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The Dallas Wings made the decision to fire Chris Koclanes after one season as the head coach of the franchise. They went just 10-34 as he failed to get the most out of the Paige Bueckers-Arike Ogunbowale pairing, as Ogunbowale had the worst year of her NBA career. Bueckers was productive, making the All-Star Game and All-WNBA Second Team, but the team didn’t perform well around her, and a lot of that falls on the coach.
In his place, general manager Curt Miller looked to the college ranks and hired Jose Fernandez, who had been at the University of South Florida for 25 years, leading them to heights they probably thought weren’t achievable there.
Fernandez is a good friend of UConn’s Geno Auriemma, who was Bueckers’ coach in college, so there should be a good level of familiarity there. But why did he decide to take the jump now to the WNBA? He discussed it on an episode of “No Offseason” with The Athletic.
READ MORE: New Wings coach Jose Fernandez gets brutally honest about state of college sports
“I thought it was time for me. I had been a head division one coach for 25 years. I think we’ve had a lot of success. The landscape of the game has totally changed from student athletes and parents are not looking at equality of when you see student athletes transferring from some very highly regarded academic institutions and not looking at the positives that that academic institution can give you, not only now but 5, 10, 15 years down the line,” Fernandez started.
“The college system is broken, and I don’t know how it could be fixed; hopefully, at the congressional level. I was really coaching professional sports at the collegiate level in regards to calculating what are we doing with our cost of attendance? What are we doing with our… summer school money, Christmas break money? What other incentives are we going to put in here? What are we going to offer in this shared revenue bucket? And what type of NIL money are they going to be able to make for us to even have a chance to have the student athlete play for us?
“So, you’re not a head coach anymore. You’re a general manager when you have to manage all those things, and then going out and have to supplement, besides fundraising, for the things that you want to do for your team. And we needed to always play in two great tournaments to get five, six top 50 games.
“If I was coaching professional basketball in college, I said, ‘You know what, why don’t I do this in the WNBA?’ Because I think getting an opportunity to go coach the best players in the world, that’s something you strive for. I’m really excited about where the league is right now. We’ve always played a pro Euro/international system, the basketball part doesn’t concern me. The player development part, the preparation, I think that’s going to be the easy part, as long as you’re able to communicate and motivate and have great relationships with the players in your franchise.”
Fernandez’s familiarity with recruiting internationally should help draw priority free agents this offseason, but nothing is like the allure of playing with Paige Bueckers. What Fernandez is trying to do is create stability for a franchise that hasn’t had much recently.
Dallas has won just one playoff series since the franchise moved there from Tulsa in 2015, and no coach has lasted longer than two seasons since 2018. Hopefully, having a talent like Bueckers will help with that, but Fernandez will be in uncharted territory if he can make it even three years.
READ MORE: How Wings star Paige Bueckers had one of the most iconic moments in women’s sports
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