Interview With Chicago Sky Assistant Coach Stephanie White

By Jim Niendorff: SPM IL Writer
Posted Friday, June 20, 2008

Stephanie White in action on the sidelines. SPM File Photos by (ABOVE) Sue Wilden and (BELOW) Amy Lugibihl.

SPMsportspage.com recently had the opportunity to talk with Chicago Sky assistant coach Stephanie White. Coach White discussed, among other things, her coaching philosophy, the toughness of Sky center Sylvia Fowles, and whether or not she continues her college tradition of playing euchre before each game.

White, a 5-11 guard, graduated from Seeger High School in 1995 as one of the most storied female prep players ever to emerge from Indiana. She averaged 38 points, 13 rebounds, eight assists, and seven steals in her senior year and was named the 1995 High School Player of the Year.

She opted to play her college ball at Purdue, where she majored in communications and earned her pilot’s license during her four years there. In 1999, her senior year, the Boilermakers won the national championship, defeating Duke. She was an All-America and won the Wade trophy that year.

The WNBA’s Charlotte Sting then drafted her in the second round of the 1999 draft. After playing one year in Charlotte she was traded to the Indiana Fever where she played from 2001-2004, retiring in 2004 due to ankle and knee injuries.

White then became an assistant coach at the high school level and then the college level, serving at Kansas State in 2005 and at the University of Toledo in 2006. She joined the Sky in February 2007, as an assistant coach to then head coach Bo Overton.

SPM: I read that at age 10 you lead your AAU-16U team in scoring. Where did your passion for basketball start?

SW: You know, I am not really sure. My family has been a sports family. At family get togethers we were always playing, whether it was basketball or baseball or softball or football, some sort of sport, and basketball was always a sport that no matter how much I was out working, it never felt like work. I was always having fun, even if I was out by myself shooting or working on my ball handling. I just had a passion for it You know a lot of people say that softball was my best sport but I didn’t have the passion for softball as I did for basketball. It’s just something I was born with I guess.

SPM: From your time at Purdue, where you went through three coaches during your four years there, what did you learn in terms of how to coach a team from all of those coaches, including Coach Peck.

SW: Well, you learn a lot from the on the court stuff as far as X’s and O’s and different styles and different systems. You also learn player management. Different coaches substitute in different ways and different patterns and for different reasons, but they also handle personnel in a different way as well. But you know more than anything from all the coaches I have played for, I learned the value of hard work, the value of passion, the value of intensity, and the value of bringing it every day because we are never guaranteed another opportunity. All of the coaches that I have played for obviously had their own strengths and weaknesses but they were able to bring out the strengths and hide the weaknesses of each of our teams. I think that that’s a craft. You learn that and you understand that and the more you are around the game and the more that you play in different systems and different styles, you learn from each of them.
Coach Lin Dunn was the greatest basketball mind that I have ever been around. She knows the game inside and out. I could talk basketball with her for hours and hours. Nell Fortner was one of the most of the intense and passionate coaches that I have ever been around. She really just brought it every day and expected you to do so as well and held you to a higher standard. Carolyn Peck is just a tremendous motivator. I mean obviously she is a great person and a charismatic person, but she’ll get you to run through the wall for her. Each of them had different things that I took from them.

SPM: Do you have a coaching philosophy yet, or is it a work in progress for a lifetime?

SW: I think for a lifetime it’s a work in progress. I mean I have in my mind and on paper the things that I would like to do. I think that your philosophy is basically the cornerstone of how you want to approach everyday. I know that, and how I want to do that, but as far as the other things, the on-the-court stuff, it kind of changes, I think, based on your personnel. I know that my underlying philosophy is going to be defense and rebounding and I know what I want to do on the offensive end, but you can’t run a lot of sets for a team that is not a good team to work with sets. You can’t run a continuity offense with a team that needs sets and for certain players you need the opportunity to get them open through different options and certain players don’t. They just need the time and the ability and the space to create and I think that depending upon the type of players that you have on a team your philosophy will always continue to change, but I think the underlying principles of what I want to be about as a head coach will always stay the same.

SPM: Having played basketball throughout your career, especially at the level that you played in high school and at Purdue -- has that made it harder or easier to be a coach?

