KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — It’s shaping up to be a historic week for Minnesota Lynx’s head coach and president of basketball operations Cheryl Reeve. The four-time WNBA Coach of the Year was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in a ceremony at The Tennessee Theater in Knoxville on Saturday night. In her next win, she’ll match Mike Thibault for the WNBA’s all-time regular season wins record at 379 total victories.
For a coach who is known to preach to her players against ‘the disease of me,’ and for whom the biggest game of the year is always the next one on the schedule, setting aside time to reflect on past achievements isn’t exactly her natural habitat.
“It is kind of tough right now to think about it,” Reeve said after Minnesota’s win against the Washington Mystics in DC on Wednesday night. “I’m just excited to go be in Knoxville and soak it all in. I don’t even know what to expect. It’s mind-boggling to me. I remember being an assistant coach at George Washington University and sitting in the office thinking about Pat Summitt like, ‘How’d she do it? … I’m just thinking about how I’d ever get a head coaching job and be halfway decent at it?’ There’s just no point in time where I ever sit around and go, ‘hey, Hall of Fame here I come.’”
Reeve couldn’t have known at the time, but her answer in the moments after her team won the last game remaining before the weekend’s festivities commenced was in direct conversation with the opening remarks from Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame CEO Michelle Marciniak.
“Everyone starts somewhere,” Marcinak said. “[The Class of 2026] were not born Hall of Famers. They became Hall of Famers.”
In a basketball career that’s spanned several decades and counting, Reeve called back to one summer during her time as player at La Salle University as an unofficial launch pad of where her career as a coach began.
“38 years ago, my goodness, I was a 21-year-old between my junior and senior years at LaSalle University working the legendary Cathy Rush basketball camps,” Reeve said in her Hall of Fame induction speech. “I called Cathy before coming here. I wanted her to know that my work at her camps ended up being the spark that became my lifelong passion for coaching basketball.
“It was during those weeks as a camp counselor that I experienced the feeling of being in a huddle with my team, sharing strategy, breaking the huddle, taking the floor to execute the plan and feel that rush as I witnessed the joy the players felt in their successful execution.”
Both of Reeve’s parents weren’t as sold on coaching as a profession as their intrepid daughter. Reeve recalled her father Larry’s worries about whether or not she’d be able to support herself financially, and her mother Rae’s wishes for her to stick with school and pursue her master’s degree. Reeve stuck with academia, but not at the expense of her coaching career, earning her MBA while working as a graduate assistant on Coach John Miller’s staff at La Salle.
Not long after that Reeve’s first full-time job in coaching came as part of Joe McKeown’s staff at George Washington. When she wasn’t busy channeling the great Summitt in the coaching offices in DC, she was helping the program make four NCAA Tournament appearances in five seasons, culminating with a run to the Sweet 16 in 1995.
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Reeve credited McKeown with giving her ‘the blueprint for winning’ in addition to giving her her first full-time job in coaching. Reeve took the blueprint with her when she departed for Indiana State in 1995 and her first head coaching job in the game at the age of 29.
The WNBA formed and held its inaugural season in 1997 and Reeve didn’t need to wait too long for an opportunity to coach in the professional ranks to come her way.
“After 10 years coaching in college, the opportunity came for me to coach in the WNBA,” Reeve said. “It was 2001, the Charlotte Sting had just hired Anne Donovan. I drove to Moody Bible College in Chicago for the WNBA Draft Combine, where Anne interviewed me for an assistant coach position. She explained to me she didn’t have a lot to offer, salary-wise, just $5,000. I said, ‘I’m in.’”
The going rate for assistant coaches didn’t steady Larry Reeve’s concerns about financial stability. But Cheryl would not be denied and joined the staff of a coach who had already been enshrined in the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame two years prior in the hall’s inaugural class of 1999, and so began the first of her 26 seasons and counting of coaching at the highest level.
“I began my coaching journey in the WNBA, from 2001 until today.” Reeve added. “I ate, drank, and slept everything WNBA. I experienced teams folding. I collected unemployment, and heard my dad wonder out loud, ‘When was I going to get a real job?’”
After a win against the Dallas Wings at Target Center earlier this season, Reeve calmly told reporters at the postgame press conference that accolades like first place or exceeding early expectations are not things that the Minnesota Lynx ever spend much time thinking about.
“We always worry about how we’re going to win the next game,” Reeve said. “We finished the Seattle game [on Sunday] and we told them that this game tonight was the biggest of the year, because it’s the next one. That’s the only way our staff thinks …Honestly, many times I won’t even know what our record is, and that’s a true story. Because it just doesn’t matter. We have so much more work to do as a team and that’s where our focus is.”
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The season schedule gave Reeve exactly the right amount of time to experience the joy of the Hall of Fame’s induction weekend and then get right back to work. In the wee hours of the morning she traveled from Knoxville to Dallas, where her team had a nationally televised matinee with the Wings.
“Being announced that I was going to be in the hall, that’s one thing, exciting in and of itself,” Reeve said. “To actually be in Knoxville at the hall is a completely different feeling. I use the word ‘overwhelming’ a lot. In the hall, there’s the history of women’s basketball, in the artifacts that they have, in the way they display things, and there’s 200 inductees. So the overwhelming part of it for me is just having inspiration from so many of these women when I was a young coach. To now think that I was going to have a spot in that same place, it’s pretty overwhelming. It’s hard to wrap your head around for sure.”
Reeve may not have set out to make it to the Hall of Fame one day, but she’s there now and will always have a place in the historic hall. She may not know what her team’s record is, but that doesn’t stop it from being tops in the league or prevent her personal wins and losses record from knocking on history’s door.
Now that the festivities of her enshrinement weekend are in the rearview, that’s where they’ll stay as Reeve and the Lynx continue their pursuit of winning each upcoming biggest game of the year. But that doesn’t mean the joyfulness of the weekend with her family, and with her championship players like Seimone Augustus, Taj McWilliams-Franklin, and Lindsay Whalen, and what it represents won’t continue to sit with her and echo through the rest of this season and beyond.
“I feel tremendous gratitude for the many who came before me, like Cathy Rush, who paved the way for the opportunity I have today,” Reeve said in the conclusion of her induction speech. “From coaching All-Star games, to winning four championships, to winning gold in Paris. This game has given me a fulfilling lifetime of joy.”
And when it comes to those years of collecting unemployment to supplement the meager salaries available to ambitious assistant coaches at the time?
“I would like to end by thanking the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame selection committee for my inclusion in the class of 2026. To share the hall with so many women’s basketball greats makes me glad I never got a real job,” Reeve said.
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