Rena Wakama looks to make her mark in the WNBA after excelling on Olympic, international stages

At the 2024 Paris Olympics, the Nigerian women’s basketball team reached heights it never had before. Known as D’Tigress, the team beat Australia, a perennial basketball power, and Canada in pool play to earn a spot in the quarterfinals for the first time in the country’s history.

Though they lost that quarterfinal game to the U.S., their surprise run helped them make their mark on the international basketball scene. At the helm of that team was 33-year-old Rena Wakama, an up-and-coming coach who was also an assistant at Tulane.

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Tyler Marsh, then an assistant for the Las Vegas Aces, couldn’t help but notice what the Nigerian team had accomplished, and who had prepared them for the tournament. When the Chicago Sky hired Marsh to be the team’s head coach last November, he immediately thought of Wakama and what she’d done with D’Tigress.

“Once you become a coach, it’s hard to just view the game through the lens of just a regular fan. So you’re always looking at how other coaches coach and adapt and things like that,” Marsh told Yahoo Sports. “She was someone that caught my eye, and before I even knew that I had this job. When I was able to build my own staff here in Chicago, she was one of the few people that came to my mind.”

Wakama, who is the first female coach of D’Tigress and was named Best Coach by FIBA after the Olympics, was on board from her first conversations with Marsh and Jeff Pagliocca, the Sky’s general manager. Coaching in the WNBA also gives her a chance to build on what she learned coaching the Nigerian team.

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“My first conversation with him, I was fired up. I thought I was a player. He got me so excited about his vision and what he was going to do with the Sky,” Wakama said. “And then after that, I spoke to Jeff. And then he was also so aligned with Tyler’s vision and getting a taste of working with pros for the national team, I wanted more. I was super interested in coming to the W and I’m so happy that it was what felt right.”

Wakama and the rest of the coaching staff aren’t beginning an easy job with the Sky. Though the team won a WNBA championship in 2021, the team has changed head coaches three times since then and lost key franchise centerpieces. They won just 13 games last season. Now they have several young and exciting players, including 2024 draft picks Angel Reese and Kamilla Cardoso and 2025 pick Hailey Van Lith, and veterans who know how to win titles in Ariel Atkins and Courtney Vandersloot, who’s back in Chicago after picking up her second WNBA title with the New York Liberty.

Now, Wakama’s job is to help the Sky jell as a team and make it back to the postseason.

She will do that while balancing her job with the Nigerian team. Wakama can keep an eye out for WNBA players with Nigerian roots. She has two on the Sky with Michaela Onyenwere, whose father was a sprinter for Nigeria, and Elizabeth Williams, who was born in Great Britain to Nigerian parents.

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Wakama will also need a strong Nigerian team. With the AfroBasket tournament in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, this summer, there will be a target on the back of the D’Tigress team. They won the event in 2023, and their Olympic performance showed what they can accomplish.

“Obviously, to me, we fell kind of short,” Wakama said. “To everyone else, we made a historic run [in Paris]. But to me, that wasn’t enough, right? So continuing to prepare, continuing to instill the faith and belief in my players in this organization that we can, you know, be on the podium hopefully in the next three or four years. That’s possible.”

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Balancing two demanding jobs isn’t easy, but Wakama’s work with the Nigerian team is about helping grow the sport she loves in the country she loves.

“That’s the root of who I am, a Nigerian, and I want to make sure that I, at any time, I let people know, and I want to also be a part of the movement of improving basketball in my country,” Wakama said. “So it’s super, super important to me, and I’m glad I’m able to be the face of it right now, but I hope to pass it on in a few years to another young female coach and continue to see the game grow.”