SW: For me, it’s made it easier. I mean as a player I was always a student of the game and no one will ever say that I was extremely blessed with talent or athleticism, but my mind for the game has always been able to take me to a higher level. Defensively, I wasn’t always the greatest player defensively -- but I knew the angles to cut off any player’s strengths or weaknesses. So it was always kind of a coaching mentality in the sense that I approached the game from an analytical mind. I think that has helped me, and playing has helped me become a better coach because I have played at every level and because I know the tendencies, and the ins-and-outs at every level. I think coaching -- when I first got into coaching, I was still playing, and I think coaching made me a better player, because those days when you are analyzing films or those days when the coaches are saying you are not going hard enough and you think in your mind as a player “Oh yeah, I am.” But then you watch it in film from a coaching perspective and you watch your teammates from a coaching perspective, and it is a different point of view -- and it also helps you become a better player.

SPM: Could you comment on the differences between coaching at the college level, which you have done a lot of, and coaching at the professional level?

SW: Well, there are a lot of differences in the fact that at a college level everything is much more structured, from on the court to off the court. Their time is basically laid out for them. There is not a lot of free time on the court or off the court and everything is very tedious and very broken down. I mean you have more time throughout a season when you are playing twice a week, or once a week in the pre-season to really fine tune all of the details.

At this level you expect the players to know the details and you go out and you try to mastermind game plans so to speak and how you are going to stop opposing players, how you are going to use your players and their strengths to the best of their ability so you put more accountability on the team and you just basically have a structured skeleton to go out there and let them really improve on your structure as opposed to breaking things down to the very minute details. And you trust in them to go out and do that every day. I think at this level it is much more about finding ways to get your team to play together. It’s much more about fitting the pieces of the puzzle together.

SPM: How was it that you became a coach with the Sky?

SW: Well, originally I came over with Coach Overton. He called me and asked me to come over with him and at first I told him “No.” I didn’t think that I wanted to leave the college game. But you know for me it was important because I was a player in this league and I want to continue to see this league survive because it is a great opportunity for young women to continue to play basketball in the United States and have an opportunity to play at the highest level in their home country. I want to continue to be a part of that and continue to help this league grow in any way that I can, and being a player in this league and to come in with a coaching staff of Coach Overton and now with Sky head coach Steve Key who has been here, I mean he knows the game and he knows the league. But to continue to help them understand the league and to continue to help them understand these players. And also work at the highest level. I mean, you are coaching with some of the greatest athletes in the game and against some of the greatest athletes in the game and it is only going to make me a better head coach.

Working with Steve, he and I have always been kind of on the same wavelength as far as what our expectations were and this transition has been extremely easy for me. Hopefully it has for him too. Hopefully we have made it easier for him. But I came over with Bo Overton and I am continuing to be able to work and learn from Steve and grow my aspect of my game -- now at the coaching level -- and hopefully instilling a little bit of the passion for the game in some of the players who are going to help take this game to the next level.

SPM: To follow up on that, with the Sky now on its third head coach in the three years that the organization has been in existence, and the three coaches that you had at Purdue, have you been able to help the players, maybe someone like Candice Dupree who has been here from the beginning, deal with the change at all?

SW: Well, I don’t think that it’s been a huge change in the sense that they are completely starting over. I mean a lot of the philosophies are the same. These players are used to playing for a lot of different coaches. They played for different coaches in college. They come to this level and they play for a different coach in the United States, and then they go to Europe and play for a different coach, and then they go to Europe in a different country the next year so I don’t think it’s much of an adaptation for them. I think just the style is pretty much the same as it has been in the past and it’s just the way that they are communicated with and the way that the day to day is, it’s a little bit different and they adapt extremely well. I am here for them to bounce things off.
I know it’s hard when there is change but again you know we always talk about we learn life lessons through the game of basketball and nothing is ever going to be the way we expect it to in life and we learn through basketball to be able to adapt to change. We learn to be able to adjust the way that we approach the day-to-day to match what our leader, which is Coach Key now, the way he approaches the day-to-day. And if they ever have to get real jobs in the real world, they are going to understand and learn to adjust and adapt to different people that they work with. And you know it’s still about the team, and it’s about learning to work with the team and continuing to work with the team and continuing to raise the bar for ourselves, and our team.

