Washington Post - United States - The itch to coach started during
Nikki McCray's second and final season with the Indiana Fever. It grew as she encountered young talent such as
Diana Taurasi and
Candice Dupree during seasons with the Phoenix Mercury and the Chicago Sky. Slowly, as her WNBA playing career wound down, McCray began to realize coaching could feed her passion for basketball as the three-time WNBA all-star moved into the next phase of her life.
She used those last few seasons as a player to learn as much as she could about leadership and communication with other players. Taking on the role of veteran leader on her teams, she worked closely with the younger players on a variety of topics from on-court strategy to off-season workout plans.
"Working with those players gave me a sense of coaching leadership," McCray said Thursday by phone.
The two-time Olympic gold medalist and former Mystic moved into the official coaching ranks in 2006 when she took an assistant coaching job at Western Kentucky University.
"I got a really great start [in coaching] at Western Kentucky," McCray said of her first coaching job. "It's a program that does things the right way and I learned so much from my experiences there."
