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After what felt like a long search period, the New York Liberty have reportedly hired now-former Golden State Warriors assistant coach Chris DeMarco as their new coach. This means all 15 WNBA teams have a head coach secured for the 2026 season.
After the 2025 season ended, there were five coaching vacancies in the league. New York, along with the Seattle Storm and Dallas Wings, parted ways with their head coaches once the season was over. The other two vacancies came from the two expansion teams, Toronto and Portland, both of whom were looking for their first coaches ever.
Portland was the first of the lot to announce its coach, hiring Alex Sarama, who previously served as an assistant for the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers. From there, teams were stalled until Sandy Brondello, the two-time WNBA Champion who had just left New York, decided where she wanted to coach. Brondello was offered the job in Seattle, Dallas, and Toronto, with rumors flying that Dallas had specifically let Chris Koclanes go from his role to pursue Brondello. In the end, Brondello decided she wanted to coach the expansion Toronto Tempo and take on a new challenge with the league’s first international franchise.
Once Brondello was taken, Dallas quickly announced their second choice, picking former USF women’s basketball coach Jose Fernandez. With over two decades of experience coaching women’s college basketball, Fernandez left his role with the program at USF to take the Dallas job. Seattle’s second choice after Brondello was just a few spots down her bench in New York, Sonia Raman. Raman spent one season as an assistant coach under Brondello after previously working as an assistant for the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies.
The last team to hire their coach was New York. Last week, The New York Post’s Madeline Kenney reported that there were three finalists for the job: Phoenix Mercury associate head coach Kristi Tolliver, Charlotte Hornets advisor Will Weaver, and Toronto Raptors assistant coach Jama Mahlalela. Yet, they didn’t pick any of these finalists, and ESPN’s Shams Charania broke the news Friday afternoon that they hired DeMarco. Kenney reported for The Post that DeMarco had emerged as a candidate on Nov. 18.
With this hire official, an interesting stat got solidified: The WNBA now has more men in head coaching roles than women.
In 2026, there will be 15 head coaches across the league, eight of those being men and seven of whom are women. Two of the three head coaches who were let go from their roles at the end of the 2025 season were women, and only two of the five hires for new coaches ended up being women.
Here is a list of WNBA coaches for 2026:
In 2025, there were 13 head coaching jobs in the WNBA. Six of those jobs were held by men: Nate Tibbetts (Phoenix), Tyler Marsh (Chicago), Karl Smesko (Atlanta), Sydney Johnson (Washington), Chris Koclanes (Dallas), and Rachid Meziane (Connecticut). The other seven head coaching jobs were held by women: Sandy Brondello (New York), Noelle Quinn (Seattle), Lynne Roberts (Los Angeles), Becky Hammon (Las Vegas), Natalie Nakase (Golden State), Cheryl Reeve (Minnesota), and Steph White (Indiana).
In 2024, nine of the WNBA’s 12 coaching positions were held by women. There were only three men in head coaching positions across the league: Curt Miller (LA Sparks), Nate Tibbetts (Phoenix), and Eric Thibault (Washington). In 2023, those numbers held steady, among some changes. In 2022, it was a little more even, with seven women in head coaching roles and five men.
2021 was the last year that the scales tipped in favor of men in coaching jobs, with seven men and five women leading the benches.
This season’s breakdown is sticking with a historical trend of more WNBA seasons where men held more head coaching positions than women. Including 2026, 13 of the WNBA’s 30 seasons have had a majority of male head coaches. 11 seasons total had more women in head coaching positions. Six seasons had an even ratio of men to women head coaches.
(In seasons where the coach was fired mid-season, the coach who was present for more games was counted.)
The fewest number of women in coaching positions in a single season was in 2006, when only three of the WNBA’s then-14 teams were coached by women. The season with the highest representation of women in coaching positions was in 2023, when women held nine of the league’s 12 coaching jobs. On the other hand, the fewest number of male coaches in a single season was the league’s first season in 1997, when just one man was a coach.
What caused this shift after making history in 2023? There has been a trend in dipping into the NBA hiring pool when it comes to hiring WNBA head coaches these days. Between the league gaining more traction and more money being offered by WNBA teams, the job is more appealing to the up-and-coming NBA talent pool. Like it or not, many in the NBA space see taking a WNBA head coaching job as a “stepping stone” into getting a more “prestigious” NBA role. There is also the fact that the majority of assistant coaches in the NBA are men, so when you dip into those circles, there are only a few women to consider.
Many of the women who have been assistants in the NBA have come back to the WNBA to coach. Becky Hammon is the most notable, but also people like Nakase, Tolliver, Raman, and Niele Ivey are previous NBA assistants who currently hold positions in the WNBA or NCAA coaching women’s basketball.
All of this raises interesting questions. Has NBA experience always been this valued in WNBA coaching searches — and the league is just making enough money now for these NBA men to consider jumping over? Is this even a “problem” that needs to be fixed?
Some purely WNBA fans have a problem with the lack of women — primarily the lack of Black women — in WNBA head coaching roles these days. Representation is important, and in a league where a majority of your players are Black women, not having a single Black woman as a head coach is a pretty glaring discrepancy. Yet, it feels like this is only a problem if the players think it is a problem, and so far, none of them have been outspoken about the shifting trends in coaching hires. If the players don’t have a preference and just want good coaches, it seems like decisions are up to individual teams.
It will be interesting to see how the coaching changes and swaps in the WNBA affect the 2026 season, which could determine whether this trend continues or reverses.
