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After graduating from Boston College with a doctorate degree in law in 2001, landing a job at the Department of Labor and later financial services firm Fidelity, Sonia Raman thought she would be a lawyer forever.
Then in 2008, she left her career in corporate law behind to coach women’s basketball.
“I actually really loved my day job at Fidelity, but I think [my] passion was with coaching,” Raman, 51, tells CNBC Make It. “Basketball just kept pulling me back in.”
It was a “calculated risk,” she says, but one that seems to have paid off: Raman was named the next head coach of the WNBA’s Seattle Storm on Oct. 28. She is the first Indian American to hold a head coaching position in the league.
Raman, who walked onto the Division III basketball team at Tufts University as an undergraduate, says she first developed an interest in coaching her junior year of college while sidelined due to a major injury.
Her “love of the game started to really evolve into the lens of a coach,” when she began spending her free time reviewing videos of the team’s upcoming opponents — taking notes to share with her team for a competitive edge, she says.
Coaching was always supposed to be a part-time passion
Since graduating from college in 1996, Raman says, she has always coached basketball in some capacity, whether it be leading a youth team in her years before law school or a summer league team during law school.
As a lawyer on Fidelity’s risk and compliance team, she spent her workdays advising non-profits on their sponsored retirement plans, and evenings as an assistant coach for the women’s team at Wellesley College.
“I was fully stimulated from morning till night doing these different roles,” she says.
For six years, she says she would rush from work to Wellesley, grabbing the bag she had packed in her car to change quickly into athletic clothes, just to make the team’s scheduled practice.
Her head coach at Wellesley kept encouraging her to pursue coaching full time, but balancing the assistant position with her job at Fidelity was a sustainable lifestyle and one she enjoyed, she says.
Taking a pay cut to bet on herself
Then the perfect opportunity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology presented itself: The school was looking for a women’s basketball head coach who could also lead the athletic department’s compliance team.
While the pay cut bumped her out of the tax bracket she was in at Fidelity, it “ended up being not as bad as it seemed,” and the tradeoff was well worth it, she says.
“I felt like I was betting on myself, investing in my own growth and my own passion for what I really wanted to do,” she says. “I also just felt like I was impacting people’s lives in a way that was much more fulfilling to me than anything I had done before.”
After 12 seasons at MIT, the two-time New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference women’s basketball coach of the year, left to become an assistant coach in the NBA for the Memphis Grizzlies in 2020. Last season, she was an assistant coach in the WBNA for the New York Liberty.
‘If I’m going to preach a growth mindset … then I need to live that’
Raman, who has always been big on planning and preparation, says leaving her law career behind was the biggest decision “not fully in the box and on a path” she has ever made. While she did have doubts, she says she also knew she was capable of making a career out of basketball, and worst case, she would always have a law degree to fall back on.
Intentionally pushing herself out of her comfort zone, an important trait she often encourages her players to embrace, forced her to shift her personal mindset on uncertainty as well, she says.
“If I’m going to preach a growth mindset, if I’m going to preach getting better every day and embracing failure, then I need to live that,” Raman says.
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