She changed her mind

In her junior year at Pickerington High School Central, Nicole Stephens ’26 played on a basketball team that won the Ohio Division I state championship. Her senior year, the team lost in the finals. Her coach — obviously a successful one — said to her, “You’d be a great coach.”

The opportunity presented itself soon after high school graduation. In August 2020, Stephens was about to move to New York City to study and play basketball at Columbia University. Then COVID-19 hit. First a quarantine. Then in-person classes cancelled. Then the season.

So, a year with family and a computer at home replaced a year in the Big Apple.

Her high school coach offered an assistant coaching position. “I wasn’t interested in coaching,” Stephens said. “But I wanted to get out of the house. So, I became a coach for girls I played with.”

The next year she did make it Columbia to play and to graduate with a sociology degree. Then she spent two years playing at Dayton and picking up a master’s degree.

During those years she saw massive changes in college basketball. “We are now seeing,” she said, “a loss of loyalty.” Money motivates transfers; there is no sitting out; coaches don’t have time to form relationships; some players can’t handle toughness.

“There’s a lot to be said about staying together and going through hard times together,” she said. “Everyone does have a different motivation. But I want to be with people who care.”

And now she wants to do that as a coach.

Last summer she worked with the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun, where among her activities were working with player development and learning teaching methods. This spring at the NCAA’s women’s Final Four she participated in the So You Want to be a Coach program of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association. There she learned from people such as former Stanford Coach Tara VanDerveer, who until recently had more career wins than any other Division I coach, and Kathy Delaney-Smith, who coached 40 seasons at Harvard.

As the school year ended, she was pursuing college coaching positions.

Her ultimate goal: Coaching in the WNBA.

Photograph courtesy of UD Athletics.

A version of this article appears in print in the Summer 2026 University of Dayton Magazine, Page 19. EXPLORE THE ISSUE — MORE ONLINE