Phoenix Mercury’s Nate Tibbetts follows his father’s path coaching women’s basketball

By Jeff Metcalfe

Coaching wasn’t on Fred Tibbetts’ radar coming out of Dakota State in 1972.

Working, though, was a necessity and to land his first business education teaching job at Jefferson High School (S.D.), he agreed to coach girls basketball and girls track. The initial payoff was an extra $200 per sport.

“He had never planned on coaching,” his son Nate Tibbetts says. “He went to a bunch of clinics and read some books. That’s when girls basketball started in South Dakota.”

There was no sanctioned state tournament until 1975 and by then, Tibbetts had the Hawkettes primed for the first of his two dynasties.

Between 1975 and ’85, Jefferson won five basketball state titles (4 Class B, 1 Class A), a run that included 67 consecutive wins from 1978-80. Tibbetts encouraged his players to double in track, with Jefferson winning five straight state titles from 1981-85.

“I didn’t know a thing about the sport,” Tibbetts told the Sioux Falls Argus Leader in 1979, although he played some in high school. “But I decided if I was going to be the coach, I would try to do it as well as I could.”

Arguably, no one did it better.

Tibbetts won six more state basketball titles (Class AA) at Sioux Falls Roosevelt High from 1997-2005 for 11 total in 29 years at the two schools. His Roosevelt consecutive win streak reached 111 over a stretch of five straight titles, finally ending in 2002.

The National High School Athletic Coaches Association named Tibbetts its girls basketball Coach of the Year in 1999 after one of his seven undefeated seasons.

“My dad used to say I don’t care how many games you coach, you’re never going to get as many wins as me,” Nate says. Fred won 551 in high school with an 84.5 winning percentage and 66 in four seasons leading University of South Dakota women’s basketball. “He’s probably right.”

Initial skepticism drives Tibbetts

The national reaction to the Phoenix Mercury hiring Nate Tibbetts as their head coach in October 2023 was tepid at best.

Tibbetts came to the WNBA having coached only men’s basketball yet reportedly with a contract paying more than $1 million annually, highest in the WNBA. His only prior head coach experience was in the NBA D-League, as it was then known, from 2007-09. The Mercury promoting Tibbetts as a girl dad (with 6-year-old twin daughters) on social media only raised the criticism, including from former Notre Dame women’s coach Muffet McGraw.

“Breaking news: white man hires white man to coach WNBA team AND makes him the highest paid coach in the league. Gender bias is real,” McGraw said via social media.

Tibbetts’ 12 seasons as an assistant with three NBA teams were largely shrugged off and his father’s history coaching women mentioned in passing.

Tibbetts took the high road in responses to those questioning a white male hire in a predominantly Black women’s league. “I’m going to do the best job I can do,” he said last fall while relying on his players “to learn how this league works.”

The heat subsided a bit when the Mercury hired three-time WNBA All-Star Kristi Toliver as associate head coach.

The Mercury made some splashy moves during free agency, adding new faces in Kahleah Copper, Natasha Cloud and Becca Allen to star returners Diana Taurasi and Brittney Griner. They endorsed Tibbetts strongly enough that by the start of the season on May 14, the focus was on his coaching rather than his credentials.

“The public opinion when I got the job is part of what drives me,” Tibbetts says now. “Is he a girls coach? Deep down probably I am, that’s how I came up. I want to live up to my dad’s legacy and take pride in that because I saw him take a lot of pride in coaching girls and not coaching them any different than if he was coaching our (boys) team.”

Fred Tibbetts preferred coaching girls

Fred Tibbetts already had the first of his many championships when the first of his two sons was born in May 1977.

The high school girls basketball season in South Dakota was in the fall until shifting to winter in the 2002-03 school year. “He was kind of living a perfect world where he was getting to coach in the fall then watch his kids (Nate and Luke) in the winter,” Nate says. “But when you’re in college, the seasons were the same.”

Fred’s college teams won a combined 39 games in his final two seasons, making the NCAA Division II postseason in 1989. But he didn’t enjoy recruiting or the half hour commute to Vermillion.

