In 2022, more than half of the WNBA’s head coaches were Black, and three of them were Black women. In the league’s thirtieth season, no team has a Black woman running it.
Noelle Quinn was the last one. She became the first Black head coach in Seattle Storm history in 2021; she was the only Black woman holding the job anywhere in the league in the 2025 season, and Seattle did not renew her. Thirteen coaching vacancies have come and gone across two hiring cycles since, in a league of fifteen franchises, and not one went to a Black woman. Black players are 63.8 percent of the player pool. The league plans to be at eighteen teams by 2030.
The pipeline argument does not survive the college record. Carolyn Peck won the national championship with Purdue in 1999 at 33, the first Black head coach to win a women’s title and still the youngest in NCAA history to do it. Dawn Staley won in 2017, 2022, and 2024. C. Vivian Stringer took three different schools to the Final Four, a first in men’s or women’s basketball.
These women have been counting. Peck gave Staley a piece of her own championship net, and in 2021 Staley cut up hers and sent a piece to every Black woman coaching Division I basketball in the country.
“We’re coaches who understand the game and can lead,” Teresa Weatherspoon said.
The floor is nearly two-thirds Black. The bench is not.
