In 2018, Minnesota athletic director Mark Coyle took a bit of a gamble on Lindsay Whalen. The Gophers legend brought the women’s basketball team to relevance as a player in the early 2000s by delivering the program’s first and only Final Four appearance. She was still playing in the WNBA, where she had already won four league titles with the Minnesota Lynx, when Coyle hired her to lead her alma mater.
In the state, she was beloved. But as a head coach, she was untested. She had been a “coach on the floor” for Minnesota, in the WNBA and for Team USA, but she had never been a coach on the sideline, actually leading a team and program.
Thursday, after five seasons and no NCAA Tournament appearances, the university announced that Whalen will step down as head coach but remain employed by the school through the 2025 academic year as a “special assistant to the athletics director.”
Whalen’s open seat is the second in power conferences for the 2023 coaching carousel (earlier this week TCU announced that Raegan Pebley will step down at the end of the season), and Minnesota could be a sneaky-good job for the right candidate.
Over the past few weeks, reporters at The Athletic have been chatting with power conference head coaches for an upcoming anonymous poll. One of the…
