On Monday, Monumental Basketball president Michael Winger took two big steps toward determining the Washington Mystics’ direction for 2025 and beyond. He hired former WNBA player Jamila Wideman as the team’s general manager and former Chicago Sky assistant coach Sydney Johnson as its head coach.
Until this fall, Winger had been relatively hands-off with the Mystics since he joined Monumental Basketball in May 2023. But that changed in October, when the Mystics parted ways with general manager Mike Thibault and head coach Eric Thibault. The Thibaults had been with the franchise in various roles for more than a decade.
“We have decided we are at a point in our competitive and evolutionary cycle to turn the team over to new leadership,” Winger said in October.
Wideman, a Stanford alumna, was the third pick in the 1997 WNBA Draft and played four seasons for the Los Angeles Sparks, Cleveland Rockers and Portland Fire. The 5’6 guard averaged 2.2 points, 2.5 assists and 1.4 rebounds in 16.6 minutes per game. Her best season was her rookie year, in which she started 14 games and ranked eighth in the league with 3.7 assists per game.
After her WNBA career ended, Wideman attended New York University (NYU) Law School and practiced law for over a decade. Then she pivoted, becoming the NBA’s senior vice president of player development. In addition to developing players’ on-court skills, she helped promote players’ mental health through the NBA’s “Mind Health” initiative.
In a September interview with NYU Law School’s magazine, Wideman explained how she approached leadership both in the NBA and as a lawyer.
“[You’re] balancing what you may begin with in terms of a vision and how you want to get there with actually being able to see the people who are in front of you … and being flexible to adjust to their unique experiences and talents and what they have to offer,” Wideman said. “And the task then is really about putting people in spaces where what they bring uniquely as human beings can really shine. And that may look really different from how you had initially imagined it.”
The flexibility she describes could be important right away with the Mystics. Wideman will have some salary cap room to build a roster that fits her vision, but Washington also has several veterans on protected contracts for 2025.
This will be Wideman’s first role where she’s building a roster rather than developing it. But Winger will also be involved in roster decisions, according to The Washington Post’s Kareem Copeland.
“Jamila’s breadth of experience, range of core competencies, and passion for developing the whole athlete makes her the ideal person to usher in the new era of Mystics Basketball,” Winger said in the Mystics’ announcement. “Together with her player connectivity, big picture vision, and intimate knowledge of the global scope of our game, we feel strongly that Jamila will be a bedrock for our athletes, coaches, and staff as they pursue another championship.”
Johnson, who grew up mainly in Baltimore, gets a homecoming of sorts after spending one season with the Sky and several in men’s college basketball. Last season with the Sky, Johnson helped develop first-round draft picks Kamilla Cardoso and Angel Reese. Similarly, the Mystics have two top-six picks in the 2025 draft and several young players who could fill out the roster.
Winger told Copeland that player development is vitally important to Monumental Basketball.
“We’re obviously leaning way into human development and less sort of the run-of-the-mill-managerial-operator type of thinking,” he said about both hires. “That’s how we feel like we’re going to rocket through the next era of the ‘W’ and pass a lot of teams. … We just didn’t want to do it the way most teams do.”
Before joining the Sky, Johnson coached at the United States Air Force Academy, Fairfield, Princeton (his alma mater) and Georgetown. He was the head coach at Fairfield and Princeton and took the Tigers to the NCAA Tournament in 2010-11. He also works for HD Intelligence, which provides analytics and scouting to top college teams and to USA Basketball.
“Having spoken extensively with Jamila, Michael, and leadership – it is clear to me how committed they are to supercharging our efforts to win another WNBA Championship,” Johnson said in the Mystics’ announcement. “As a team, we will carry the core values that drive this franchise – excellence, togetherness, joy, competitiveness, and accountability through everything we do.”
Johnson has also coached for USA Basketball, including guiding the 3×3 women’s team to a silver medal at the AmeriCup this month. That team featured Mystics guard Brittney Sykes, who led Team USA in scoring and was named to the three-player Team of the Tournament.
“Heyyyyy he looks really familiar !!!” Sykes wrote in a comment on the Mystics’ Instagram post, adding several fire emojis. She continued in her own Instagram story, “Got Silver together … time to get some more hardware.”
‘Rare Gems’ is out now!
Howard Megdal, founder and editor of The IX Basketball and The IX Sports, wrote this deeply reported book. “Rare Gems” follows four connected generations of women’s basketball pioneers, from Elvera “Peps” Neuman to Cheryl Reeve and from Lindsay Whalen to Sylvia Fowles and Paige Bueckers.
If you enjoy Megdal’s coverage of women’s basketball every Wednesday at The IX Sports, you will love “Rare Gems: How Four Generations of Women Paved the Way for the WNBA.”
Winger selected Wideman and Johnson with help from Nolan Partners search firm, according to Copeland. There was a pool of 35 to 40 candidates for each position, and Wideman beat out several candidates who had experience as assistant general managers. Wideman and Johnson signed multiyear contracts, and each will report to Winger.
With the positions opening relatively late this fall, Johnson was the eighth and likely final head coaching hire for the WNBA’s 13 teams this offseason. Wideman was the fifth general manager hired, and two vacancies remain.
Johnson and Wideman will both need to hire staffs as well. According to Copeland, they’re expected to consider some of those who worked for the Thibaults.
These two hires come shortly before free agency begins in January and well into the college season, when WNBA front offices scout college players for the draft. Winger, Wideman and Johnson will need to align quickly on their goals for their first offseason together. But they are expected to be patient as they rebuild, rather than swinging for the fences to contend immediately.
