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As an aspiring basketball coach in his teens and early 20s, Alex Sarama was often met with snickers when he talked about the game he loved. For the British-born Sarama, who on 28 October was named the head coach of the WNBA’s newest expansion team, the Portland Fire, people doubted him before he even put two sentences together.
“There was a lot of skepticism,” he tells the Guardian. “A lot of coaches heard the accent and they’d say straight away this Alex guy can’t coach!”
Sarama, however, would not be dissuaded.
“So, it’s been great!” he says with a laugh. “It’s given me a real chip on my shoulder to go the extra mile to make sure I’m meticulous knowing my stuff. Because at the end of the day, the players don’t care. The players just respect you if you’re competent, if you make them better.”
All joking aside, it’s true. It’s not every day that you see a British basketball coach make it in the US. But that’s exactly what Sarama has achieved. While his homeland has never been known as a hotbed for basketball, he’s made a name for himself.
Growing up, though, Sarama played soccer and tennis. While basketball is a religion to many in the United States, It was never nearly as important in the UK. Still, as he got older, the game drew Sarama in.
“I think the fact that basketball wasn’t as popular made me even more determined,” he says. “Even when all my friends were playing other sports.”
Indeed, where there’s a will there’s a way.
“I think because basketball in the UK is less developed, it actually awarded me more unique opportunities to accelerate my coaching career,” the 30-year-old says, reflecting on his journey. “When I was 15, I knew I was never going to be good enough to be a professional player. But I thought that coaching would be the best way to have a career at the highest level.”
In need of an outlet, Sarama was in his mid-teens when he started his own basketball club, the Guildford Goldhawks. In just a few years, he grew it to be one of the bigger youth teams in the United Kingdom. “We actually won the national championship for the under-14 girls team,” he says. “That was my first experience coaching girls basketball.”
In his early 20s, Sarama continued his education at the University of Nottingham, studying history. He also coached – some of the players were nearly twice his age. He garnered important experience. “If I was in [a bigger basketball market like] Serbia, Spain or Lithuania, I would never have had those chances to coach,” he says. “To lead.”
From there, he managed to make the leap to the highest level of basketball: the NBA. He worked in the league’s international office, starting in London, before moving to Madrid and Antwerp. When he came to America, he worked in player development with the G-league’s Rip City Remix and then got a job with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
“The resources are very different in the UK,” Sarama says. “The universities – it’s not professionalized like it is in the US. For a lot of universities, it’s more for participation, rather than elite performance.”
The new head coach for the Fire, though, says that Britain does have a lot of potential when it comes to hoops. He goes as far as to call the country a “sleeping giant” when it comes to basketball. “I think it has so much potential with the players,” he says, “and some really good coaches who mean well. We just need as a country to prioritize a lot more coaching education and development.”
Sarama says he does maintain hope for the sport to grow there, however.
“I think there’s no reason why England couldn’t be a great basketball country,” he says. “It’s going to require a lot of intentional work to get things moving in the right direction. One day I would love to be a part of that and really initiate some positive transformations.”
As for his job with the Fire, he certainly has his work cut out. Building an expansion team is not for the weak of heart. Sarama, the author of the book, Transforming Basketball, is going to have to help build a franchise from square-one in a league that is both growing and changing faster than anyone can predict. To do so, he will employ some unique methods.
“We’re going to have every coach doing player development,” Sarama says, “with a shared methodology and a shared framework of the principles of play and the individual development plans we have for each athlete. So, a strength coach is not just going to do weight room and warmup. They’re going to be in the whole practice, doing actual basketball activities.”
Sarama says he’s keeping three things in mind in his new job – courage, confidence and humility. He believes he is working in the most exciting time in WNBA history. “I feel very privileged to be coming in during this moment in time,” he says. “Just the chance with an expansion team – this is so unique. I could coach the rest of my life and never have this situation. A lot of times in an organization, you have to unlearn previous processes.”
Sarama says he’s going to be instituting a lot of new “standard operating procedures”.
“We’re going to have absolutely everything documented in the organization,” he says. “That includes checklists in every area from how we go about building the culture to how we build an offense, how we run film sessions, how we give feedback to the players, what we do during a timeout. There’s going to be a checklist to everything.”
One thing that he will assuredly keep track of is his team’s rivalry with the squad a few hours north of Portland – the Seattle Storm, who are one of the successful teams in league history, with four championships to their name.
“It’s the game I’m most looking forward to, I can say that,” Sarama says. “That will be a very hyped game, which I’m eagerly looking forward to … I watch a lot of basketball – leagues all over the world. And I really want to try to bring the best ideas I’ve been fortunate enough to learn in all these different places to the Fire.”
