Caitlin Clark’s next WNBA coach might still be under contract with another team.
In the aftermath of the Fever firing Christie Sides on Sunday, Connecticut Sun coach Stephanie White has emerged as the candidate expected to become Indiana’s next coach, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
White remains under contract with the Sun through the end of next season, the Sun-Times reported earlier this month, but she’d already emerged as an option for both the Fever and the Sky — two of the league’s six current vacancies — to potentially land, in addition to the scenario where White remains with a Connecticut team that could look significantly different next season based on contract situations.
Back in the 2015 and ’16 seasons, White served as the Fever’s head coach — leading the team where she spent most of her WNBA career after playing collegiately at Purdue — and collected a 37-31 record before coaching Vanderbilt through the end of the 2021 season.
Then, the Sun hired her, and she led them to the WNBA Finals in her first season before falling to the Aces.
Connecticut returned to the semifinals in 2023 and lost to the Liberty, and their season fell short of another trip to the Finals this year, too, when the Lynx eliminated them in Game 5 of their semifinal series.
The Fever joined the Wings, Sparks, Dream, Sky and Mystics as teams with coaching vacancies in the weeks following the season when they announced Sides’ firing Sunday, a somewhat surprising move given the Fever’s in-season turnaround that led to the No. 6 spot in the postseason despite a young roster.
Clark, who won the league’s Rookie of the Year award in 2024, paired with Aliyah Boston, Kelsey Mitchell and others to help give Indiana a stable core to build around for future seasons, and Sides received a vote in the league’s Coach of the Year poll — with all of the others going to either the Lynx’s Cheryl Reeve or the Liberty’s Sandy Brondello, who met in the WNBA Finals.
“Leave it better than you found it,” Sides wrote in an X post Sunday, with a victory hand emoji added to the end.
But White, if the Fever end up hiring her, could benefit from that improved roster.
Clark averaged 19.2 points, 8.4 rebounds and 5.7 assists during her rookie campaign, and the viewership and attendance records from Iowa followed her to Indianapolis when the Fever selected her No. 1 overall in the 2024 WNBA Draft.