When the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) San Antonio Spurs hired Becky Hammon to become the first female assistant head coach, it was a watershed moment. Working under the much-loved and very progressive head coach Greg Popovich, Hammon—a former olympic basketball player and 16-year WNBA star—was being given a prestigious move up the team’s leadership ladder. Now, ESPN reports, Hammon is being interviewed by the Milwaukee Bucks, who have a head-coaching position open.
Hammon is the NBA's first female assistant coach and now will be the first woman to interview for a head-coaching job in the league.
Hammon isn't considered a frontline candidate on a Bucks list that includes at least 10 possible candidates, but Milwaukee ownership and general manager Jon Horst were intrigued enough to ask the Spurs for permission to speak with her.
Hammon’s chances of getting the Bucks job are slim, but the interview is a very important milestone because, like many organizations, the pool of people considered for top leadership positions is small and frequently rotating. Becoming a person that gets interviewed for those jobs is usually a statement that you are now ready to become a head coach—somewhere. Hammon’s credentials include the great respect Spurs’ head coach Greg Popovich has for her.
In April, he explained to the The New Yorker that he had watched Hammon play basketball all the way back in 2007 and was impressed not simply with her basketball talent but her leadership qualities. In 2012 he sat with her on a flight, and the beginnings of Hammon’s next career took shape.
Hammon and Popovich managed to sit together on the flight to San Antonio. They talked until the plane touched down, but not about basketball. He wasn’t interested in whether she could diagram a play. Popovich has a more character-driven view of coaching—and of coaches. “I wanted to find out who she was,” he said. “What did she think? How intelligent is she? How worldly? What goes through her mind? My ulterior motive, if that’s the way to put it, was that I wanted to find out whether she had the interest and the tools to be a leader, to run a team.”
In 2014, Hammon retired from the WNBA and the Spurs hired her as the NBA’s first female assistant coach—the first full-time female coach in professional male sports. Popovich dismissed the inherent political questions thrown at him about the hiring, “It has nothing to do with her being a woman. She happens to be a woman.”
Deadspin’s Chris Thompson explains that the route Hammon has taken is of the highest pedigree, something that is usually essential for people who are blazing new paths.
Plenty of assistant coaches get onto this path and never reach the end (just ask Patrick Ewing), but Hammon’s pedigree in basketball and coaching is unimpeachable, and she’s acing the same apprenticeship that once made Budenholzer—who never played professional basketball and started his coaching career as a video coordinator—a hot commodity as a rising head coach candidate. That she’s gotten this interview means the question of her someday becoming an NBA head coach should be framed in terms of when, and not if.
It’s going to happen.