“I don’t think college was his deal,” Nate says. Fred returned to Jefferson for four years before taking on Roosevelt, which jumped from 4-16 in 1993 to fifth in the state tournament upon his arrival in ’94 (when Nate was a high school junior). That was just an appetizer for the title feast to come.

Going back to the Jefferson days, Nate remembers having a straight path out the back door of his home to the gym.

“The gym was always open, and the players bought into it,” he says. “He won pretty easily early in his career and just kept winning.”

“I thought I was living a dream being in this little gym in South Dakota. I remember when he’d start yelling at his team, I’d run out the side door home. He empowered them and lifted them up, but he wasn’t afraid to get after them.”

Fred coached his sons in youth basketball and Nate’s AAU team. That was plenty when it came to the boys side.

“He loved coaching girls,” Nate says. “He always talked about how he would struggle switching over to boys just because he thought girls were more coachable, more willing to work and try new things. I don’t think he ever had a drive to change it up.”

Or as Nate’s mother Micki puts it, “Teenage boys sometimes know it all, they think. Fred felt the girls were more receptive as far as listening and following through with things.”

The good times continued for the Tibbetts family into the first decade of this century.

Nate became an all-conference player in college at South Dakota. Luke also played at South Dakota after helping Roosevelt win a AA state title (that eluded Nate) in 2000. Fred won his sixth championship at Roosevelt in 2005 then resigned in April saying his mother’s death “has kind of taken its toll because basketball has been my life.”

By August 2006, it became public knowledge that Fred was undergoing chemotherapy for stage 4 colon cancer. He died at age 58 in February 2008 but lived long enough to see Nate become a first-time head coach in 2007 with the Sioux City Skyforce.

Fred’s influence on Nate

Nate Tibbetts was 30 when his father died. He’s 47 now and on a journey that Fred would have followed with same passion he brought to coaching.

“He would never have dreamed of the path that took me to the NBA and now to the WNBA,” Nate says. He was an NBA assistant for 12 seasons – with Cleveland, Portland and Orlando – starting in 2011-12, bringing him to the attention of first-year Mercury general manager Nick U’Ren, familiar with the NBA through his work with the Golden State Warriors, during a coaching search in fall 2023.

“The first time Nick called, my mom was visiting us in Florida,” Tibbetts says. “She was ecstatic about the opportunity,” something Micki confirms. “I had never thought about coming to the W, but when it was presented to me, it was like that’s what I’ve been around my whole life.”

“I felt it was going to be a smooth transition because I didn’t view it any different because of how I was raised.”

The movie that Micki replays in her mind goes back to Nate as a baby crawling with a full-size basketball. To driving home with her sons from Fred’s games with Nate chattering about players even on the opposing team. To father and son reviewing video of Nate’s games and “what he should have done differently,” she says. “It influenced him a lot.”

“Fred was very passionate. The way Nate coaches reminds me of Fred a lot. The way he paces. When the players come out, he’ll talk to them about what they did or didn’t do right. He’s teaching all the time. Fred was like that too. [Nate] really cares about the team and wants them to do well. That was very important to Fred.”

Winning over Mercury players

The Mercury went into the Olympic break with a 13-12 record that almost certainly would have been better had they not been without one or more starters for more than half (14) of their games. They are 7-4 with their full starting lineup.

The post-Olympics portion of the WNBA season resumes Thursday.

Tibbetts has a long way to go to challenge his dad’s success, but that’s not the expectation at the highest level of women’s basketball.

For a proud franchise on its fourth head coach since 2021, the goal is to return to the WNBA playoffs after missing out last year for the first time since 2012 and as soon as possible to contend for an elusive fourth title (first since 2014).

In his first nine months with the Mercury, Tibbetts has done enough to win the trust of high-profile returning veterans like Diana Taurasi and Brittney Griner and newcomers Kahleah Copper, Natasha Cloud and Becca Allen. Four of those, all but Cloud were selected as Paris Olympians although Allen was forced to drop out due to injury.

That’s a bounty of talent – Copper is second in WNBA scoring – accompanied by a boatload of pressure in a 12-team league with no easy wins. Not to mention expectations of Mat Ishbia, already with two Phoenix Suns head coaching hire in his still brief tenure (since February 2023) as Suns/Mercury owner.

