Stephanie White won Indiana Ms. Basketball at Seeger High School, a national championship at Purdue and helped bring the Fever a championship as an assistant in 2012. Photo courtesy of AP News.
DAVID JACOBS | ASSISTANT SPORTS EDITOR | drjacobs@butler.edu
Overtime, or “OT,” is an opinion column series where the Collegian takes national sports headlines or polarizing topics and gives them a Butler-centric angle.
Following its most historic season since its inception in 1997, the WNBA has seen viewership and attendance skyrocket throughout the league. With the growth in popularity, the players association is in the midst of negotiating a new Collective Bargaining Agreement while the league has already announced three new expansion sites — Toronto, Golden State and Portland.
Despite this, seven of the 13 active teams are searching for head coaches, with Toronto and Portland also actively searching for their head coach for their inaugural 2026 season.
That many coaching vacancies are counterproductive for the sport. As the league grows, team owners need to recognize that many of these coaches deserve time to develop just as the players do.
Of the six coaches fired this off-season, former Los Angeles Sparks head coach Curt Miller was the only coach with more than five years of head coaching experience on their resume, with four of the canned coaches being within their first two seasons.
J.M. Brenner, a first-year exploratory business major, feels the sense of continuity and development is key for team success.
“I’ve always been a fan of sticking things out,” Brenner said. “I’m a fan of growth and development as a team because if you keep just firing and hiring new coaches you’re never going to gel as a team. Especially if you have a young team, I just think that is the wrong move.”
With the influx of viewership coming into the league, it makes sense for so many teams to scour for new leadership — everybody wants to be in the best situation possible. But at what point has it gone too far?
Chicago Sky head coach and basketball hall of famer Teresa Weatherspoon getting the pink slip after just one season is one of the more extreme situations of teams moving on too early.
Although Weatherspoon led the Sky to just a 13-27 record this past summer, she had to deal with injuries to her top two draft picks — Angel Reese and Kamilla Cardoso — and a mid-season trade shipping off her best shooter in Marina Mabrey.
The Sky announced on Nov. 3 that they had hired beloved Aces assistant coach Tyler Marsh to be their new head coach.
While there is an argument to be made that the right coach for the franchise would be able to overcome those challenges, giving a bit more grace when so much went wrong for the Sky should be standard practice.
At the end of the day, as a coach the goal is to win, and failing to do so warrants a change of command regardless of the tenure length. Such quick coaching overhauls disrupt the continuity a franchise needs to appeal to fanbases.
Sophomore pharmacy major Allie Smith has grown up a sports fan but feels the lack of continuity makes it hard for fans like her to try and pick a team to root for.
“It’s going to be a better atmosphere [with the same coach],” Smith said. “Without [the same] head coach, it’s just not going to be the same gameplay and you never really know [if] they are going to be good or bad.”
Of the six other coaches who got fired, four failed to hit the elusive .500 mark. The two others — former Indiana Fever coach Christie Sides and former Connecticut Sun coach Stephanie White — were the lone coaches to be fired following a winning season, showing that each situation is unique.
Sides had been ridiculed by Fever fans for poor play calling and game management to aid their superstar and rookie of the year Caitlin Clark.
Nonetheless, the amount of vacancies can be alarming from an outside view.
However, junior marketing major Nolan Canada feels that as an evolving league the overhaul will be for the better down the road.
“As a sports fan, seeing that in a professional league is pretty crazy,” Canada said. “Teams are looking to grow and push forward more than they have before, especially with [the WNBA] being an expanding league.”
With the Fever announcing on Nov. 1 that White will return to the Gainbridge sidelines, Fever fans are excited about the reunion.
White’s departure from the Sun — officially called a “mutual parting of ways” — came with minimal fan disappointment from her tenure in Connecticut.
The former Fever head coach who brought the team to the 2015 finals boasts an impressive 92-57 career record with a 55-15 record in her two seasons with the Sun.
“Since 2014, they’ve had a lot of turnover in terms of coaching,” Canada said. “I think it’s good to see someone with proven success take the reins with a roster that already has talent.”
Despite Fever fans potentially coming out of the offseason happy, the firing of so many young coaches before they have a chance to prove themselves is an epidemic.
If this was the NBA — where 17 teams had a head coach opening — there would be an uproar of confusion among sports fans. Of course, with the WNBA having fewer teams, getting to the point where over half of the teams have an open spot is an easier benchmark to hit. Nonetheless, so many open jobs is an incredibly alarming sign.
With more fans tuning into the league than ever before, how can a prospective fan be asked to root for a team that does not even have a coach? While each coach is bound to land somewhere and is capable of being successful, for the sake of the league these teams need to be more patient with young coaches — just as if they were players.
Although the WNBA does have a documented player development problem, it was often due to the lack of roster spots rather than teams giving up on a player too early. With these coach firings — for the most part — it is ownerships giving up on coaches too early. Of course, each situation is different and some coaches do deserve to get the ax after just a year.
Nevertheless, if the league wants to continue its positive trajectory it is crucial to create continuity within teams for all the new fans.
“[As a new fan] it would be kind of hard to watch,” Smith said. “Having the same coach will have the same foundation set [each year], but with a new coach there [are] a lot of question marks.”
