When the overtime buzzer sounded on Toronto’s thrilling win over Connecticut on Wednesday night, Sun associate head coach Roneeka Hodges immediately headed toward the sideline for the customary postgame handshakes.
While Sun head coach Rachid Meziane was still visibly frustrated by the result, Hodges remained composed. In fact, Meziane appeared so caught up in the moment that he nearly forgot to make his way to center court, but Hodges’ pace behind him was a reminder that he needed to turn the other way and shake the opposition’s hand.
Hodges then reached Sandy Brondello, her former boss and now the Tempo’s head coach. The two initially exchanged a handshake, but the interaction quickly evolved into a warm hug. Hodges and Brondello broke away and Brondello was still patting Hodges on the back and smiling. Hodges flashed a smile too although her team had lost 106-102.
“She’s comfortable and confident, and she always has been, and that’s what I love about her,” Brondello told NBC Sports in an interview about Hodges. “What you see is what you get. It’s no BS to her. She’s real, she reads people well.”
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Hodges, a former player, is a rising talent in the WNBA coaching space, a community that currently does not have a Black woman at the helm of any of the W’s 15 teams this season. For context, about 62.5 percent of the WNBA’s players are Black.
This season marks the first time since 2020 that the WNBA has been without a Black woman head coach. And this is the first season since 2021 that the WNBA has employed more men than women head coaches. The then-12-team league ended the season with seven men and five women as head coaches.
In recent years, WNBA head coaching jobs have often gone to NBA assistants who wanted to make the jump to head coach, but couldn’t in the NBA. And as a result of those shifting dynamics, the demographics of WNBA head coaches have also changed.
There are currently eight men and seven women serving as WNBA head coaches. Of the league’s seven women head coaches, only two are women of color: the Golden State Valkyries’ Natalie Nakase and the Seattle Storm’s Sonia Raman. Both Nakase and Raman had NBA experience before becoming WNBA assistants and then head coaches.
Hodges has her sights set on being a head coach in the WNBA, and her rise could represent a shift back toward giving former players and Black women opportunities to lead in the league that they helped build. From 2022-2024, three Black women finished the season as WNBA head coaches. Since then that number has dropped to zero.
(Data compiled by Jackie Powell and with the help of Basketball Reference)
How did Hodges even get into coaching in the first place? Initially she was reluctant to make the jump.
A decade ago she was still playing professionally overseas after a 12-year career in the WNBA. Hodges, a swingwoman and role player by craft, often worked out in between pro seasons at LSU, the school where she spent three of her four collegiate years playing before finishing her career out at Florida State.
Hodges played pick-up games with current Las Vegas Aces president Nikki Fargas, who was LSU’s head coach at the time. While Hodges was in the waning half of her playing career, Fargas asked Hodges multiple times if she wanted to learn about coaching. While she initially said no, the wheels began turning once she jetted off to Spain to play for a team in Zaragoza, a city located in the Northeast region of the country.
Hodges was at a point in her career when she was exhausted by living out of a suitcase and couldn’t bear to miss more birthdays of family and friends. Amid the grind, she found herself most fulfilled by mentoring one of her teammates who was a first-year pro. Hodges took to making sure this young player with high potential knew what it meant to be a professional.
The coaching bug had officially been planted. But what was next?
“I couldn’t necessarily get a job as soon as I finished even with my body of work. There was no job waiting for me,” Hodges told NBC Sports.
While it’s quite common for former NBA players to get head coaching jobs without any other work experience besides their playing careers, that’s far from the status quo in the WNBA. Brondello (Toronto Tempo), Becky Hammon (Las Vegas Aces) and Stephanie White (Indiana Fever) are the only former players that are head coaches this season. All three of them couldn’t jump into a head coaching job right after playing. That was inconceivable.
To get her feet wet, Hodges began volunteering at a high school in New Orleans. She was living in Baton Rouge at the time and she drove an hour each way to volunteer. While she was only supposed to be going twice a week, she ended up in New Orleans volunteering every day of the week.
She questioned why she was putting so much time and effort into something that gave her at most a $1,400 stipend. But that was when the light bulb really went on, and after she told Fargas “no” so many times, this time it was a “yes.”
Fargas didn’t have the money to pay her at the time, but the idea was that Hodges would be in every room she could. She began ripping clips in the video room and sat in on all of Fargas’ coaches meetings. “She allowed me to see and feel what my dream really was and if I really wanted that,” Hodges said about Fargas.
After spending the 2019-2020 season with Fargas, Hodges found a job working at Old Dominion University for former WNBA player Delisha Milton-Jones, a three-time WNBA All-Star and two-time WNBA champion. Milton-Jones was the first person to give Hodges a paying job in the coaching space and during that year at Old Dominion, Hodges learned about how coaching staffs are built and how coaches need to compliment each other like players do.
Then Hodges moved on to Colgate University, an academically rigorous liberal arts school. Ganiyat Adeduntan, the coach at the time, taught Hodges all about the importance of preparation and having a specific plan for how objectives were going to be accomplished.
And then Hodges got the opportunity to return to the place she calls home: the WNBA. She still remembers exactly how it all went down and how she ended up on Brondello’s Liberty staff. Hodges had heard that Brondello just took the head coaching job in New York and since Hodges was coaching just 250 miles from Brooklyn, she thought she’d shoot her shot.