Whatever intangibles that were missing, though, for the 2023-24 Suns aren’t an issue for the Mercury judging from opinions about Tibbetts.

Two-time WNBA champion and three-time All-Star Kristi Toliver and Megan Vogel are women on Tibbetts’ staff.

Vogel came from college coaching after 11 years at Wisconsin Green Bay. She was a four-year starter from 2003-07 at South Dakota State, overlapping with Fred Tibbetts’ final seasons coaching at Roosevelt High and his induction into the South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame in 2007.

“You think of South Dakota high school and college sports and you think of Mr. Tibbetts,” Vogel says. “I knew players that were coached by him and all had great experiences.

“Any time you grow up in a coach’s family, it’s just a part of you. You get to see how he coaches, his style, the impact he has on those players. How can you not want to aspire to that and the success his dad had. There’s no doubt that had an influence on who [Nate] is today.”

Toliver, like Tibbetts with NBA assistant coaching experience and projected as a future WNBA head coach, has praised Tibbetts since before the season even began.

“He’s been money from day one,” she said in early May. “The players love him, I love working with him. Part of my job is bridging the gap [with players], but he’s done a phenomenal job build relationships with players. Everything is very clear and concise.”

Taurasi, in her 20th WNBA season at age 42, has played for a smorgasbord of head coaches ranging from Geno Auriemma to Dawn Staley. Tibbetts is her eighth with the Mercury since 2004 in addition to five in her six Olympics and others on international teams.

Winning over the strong-willed WNBA career scoring leader isn’t easy, but Tibbetts appears to have done just that.

“You can feel all his experiences as a coach,” Taurasi says. “I think it’s culminated in him being in this place right now.”

“He just has a way of communicating with us in different ways. Every time we need something, it seems like he knows what to say. He’s honed that for all those, coaching hundreds of teams and players. He’s really given us a different mindset of how to approach the game.”

Copper, in her first season with the Mercury, has credited Tibbetts with helping to improve her pick-and-roll game.

The 6-9 Griner and 6-3 Natasha Mack are benefiting from their training with 6-7 assistant coach Michael Joiner, who played for Tibbetts for two seasons with the Skyforce.

For Cloud, a high-profile free agent going into this year, the Mercury were attractive because of her ties to Toliver when both were with the Washington Mystics. But the point guard first needed to be sure about Tibbetts as head coach.

“I was never skeptical of his career or his resume, but that fear of this was a huge move for me to begin with. Eight years in one place then to go do it with a coach that was just coming into the league, definitely nerves there. But I came and met him on my visit, we instantly clicked.”

“I loved his personality, I loved how he was blunt and to the point because that’s how I am. I just appreciated his personality more than anything. The Xs and Os were always going to come and with him coming from the NBA, I knew it was going to be an open concept then also having Panda (Toliver) as his assistant made me feel really comfortable.”

If anything, Cloud is more bullish on the Mercury now, in no small part because of the team’s recently opened $100-million practice facility but also because of greater familiarity with Tibbetts.

“You could see from who he is for his family, who he is for his wife and his daughters. That holds importance when you’re talking about who the head of your snake is and how you respect him.”

“He’s a girl dad. You can definitely tell that from how he cares about us as well.”

“His respect of the women’s game overall comes from his dad and from his dad putting in years with women. You have that ingrained into you from the start. It’s not something that develops over time. He already respected us before he came into this league.”

A girl dad, now said as a compliment about Tibbetts instead of a pejorative.

His father’s son, perhaps the ultimate compliment and a role Tibbetts will aspire to for the entirety of his coaching career.

“He would be super proud of this,” Tibbetts says. “When he walked in the room, you felt him. My brother and mom joke if he would walk in here, he’d be like the mayor. He’d be so happy. He’d be trying to be Kah and DT’s (Copper and Taurasi) buddy.”

“I’ve been around some great coaches, and I’d put him right up there with any of them…There’s a lot of moments that I’m guessing our mannerisms are the same or I’ll do something out on the court or go talk to a player, I’ll think about him and how he would handle a situation. Every day I still think of him even though he’s been gone since 2008 just because of the impact he had on me but also where I’m at in my life in getting this opportunity to coach women. It’s pretty special.”