Indiana Fever GM Lin Dunn’s Two Keys For Women’s Basketball Coaches

• By Grant Young

Coaching women's basketball comes with its own set of unique challenges: 

1. Breaking through gender stereotypes and biases that may exist in the sports world. As a coach, it's important to create an environment where female athletes feel supported and empowered, and where their skills and abilities are recognized and valued. 

2. Managing the different communication styles and emotional dynamics that may be present within a women's team. Effective communication and understanding of individual personalities are crucial for building a cohesive and successful team. 

3. Addressing the specific physical and physiological differences between male and female athletes is important. Training programs, injury prevention strategies, and overall game tactics may need to be tailored to accommodate these differences. 

Overall, coaching women's basketball (and running women’s basketball coaching clinics) requires not only a deep understanding of the sport but also a strong awareness of the unique social, emotional, and physical aspects that come with coaching female athletes.

Few people understand how to navigate and persevere through these unique challenges better than Lin Dunn.

Coach Dunn currently serves as the General Manager for the Indiana Fever WNBA team, which has become the WNBA’s most-watched and popular team due to them drafting former Iowa Hawkeyes sensation Caitlin Clark with the No. 1 pick of the WNBA Draft. 

Prior to becoming the Fever’s GM, Dunn spent 11 seasons as a professional head coach, she has compiled a record of 181-160 capturing the 2012 WNBA Championship with the Fever. She was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2014 after over four decades spent as a coach in the world of amateur and professional women’s basketball. 

Coach Dunn’s ‘Keys For The Head Coach’ course gives the five keys for head coaches to make a successful basketball program. In addition, Coach Dunn conveys the four areas that a head coach needs to manage in order to keep the program intact. Having a plan is one of the most important and necessary qualities for any coach to have success.  

Have a Plan

Coach Dunn explains that the first and foremost aspect of being successful as a head coach in basketball is that they have to have a plan. What she means by this is that a coach must have a big-picture vision for their program. 

Goals need to be created within the first few days of becoming a head coach, regardless of what level you’re coaching at. And these goals and going to make up the foundation of your program, and will be pillars that you return to time and time again, both for yourself and for your players. 

“It’s like building a house. You have to have a great foundation before you can build up,” Coach Dunn says. 

When crafting goals for your program, they must be: 

- Believable

- Measurable 

- Achievable

In addition to this, there must also be short-term goals, medium-term, and long-term. 

A great example of this is with Dunn’s Indiana Fever team in 2024. Indiana has been among the WNBA’s worst teams over the next half-decade or so. Yet, with the additions of two consecutive No. 1 overall picks in the WNBA Draft (Aliyah Boston in 2023 and the aforementioned Caitlin Clark in 2024), Indiana knew they had a great foundation in the future.  

Yet, the thought that they could truly compete for a WNBA championship in 2024 with such a young core wasn’t believable. So what was Indiana’s goal for 2024? Make the WNBA playoffs for the first time since 2016. And that’s exactly what they’ve done. 

That was Indiana’s short-term goal. In the coming years, however, their goal will become to win a WNBA Championship, because Boston, Clark, and the rest of the Fever’s roster will gain enough skill and experience where that goal becomes achievable. 

Every aspect of what a team does (how they practice, the drills they run, and how they spend their free time) must align with the coach’s core goals and philosophies. 

Talent

“Great talent makes great coaches. You’ve got to find it, you’ve got to recruit it, you’ve got to sign it.”

Regardless of what level you coach at, there are always opportunities to scout and seek out talent to improve your team. While this is obvious for college coaches (in the form of high school recruitment), even high school coaches can spend time speaking to junior high players that they identify as talented and trying to ensure that attend their school. 

And once that talent is acquired, the number one priority from there is developing that talent by any means necessary. 

Coach Dunn believes that the sign of a great coach is whether their players get better over the course of a season. 

But it isn’t enough just to have a hope of developing players. Each player must have an individual development plan set up by them and the coaching staff, which identifies specific goals (there’s that word again) that the player needs to reach to further develop their game. 

Just like an organization’s goals, these individual development goals must be believable, measurable, and achievable. There needs to be specific drills or workouts that are set up so that individuals can develop in the ways they need to. 

Coach Dunn also stresses that a head coach must be on the same page as their star player or team captain. Those are the people who control the locker room and dictate a team’s morale when you’re not present. 

For this reason, coaches have to be willing to listen to a star player’s or captain’s opinions or gripes, even if they don’t necessarily agree with them. Just hearing what the player has to say, will give a coach a clearer understanding of how the locker room is feeling, which will provide crucial insight on where to go from there.