Former CSU basketball star Becky Hammon makes head coaching debut with WNBA's Las Vegas Aces

Becky Hammon played 16 seasons in the WNBA, appearing six times in the All-Star Game.

She spent the past eight seasons learning from one of the NBA’s greatest coaches of all time as an assistant under Gregg Popovich with the San Antonio Spurs.

On Friday, the former Colorado State University All-American will put her own stamp on the court for the first time as head coach of the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces.

After years of talk about her becoming the first female head coach in the NBA, and a half-dozen or so interviews for those jobs, Hammon, 45, shifted gears over the winter.

The Aces, a team she played eight seasons for when they were the San Antonio Silver Stars, was offering her the chance to run her own team, on her terms. So she accepted the job, becoming the WNBA’s highest-paid coach, according to The Athletic.

“My heart was saying it was time to go,” Hammon told the Associated Press. “This is where I’m supposed to be right now. There were a lot of sleepless nights getting to this conclusion.”

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Hammon left the Spurs last month to begin getting ready for the start of the WNBA season. The Aces lost an exhibition game 89-86 on Sunday at the Minnesota Lynx and open the regular season Friday night at the Phoenix Mercury.

The Aces tied a franchise record by attempting 23 shots from 3-point range, making just nine. But Hammon told reporters afterward her team would shoot even more 3s as the season went on.

As a player, Hammon was one of the most-prolific 3-point shooters the game has ever seen, making 829 in her WNBA career — No. 2 all-time. Among the many records she still holds at CSU are 3-pointers made in a season (114 in 1998-99) and career (365).

“It’s an emphasis for us,” she said in her postgame news conference. “We shoot a lot of 3s every day, and everybody has a green light.”

Green lights have been a rarity in Hammon’s rise to fame.

The 5-foot-6 point guard from Rapid City, South Dakota, wasn’t supposed to become the best girls basketball player the state has ever produced, the first consensus All-American in CSU history, the Western Athletic Conference’s all-time leading scorer, a six-time WNBA All-Star, an Olympic medalist or member of the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame.

She never backs away from a challenge, though.

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So she came to CSU and led the Rams to the best four-season stretch in school history. CSU won WAC titles and advanced to the NCAA Tournament in three of her four seasons, advancing to the Sweet 16 while going 33-3 in 1998-99, her senior season.

Hammon was the WAC Freshman of the Year in 1995-96 and the Player of the Year each of the next three seasons while scoring 2,740 points, more than any basketball player — male or female — in league history.

After being passed over in the WNBA Draft, she signed as a free agent with the New York Liberty and not only made the team, but went on to become one of the league’s greatest players of all-time. She was named one of the top 20 players in WNBA history during a 20th anniversary celebration in 2016 and one of the top 25 of all-time during the 25th anniversary celebration in 2021.

She played 16 seasons, eight apiece, with the Liberty and Silver Stars, making the All-Star Game six times.

When she wasn’t invited to tryouts for the U.S. Olympic Team for the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, she took a different route. While playing professionally in Russia during the WNBA’s offseason, she had been granted dual citizenship. So she played for Russia in both the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, winning a bronze medal in 2008.

On the flight home from the 2012 London Olympics, she wound up on the same plane as Popovich. The two started talking basketball strategy, she said during a visit to CSU in 2015, and Popovich invited her to come watch some Spurs practices.

When Hammon retired from the Silver Stars, who shared practice and game facilities and some front-office staff with the Spurs, Popovich offered her a job as an assistant coach with the NBA team. Hammon wasted no time accepting, becoming the first full-time female coach in a major U.S. professional sports league for the 2014-15 season.

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The more she worked with Popovich and the Spurs players, the more respect they gained for her coaching abilities. She was put in charge of the team’s Las Vegas Summer League team in 2015 and led them to the championship. She went from a back-bench to front-bench assistant and was sitting beside Popovich as one of the team’s top assistants when the head coach put her in charge after he was ejected from a game Dec. 30, 2020, making Hammon the first woman to ever serve as head coach in an NBA regular-season game.

Other NBA teams took notice, with some even interviewing the former CSU star for head-coaching positions over the past few years. None offered to hire her, though.

“There’s 30 jobs, and they are incredibly hard to get,” Hammon told The Associated Press in August. “When I say there are 30 jobs, not all 30 are available, so I’m really talking about three or four, and they are really hard to get.”

She rejected several opportunities to leave the NBA to coach the women’s game at the college level or WNBA and told CSU she wasn’t interested when the school contacted her about its vacant men’s basketball coaching position before hiring Niko Medved in 2018.

The Aces, though, came through with the right offer at the right time, a five-year deal that reportedly made her the highest-paid coach in WNBA history at more than $1 million a year. The Aces advanced to the semifinals of the playoffs the past three years and played in the WNBA Finals in 2020 but have never won a championship.

Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis bought the Aces in 2021 and brought in a new management team, with Nikki Fargas as president and former WNBA player Natalie Williams as general manager.

And they offered Hammon a chance to build a team that she believes will win a championship, playing the way she sees fit.

The WNBA has evolved significantly since her playing days, Hammon told ESPN.com and other media outlets in video conference call Wednesday. Teams are relying less and less on “two big post players” and opening up the floor with athletes who can play multiple positions, much as the NBA has done in recent years.

“I see the evolvement going in a really good direction and at a pretty good clip, too,” she said.

Hammon hired two of the women who followed her lead and were working as assistant coaches in the WNBA — Natalie Nakase from the Los Angeles Clippers and Tyler Marsh from the Indiana Pacers — as assistant coaches with the Aces.

Her team returns four starters from last season, led by 2020 WNBA MVP A’ja Wilson. She’s changing the offensive and defensive systems and emphasizing fundamentals, she said on the conference call.

She’s putting her stamp on the team. But she’s not starting from scratch.

“I’ve got a great foundation, so it’s not about tearing down everything and completely rebuilding,” she told the Las Vegas Sun after a recent practice. “We’ve got a lot of good pieces in place.”

As for that elusive WNBA championship?

“We can do a couple things offensively and defensively differently that I think will help put us over the hump,” she said.

Obstacles have never stopped Hammon before. So, why would they now?

Kelly Lyell reports on CSU, high school and other local sports and topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, follow him on Twitter @KellyLyell and find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/KellyLyell.news. If you 're a subscriber, thank you for your support. If not, please consider purchasing a digital subscription today.

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Colorado State basketball star Becky Hammon makes WNBA coaching debut