Stephanie White is in the middle of one of the unique careers in professional sports. An accomplished WNBA coach — her career record is 92-56 — she was given the on-court keys three months ago to the Indiana Fever, where she will coach the All-Star quartet of DeWanna Bonner, Aliyah Boston, Caitlin Clark and Kelsey Mitchell, as well as three-time WNBA champ Natasha Howard.
Away from the Fever, she is a basketball analyst for ESPN, calling men’s and women’s college basketball and the NBA. She recently sat down for an extended conversation with me on the Sports Media Podcast, where she addressed the dual roles of broadcasting and coaching the Fever.
It goes without saying that Caitlin Clark isn’t just an All-Star player. She’s the most famous women’s basketball player in America and one of the most well-known basketball players in the country, regardless of gender. How do you manage, and I don’t mean this pejoratively, the circus that will be around her?
I think first and foremost, she does an outstanding job of managing it all. Like, she’s incredibly humble. She understands the big picture. So she views it understanding her celebrity, No. 1. But No. 2, she’s a Midwest kid, a Midwest person and she is who she is. She tries to live her life in an authentic way. But she’s very much Taylor Swift 2.0.
So I think from my perspective, and from our staff and franchise, it’s how do we help her navigate all of this? How do we help her protect her peace? Because it can be a lot. How can we be a resource for her? It’s a different level now with social media and fan engagement. We want to be a resource and help protect her.
She’s an incredible kid. I call her a kid, but she’s obviously a young woman. An incredible talent. She’s an incredible human being. She works her tail off. There’s a reason she is who she is in terms of a player. She’s handled all of this with such grace and poise that most 23-year-olds wouldn’t be able to.
all in the work 🧬 pic.twitter.com/V0mWzgtXyg
— Indiana Fever (@IndianaFever) February 14, 2025
What about from a coaching perspective?
From a coaching perspective, keep the main thing the main thing. Help her protect her peace and then help her continue to grow on the basketball court. We let our players know sometimes you gotta minimize the noise around you and focus on what our job is. Our job is to put the best team and the best product on the floor that we’re capable of doing.
I give our front office and management with (COO) Amber (Cox) and (general manager) Kelly (Krauskopf) a ton of credit. They’ve done an outstanding job in free agency. As coaches, we’ll continue to be very transparent in our communication. We will address elephants in the room. Communication is gonna be of the utmost importance.
You are coaching at the highest levels of your sport, but you’ve also reached a destination job for sports broadcasters as an ESPN on-air person. How do each of the jobs help each other?
I hope they help the viewer and I hope they help my teams. As coaches, oftentimes we get very tunnel-visioned in a lot of the minutia that goes on every day in our world. As a broadcaster, you get a very macro view. As coaches, we’re often focused so much on what our players can’t do. As a broadcaster, we’re always focused on what players can do. I feel like that helps me be a better coach and hopefully helps me be a better broadcaster.
How did you get into broadcasting?
I got lucky. I didn’t study broadcast journalism in college. I studied aviation for two years. That’s part of the reason that I went to Purdue. Then I changed to general communications. I was living in Chicago at the time (as an assistant coach for the Chicago Sky), and a broadcaster who was calling games for the Sky, Eric Collins, gave me the name of (executives) Tim Sutton and Leon Schweir at the Big Ten Network, which was starting in Chicago. I got to talk to them and had a little audition. They said we’ll give you five or six games and see how you do. Five or six games turned into 50 events that first year. I’ve been doing it ever since.
The Fever are now considered one of the top four teams, at least based on the oddsmakers, to win the WNBA title. Is it realistic to say that this team is a title contender in 2025?
I think on paper, certainly. Our goal was to bring in players that can complement our big three. I didn’t know that we would be able to build the depth that we were able to build in Year 1.
I think each player that we brought in complements what we have in a tremendous way. They understand what it takes to put a championship-caliber team together. It’s our job as coaches to build chemistry quickly. We’ve got to find out which groups can play best together. We’ve got to find out how to make our team and each individual player as efficient as possible throughout four quarters and throughout 44 games.
We’ve got four more games than we had a year ago in the same time frame and no Olympic break. We’ve got to be able to get a rotation. Two years in Connecticut, we couldn’t find a rotation. Our starters had to play heavy, heavy minutes. I think at times in fourth quarters and throughout the end of the season, you could tell that a little bit because our efficiency dipped.
Here, we’ve got a lot of great offensive weapons that we’ve got to put in positions to be successful. But we’ve got to get better on the defensive end of the floor.
So do I think we can be title contenders? Absolutely. Do I think it’s going to all come together right away in May? No, it’s going to take time. There’s always that element of luck to stay healthy and be peaking at the right time. I’m incredibly excited about the players we brought that fit our locker room. They are good culture players who understand sacrificing for one another for the betterment of the team. They have championship-caliber pedigree.
GO DEEPER
Why DeWanna Bonner chose Caitlin Clark, Indiana Fever: ‘I want to win another championship’
One of the things that often happens with great players is they make a jump from their rookie season to Year 2. In the WNBA, that often means getting stronger. What’s realistic in terms for Caitlin from Year 1 to Year 2?
She is stronger, first and foremost. She’s got a lot of self-awareness. She figured out right away that I need to get stronger, I can’t get knocked around as much. She’s done a great job of getting in the weight room and focusing on her strength, in terms of low center of gravity, time under tension, all of those things. I think the next step is efficiency. Not so many turnovers, higher field goal percentages.
I remember sitting in a press conference midway through last season and getting asked about Caitlin Clark and Indiana. I was like, guys, just relax, they’re gonna figure it out. They’ve gotta learn how to play together. She’s thrown into this league right away and she’s gonna figure it out. And she did.
She’s gonna see all kinds of coverages, all kinds of matchups. It’s working on how to become a little bit more efficient, whether that’s angles of attack, not avoiding contact, how we get by people, different cadences in dribbling, different cadences in footwork and different finishes around the rim. … For us as coaches, it’s moving her off the ball a little bit more so she’s not getting worn out in-game. We’re challenging her on the defensive end of the floor, as well — being a better defender. As an opponent, you want to attack a good offensive player by making them play on the defensive end, putting them through the wringer. We will be creative as a staff in how we utilize her and how we utilize her talents.
How do you want the Fever to play this year?
I think our players play fast naturally. When you look at what Indiana did a year ago, they were tops in the league in pace and tops in the league in offense. We want to continue to build on that. We want to make sure that we have more options to share the ball, make it more difficult to guard our big three.
I think Aliyah Boston probably had more space last year than she’s had in her career, and I think she’ll have even more this year. Kelsey Mitchell, the same. Caitlin led the league in assists, set a ton of assist records as well as some scoring records, but now she’s got more options. We wanna be more versatile. Everybody’s ready for our first and second action, so we gotta be patient enough to get to the third and fourth action.
Where we can improve is our ability to score off of cuts with this roster. We can use a lot of off-ball screening action with the lineup that we have. I think we can force mismatches and look to attack mismatches a little bit more. We’ve got a high-IQ team.
The biggest challenge for this group is we’ve gotta go from 11th or 12th in the defensive end of the floor to the middle of the pack. Because there are gonna be days where our shots aren’t falling. There are going to be days where we’re not great offensively. There are really good defensive teams and players in our league that are gonna make us uncomfortable. So we have to get to the middle of the pack on the defensive end of the floor. But I’m excited about that. I’m excited about the challenges that we have with our group. We got a lot of length and size and the ability to stretch the floor and shoot the ball — and we’re gonna use it.
(Photo of Stephanie White: Ron Hoskins / NBAE via Getty Images)