Brondello had coached Hodges back in 2010 on the San Antonio Silver Stars and Hodges still had her number. She sent her a text and moments later Brondello responded, setting up a time for a phone interview. Weeks following the phone call, Hodges was hired and she didn’t have to move all that far, just a four and a half hour drive.
Hodges was able to go at her own pace as the Liberty’s third assistant behind Brondello’s husband Olaf Lange and longtime Brondello assistant Zach O’Brien. During the first year and a half in New York, Hodges had to re-learn the league she played in. It was from a different lens but Hodges was dedicated to taking in all the information and paying close attention to how Brondello’s tactical mind worked.
Brondello recalled a moment during the Liberty’s championship run in 2024 when Hodges’ made a locker room speech that stood out. Brondello had previously empowered Hodges to step up and use her voice when she saw fit and that happened in October during the WNBA Finals.
“I can remember this speech and I went, ‘that was spot on,’” Brondello said. “She felt it was the right time, and it was, and it was inspiring.”
But after winning a championship with New York, Hodges wanted to have more of a voice, and the Sun were hiring a coach in Meziane that didn’t have WNBA experience or a lot of institutional knowledge coming in. This was her opportunity to use her voice and bring all she learned from Brondello and company. Less than a month into the 2025 WNBA regular season, Hodges was promoted from an assistant to an associate head coach.
The next step for Hodges was getting some head coaching reps which she did during the WNBA offseason. Enter Unrivaled—the three-on-three league where many WNBA players spend their winters. Hodges was hired to coach the Phantom basketball club and she was responsible for drafting her team and coming up with the practice plans and schemes.
Hodges’ emotional intelligence and aptitude for achieving star-level buy-in came into focus during the Unrivaled semifinals this past March. Kelsey Plum admitted to a room of reporters that she played with Hodges during Plum’s rookie season in San Antonio. The two had known each other for a long time.
“I think when there’s mutual respect and a trust, you’re able to communicate with someone in a different way,” Plum said about Hodges. “When someone’s played at this level, they understand the way that you need to communicate for it to be received. And so I think I know for me, like you’re talking baller to baller. I speak this language. I understand what you’re saying.”
Hodges took Phantom to the Unrivaled Finals this past March and was named the coach of the year. She achieved buy-in from stars like Plum and Aliyah Boston.
When Sun center Brittney Griner was asked about Hodges, she told reporters that Phantom player Natasha Cloud had spoken highly of the way Hodges ran practices. Griner was impressed by what she heard, and then saw it play out when she joined the Sun this past April.
“Every detail she gets us, we can never go into a game saying we weren’t prepared,” Griner said. “She’s laid it all out for us. We know what we’re doing. We know what to expect, and she’s going to bring it out in us too.”
How can Hodges get her opportunity?
The reasons for the decline in Black women head coaches are likely complex and, at times, mirror broader trends in American society. In recent years, as investment in the WNBA has increased and the league’s style of play has adopted more NBA influences, more WNBA head coaching jobs have gone to candidates with NBA assistant coaching experience—a pathway that has historically been less accessible to women and former WNBA players.
Hodges’ hiring in New York was aided by one of the WNBA’s efforts to strengthen that pipeline. In 2020, the league expanded the number of front-bench assistant coaching positions from two to three, requiring at least one of those assistants to be a former player.
This was a policy that aimed to shape the coaching pipeline in the WNBA, but it hasn’t led to long time assistants graduating and sustaining their jobs. Former players Noelle Quinn, Tanisha Wright and Vickie Johnson are prominent examples in the past six seasons. But what may make Hodges stand out is the long road she took and the resources she had that folks like Quinn, Wright and Johnson most likely didn’t.
One trend that has emerged in 2026 is teams expanding their back-bench coaching staffs with player development-focused hires. The Las Vegas Aces added Unrivaled head coach Nola Henry, while the New York Liberty and Minnesota Lynx brought former players Kristen Mann and Janel McCarville onto their staffs.
Much like the WNBA’s 2020 rule change that created additional opportunities for former players to enter coaching, these hires could help broaden the pipeline. The larger question, however, is whether those opportunities will ultimately translate into more former players — and more Black women — reaching the league’s top coaching positions.
“[Hodges] is a former player in the WNBA pipeline, but look at who she’s learned from,” O’Brien, now with the Los Angeles Sparks, told NBC Sports. “Look at who she’s played for. She got to coach with [Brondello] and [Lange], learn from all these different people, and then have this role in Connecticut. So yes, she’s from the pipeline, but she’s so unique, too, with her background, playing experience and just who she is as a person.”
Should this matter since Hodges has put the work in? In a just world it shouldn’t.
Will experience be enough for Hodges, especially when her name is bound to come up as expansion teams in Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia begin hiring for their inaugural seasons in 2028, 2029 and 2030, respectively?
“Doing a good job with the opportunities that you have should be the precedent for the next opportunity, and that should be in any situation just based on your body of work,” Hodges said.
Or what about for the team she currently coaches? The Sun are moving to Houston to revive the Houston Comets. Sun head coach Meziane has taken a job to go coach back in Europe for Turkish club Galatasaray. Fun fact about the Comets: Hodges was their 15th overall draft pick in the 2005 WNBA Draft.
For now Hodges will do what she’s always done even as a player. “I just want to continue to prepare so that when my name and my number is called, that I’m ready,” she said.
