WNBA: Indiana Fever welcome back Stephanie White with open arms

Stephanie White is Indiana basketball royalty and she was treated as such during her introductory press conference as the head coach of the Indiana Fever on Monday.

White acknowledged the journalists who covered her previous stints here, as a player (2000-04), assistant coach (2011-14) and head coach (2015-16), and they treated her with reverence rather than just respect reserved for an established coach, one of the best in the league. 20 years after her retirement from her playing, the emotional connection is still there and it makes you understand why the Fever couldn’t waste the chance of signing White. As well as why White can’t stay away from the Fever. The following statement captures her attitude and work ethic:

I think people expect a lot out of me, but nobody can expect as much out of me as I do….I want perfection, and I strive for perfection all the time.

However, she didn’t share those words on Monday, but in 2000, as a 23-year-old who just joined her homestate team as the No. 8 pick in the WNBA Expansion Draft. The expectations were high for the 1995 Indiana Miss Basketball and 1999 NCAA champion with Purdue when she came back to Indiana.

The Fever’s first ever general manager and current president of basketball and business operations, Kelly Krauskopf, alluded to that time during the press conference, sharing:

My first player transaction that I ever did was to bring her to Indiana when we were an expansion team a long time ago, and the player that I traded for her was Sandy Brondello, who’s the head coach of the championship team this year.

Coming out of college, White was seen as an incredible basketball mind, dressed as a 5-foot-9 scrappy point guard. Legends of her play rivaled those of Larry Bird, at least if you want to believe former Purdue head coach Carolyn Peck, who had high praise for White when she retired in 2005 at just 27 years old. Her WNBA career did not approach the heights she reached in high school, when she set scoring records, or college, when she went on 3-point scoring sprees, but people in Indiana still loved her. Both, for the memories, and the fact that she was theirs.

On Monday, White asserted:

I’m at the point in my career where making a decision for one reason or another isn’t really good enough anymore. It’s got to be about professional opportunity. It’s got to be about the the personal opportunities and for me being near my family—and some of them are here today, including my nephew who I have only seen a few times, so it would be great to see his cute little face more often. And for my children, to be able to be around my family even more—it’s important. For those of us who have children, you don’t get those years back, right? You don’t get this time back. And my family sacrificed a lot of time with my children and for them to now be able to have them around more often, for me to be closer to home, it was really important.

White returns to the Fever, but encounters a new team, whose development was accelerated by drafting Aliyah Boston and Caitlin Clark, a pairing the coach compared to John Stockton and Karl Malone, while also joking that her players were too young to understand that reference. Stockton and Malone, of course, are one of the best playmaker-big duos in NBA history, who, for 18 seasons, carried the Utah Jazz to never-before-seen heights. That’s a high bar to set for Clark and Boston, but White is confident in both of their abilities, noting:

I think first and foremost they’re both incredibly competitive players and there’s a fire and a mentality that you can’t teach when it comes to competitive spirit and when it comes to being a great teammate, when it comes to lifting up those around you and watching both of them grow into not just the players that they are, but grow into the spotlight that they have, how they lead and how they make their teammates better, how they lift one another up, these two…are going to go down in history as the greatest and I’m excited about the opportunity to work with them. I’m excited about the opportunity that we have to build from those starting points and build for the longevity that those two could have in Indiana.

Once again, White is returning to Indiana with high expectations. The spotlight is brighter than ever before, but the franchise, the community and the state are all behind her.