INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Stephanie White is coming home to win again.
Yes, after collecting Indiana’s prestigious Miss Basketball Award in high school and leading Purdue to the 1999 NCAA title, after playing on the Indiana Fever expansion team and serving as an assistant coach during the franchise’s 2012 championship run, White has decided she has some unfinished business to complete in her second stint as Indiana’s head coach.
She can’t wait.
So three days after Indiana hired White, she returned to Gainbridge Fieldhouse and received a rousing reception from her home-state fans with some of her new players, including Caitlin Clark, in the crowd.
“It’s going to be really hard for me to not get emotional today, but you know, I think all of these familiar faces in the building here, this is coming home for me,” White said Monday during her reintroductory news conference. “It has been such an experience with this franchise for nearly 25 years, from Day 1, and the opportunity to come home and lead this young, exciting team is really exciting.”
Why not?
The 47-year-old White returns to Indiana as a far more experienced coach than the one who left in 2016 just two seasons into her head coaching career with a record of 37-31. She spent the next four-plus seasons as Vanderbilt’s head coach, compiling a 46-83 mark before taking a year off and eventually returning to the WNBA with the Connecticut Sun.
There, she went 55-25 and led the Sun to the league’s semifinals in both seasons, earning the head coaching slot for the 2023 WNBA All-Star Game before winning the 2023 WNBA Coach of the Year Award.
But when Indiana fired Christie Sides amid rumors about White’s interest in returning to Indiana, White and the Sun agreed to part ways — opening the door for her return to the Fever.
It didn’t take long for the sides to reach a deal and now White, who honed her communication skills as a broadcaster, takes over one of the league’s most entertaining teams, featuring back-to-back rookies of the year in Clark and Aliyah Boston.
White already has some notion of how she wants to run the Fever.
“They’re an exciting team to watch and I think offensively, we can be more creative. I think we can utilize certain players in different ways,” White said as Clark and Boston watched. “I’m a forward-thinking, outside the box kind of coach. I like to challenge them on a number of levels, and they are a high basketball IQ team, so I want to give them the freedom to make plays.”
But it’s not just strategy that has White eager to get started.
She believes the league’s highest-drawing team in both attendance and television ratings can hang another title banner, or multiple banners, while helping women’s basketball reach a level former players, such as White, once used to think was possible only in their dreams.
Fever officials believe White’s presence — on and off the court — will help keep the momentum building just two months after Indiana clinched its playoff berth since 2016.
“We’re looking forward and this is about the next phase in the next era of kind of what we’re building here,” said Kelly Krauskopf, president of basketball and business operations for the Fever. “When I had the opportunity to talk to her, it was like fortuitous or something. I couldn’t even believe the timing of the opportunity. I look forward to seeing how Stephanie can communicate with (the players) and work with them and put them in a position to be successful.”
And White believes she can get the job done and add yet another chapter to her long list of accomplishments in this basketball-rich state.
“I think there’s a competitive fire and a mentality there that you can’t teach,” White said when asked about Clark and Boston. “And then you put it together, you’ve got the point guard and the center, are you kidding me? Like we’ve got the bookends that you want to build around and these two are the best. I’m excited about the opportunity we have to build from those starting points and build out for the longevity those two could have in Indiana.”
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