SPM: What are some of the specific duties that you have during the game and/or practice?

SW: Well, I work with our guards every day. I am always very focused on defense so I am always continuing to watch our defense and get them to watch the way that we attack or just the different teams’ offensive schemes, scouting. Fellow assistant coach Mitchell and I split the scouts down the middle so I’ll be scouting during the game. I keep a small chart of our defensive execution, when we get a stop, when we don’t get a stop, what we are playing the best in, if we are playing the best in the man tonight, best in zone, who we are fouling, why we are fouling, different rotations. It’s kind of a defensive chart that I keep during the game but we kind of all go across the board. I’ll make suggestions on the offensive end as well, but mainly my focus is on our guard play and on our defense.

SPM: What was the Sky looking for before this year’s draft. Did the team have particular needs in mind or were you kind of going after that best player available?

SW: Well, we definitely had needs in mind. We knew that we needed a dominant center. I mean it just happened that Sylvia Fowles was right there which was great for us. We needed a banger down low. We needed somebody that was more physical and somebody that could take some minutes away from Chasity Melvin because Chas is a veteran in this league. She has played for a long time and to be able to ask her to go 40 minutes a game is a tough situation, especially when we play so many games in such a short period of time. So, we knew we needed that.

We also needed to focus on getting another shooter. With the loss of Stacey Dales we were going to lose not only a leader, but our most consistent outside threat, and we knew we needed to get a shooter and we were able to get that in Quianna Chaney and I think that just being able to help her adjust to the next level, being able to help her understand the game at this level is something that we’ll continue to work on but we got what we needed. Obviously, we want to still continue to look to build on our team. We still have strengths and weaknesses but we do our best to hide our weaknesses and bring out our strengths.

SPM: With the phenomenal guard play that the team has had this year with Jia Perkins and Armintie Price, and the resurgence of Cathy Joens over the past few games, what has been your approach in teaching them how to play the guard position better?

SW: Well, I think it’s just little things. I mean they were all great college players and so they understand how to play. It’s just little things, getting us better spacing, making sure that within our offense we know where we are going to get our shots, that we’re catching ready to shoot, make sure that we understand when we are running this play, this is what we are looking for, and when running that play, that is what we are looking for, and learning how to read how teams are playing. If defenses are playing us a certain way, we are going to exploit the way that they are playing us. So I think it’s just the little small intricacies of really knowing and understanding the game, and getting better patience, and getting better spacing, and understanding when and where we are going to get the best shot opportunities for us, and when and where we need to give our teammates the ball in a position to make them successful.

SPM: With the sprained ankle that you sustained with 4:00 left in the title game against Duke and the ankle and knee injuries that you had in WNBA, have you been able to help Sylvia Fowles [currently out with a left knee sprain] get through this period mentally at all?

SW: Well, I think right now Sylvia is at a point where physically she is so much more superior than a lot of players in our league and she is going to be able to heal quicker. I think mentally, it is a struggle for her to trust maybe in herself and I am always here for her if she wants to chat. Our training staff is doing an amazing job with her. But she’s a kid who wants to get after it no matter what and really I think her biggest asset is the fact that if she is tough enough and she is strong enough on the mental side of her game to want to push through to do what she is asked every single day and even when it comes to rehab. I’ll be here for her if she needs me but I think she is going to be just fine on her own.

SPM: I think I read somewhere that you have a desire to go the route of John Wooden and go from Indiana to Purdue, which you’ve done, to UCLA as a head coach. Do you still want to be a head coach, or what are your future goals?

SW: I do want to be a head coach. I think that my future is probably going to be head coach at the collegiate level. I have a passion for the game of basketball and a passion for the spirit of college athletics. I love what I am doing right now and I love our team and the people that I get to work with on a daily basis. I think long term though, I see myself as a head coach in college. Hopefully, I will have that opportunity at some point. Until then I’ll just continue to grow and continue to really learn the ins and outs of what it takes to be a head coach.

SPM: Lastly, do you still play euchre before every game?

SW: Well, I don’t. I can’t play before every game. Nobody plays euchre any more. It’s like you ask people to play and they’re like, “Euchre? What’s that?” When I get home, we play euchre at family get-togethers all the time.

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