, organically, good things will happen, and a lot of good things have happened.”
Carlisle says other concepts may be in the works for Summer League: “One of the ideas that we’re talking about is the possibility of offering positions during the summer so that NBA teams can get to know qualified women who are interested in becoming NBA coaches and to help them develop relationships.”
The NBA has also created what it considers the prize jewel of the CEI initiative: a private online database and mobile app for front office executives to better recruit diverse candidates. Current NBA assistant coaches, as well as others specifically invited by the NBA, such as those within its Coaches Development Program, can create extensive profiles in the database. Candidates can detail their coaching philosophies, specific skills, championship experience, and coaching trees, helping decision-makers to discover ties they may not know existed. Those within the NBA with knowledge about the inner workings of the database said that the hope is to reduce the barrier of having to “know someone first” to get hired.
Of course, NBA coaches themselves must also be more intentional about diversifying their staffs, and those who do may serve as a model for other teams. Take Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic, who previously served as an assistant coach with the Thunder, Suns, and Grizzlies and worked alongside a woman assistant coach, Sonia Raman, for the first time in his career while with Memphis from 2020 to 2023. “It was an amazing experience for me,” Rajakovic says. “Sonia was completely outstanding for us in Memphis. … She was able to help me become a better coach.”
You’re asking a female to potentially stay in a position [in the NBA] where nobody has been able to break that ceiling of becoming that head coach, and then you have somebody else that’s literally wanting you to come and be their head coach and willing to pay you. … It’s almost like a business decision, right?Lisa Boyer
That experience inspired him to hire another qualified woman coach while rounding out his staff in Toronto in September 2023, bringing on Mery Andrade, a former assistant coach with the G League’s Erie BayHawks and the Angolan club Petro de Luanda. “I wanted coaches from all different aspects and backgrounds and different cultures,” he says. “From day one, I was very intentional about hiring a female assistant coach.”
That word, intention, came up often in interviews with The Ringer. Intention to widen the hiring pool, intention to look beyond familiar faces. “Having more people with different backgrounds, it just makes you better,” says Rajakovic. “It’s a huge value.”
There have been enough women assistant coaches, it seems, that hiring a woman as a bench coach is no longer seen as a radical decision—not like what the response will be when an NBA team taps a woman to be a head coach for the first time.
Decision-makers have to become more “comfortable with going outside the box and making a hire that has never been done before,” Ivey says. “One person has to be bold enough to do it.” The goal, many of the coaches interviewed said, is to reach and go beyond normalization so that hiring qualified candidates that happen to be women isn’t seen as bold or even “courageous”—another word that is regularly used in this context. But it isn’t really about courage, says the Blazers’ Sheri Sam, a 10-year pro and two-time WNBA champion. “Makes it sound heroic. I don’t see it as that profound,” Sam says. “More in symmetry with going against the trend. Buck the masses. Ultimately, it’s hiring a qualified candidate that you feel can be successful in your organization’s culture.”
Owners and GMs, Sam says, must “have a perspective of wanting the best basketball mind, without really applying gender to it.”
That means expanding the feeder pool beyond just one woman candidate. Hammon shouldered considerable pressure, as there seemed to be a collective hope that she would be the one to achieve another historic breakthrough by becoming the first woman head coach. Several coaches interviewed for this story mentioned Hammon and how she represents a dichotomy—her departure to the WNBA signified the difficulties women coaches face in trying to climb the NBA ladder but also the exciting possibilities that can exist outside the NBA.
But the way forward, many said, won’t be through just one woman and won’t focus only on NBA head-coaching jobs. “We need more female NBA assistant coaches to make a female NBA head coach a more likely reality. There’s strength in numbers,” says Debbie Spander, coaching agent and president of Insight Sports Advisors. “While there have been some positives the last few years, including a woman [Harding] being named G League Coach of the Year, there needs to be a stronger pipeline of female coaches on NBA staffs with a real opportunity to move up through the ranks.”
It’s around 9:15 p.m. when Mery Andrade, the Raptors assistant coach on Rajakovic’s staff, picks up the phone for her interview for this story. She’s in Utah, after a game against the Jazz. “I still have the adrenaline,” Andrade says. “In Portugal we have a saying: ‘If you run for something that you like, you never get tired.’”
More than anything, it is clear how much these coaches value their jobs—but so did many others who are no longer in the NBA, who never received a call-up after years of work in the league, who might still welcome a chance to come back in. Former Clippers assistant coach Natalie Nakase, now an assistant on Hammon’s staff with the Aces, spent a decade in the Clippers organization in various roles, including assistant video coordinator, assistant coach of G League affiliate Agua Caliente, and player development assistant coach. She became the first woman head coach in Japan’s top pro men’s league. There was even mainstream speculation that perhaps she could become the NBA’s first woman head coach. Instead, she joined Hammon’s staff and has helped the Aces win back-to-back titles.
Former Trail Blazers assistant coach Edniesha Curry, now the head coach of the Virgin Islands men’s national basketball team, spent years coaching overseas in Israel, China, and Vietnam. She played in the WNBA and served as an assistant coach for the University of Maine’s men’s hoops team from 2018 to 2021—and at the time was the only woman working as a full-time assistant coach for a men’s Division I program. She continues to chase her dream to get back to the NBA. “I’ve never stopped because I have a true passion for teaching,” Curry says.
This is Curry’s eighth season in the NBA’s Coaches Development Program (formerly known as the Assistant Coaches Program), which provides hands-on coaching experiences to help current and retired NBA, G League, and WNBA players develop their skill sets, including with scouting software training and networking opportunities. Many program alums have advanced to the NBA, including Dupree, who recently left her job with the Spurs; Andrade, now with the Raptors; and Jia Perkins, now with the G League’s Salt Lake City Stars.
In March, Curry served as a coach for the Mexican Coaching Federation. In April, she ran a coaching clinic in Qatar for the NBA’s Her Time to Play program, which aims to encourage more girls to play and more women to coach. She is determined to continue coaching—no matter how challenging the path might be—as she knows that many young girls are watching. These days, after her games overseas, she sees the way their eyes follow her. “Look!” Curry hears them say. “There’s a woman coaching!” “It makes all the ideas of gender—you can’t do this—or the stereotypes that come with gender of women coaching men worth it.”
I don’t want to get a job because I’m a woman. “I just don’t want to not get a job because I’m a woman.Boucek
Back in Indianapolis, Boucek says she doesn’t think about the fact that she’s the only woman currently working as a front of bench coach. She can’t. There’s too much work to be done. The Pacers defense is calling her. The only time she really notices is when others ask her about it. Or when young women or parents of young women send handwritten letters to her. She’s looking at one as she speaks, from a father who’s telling Boucek that having her on the bench has positively affected his daughter and the conversations they have about basketball. Boucek is moved that people take time to send her genuine notes. “It’s meaningful,” she says.
Sometimes people approach her when she and the Pacers are on the road. Recently, a father walked up to her in the weight room of a hotel, telling her that he and his two daughters had been at the game the previous night. “Once they noticed you,” he told Boucek, “they didn’t watch a second of the game after that. They watched you the entire hour and a half after that. They couldn’t take their eyes off you.”
That was when it really hit her: what this all means—what all this could become. What if one day this was the norm? What if what she’s doing right now is laying the foundation for the next woman coach to arrive? The thoughts are tantalizing. Exciting.
But there is something to lose, too. Something that hasn’t been explicitly named but is quietly humming in the background.
Momentum.
It’s hard to create it—even harder to sustain it. The stakes are high. Those young girls who have watched during this Pacers playoff run are already here. Already dreaming. And there will only be more, climbing from the margins toward the front of the bench.
