Have Womens's Basketball Coaches Moved to the Men's Game? CAN They?

The Game Room
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First, a simple question with a factual answer: has anyone made the leap from coaching a successful women’s college basketball program to being head coach of a men’s college basketball team?

Or, has any successful coach of a women’s professional basketball team subsequently been hired by an NBA team?

Now, a more general question, one that can be debated: SUPPOSE there’s a young man with ambitions of being a head coach of a top NCAA men’s basketball team. No such job opens up, but he’s offered a job as head coach of a promising women’s program. IF that young man takes the job, can he still hope to get a head coaching job with a men’s team some day? Or is he now pretty much locked into coaching women’s teams for the rest of his life?

I don’t mean to imply that ANY men’s basketball coaching job is automatically better than ANY women’s coaching job. I’m sure Geno Auriemma wouldn’t WANT to take over, say, the men’s basketball team at St. John’s- he probably thinks he has a MUCH better job where he is.

But, let’s say a 32 year old male coach does a FANTASTIC job coaching the women’s team at previously unknown Wassamatta U., taking his girls to the Final 4. Does THIS guy have any chance of getting hired as the St. John’s Red Storm coach? Or must he scale back his dreams to taking over a more prestigious women’s program (say, taking over at Tennessee when Pat Summitt retires)?

For that matter, now that Bill Laimbeer has coached in the WNBA, is he still a viable candidate for an NBA head coaching job?

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Michael Cooper coached the Los Angeles Sparks to WNBA titles in 2001 and '02, then lost to Laimbeer’s Detroit Shock in the 2003 finals. He took an assistant’s job under Jeff Bzdelik with the Denver Nuggets the next year, then served as interim head coach of that NBA team for about a month after Bzdelik was fired. Cooper subsequently became a scout for the Nuggets after George Karl was hired as head coach, then took over the reins of the NBA Development League’s Albuquerque Thunderbirds.

He won the league championship in 2006, but has since returned to the women’s game. After a second stint with the Sparks, he was hired last year to guide the University of Southern California Women of Troy. The team finished with a 19-12 mark in the just-concluded NCAA season.

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Ashley McElhiney

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His bio in Wiki is incomplete, but IIRC, Benny Dees was the Womens B-Ball coach at Georgia Tech many years ago (an unsuccessful one) and he moved on to the Men’s head Coaching job at the University of Wyoming and Western Carolina.