Coach ,

Few people understand how to navigate the unique challenges of coaching women’s basketball 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. 

Before 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. 

Coach Dunn’s ‘Keys For The Head Coach’ clinic provides keys for head coaches to make a successful basketball program.  

Have a Plan

Have a Plan

Coach Dunn explains that being successful as a head coach requires having a big-picture vision for the program. 

Goals need to be created within the first few days of becoming a head coach. These goals and going to be pillars that you return to time and time again. 

“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: 

1. Believable
2. Measurable 
3. 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. Indiana has been among the WNBA’s worst teams over the next half-decade or so. Yet, after drafting the aforementioned Caitlin Clark in 2024, Indiana knew they had a great foundation.  

Yet, Dunn knew they couldn’t compete for a WNBA championship in 2024 with such a young core. So their goal was to make the WNBA playoffs. And that’s exactly what they’ve done. 

That was Indiana’s short-term goal. In the coming years, their goal will become winning a WNBA Championship. 

Talent

Talent

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

There are always opportunities to scout and seek out talent to improve your team. 

And once that talent is acquired, the first 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 want to develop players. Each player must have an individual development plan set up by them and the coaching staff, which identifies specific goals the player must reach to develop. 

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 because they’re who controls the locker room. 

For this reason, coaches have to be willing to listen to a star player’s or captain’s opinions or gripes. Just hearing what the player has to say will provide crucial insight into where a team’s direction is headed. 

Never get out coached,

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