Cheryl Reeve has thought about leaving the Lynx. A few times. The coach is not “a stayer,” as she calls it, and her early career was full of the usual positional hopscotching and leapfrogging. Then she came to Minneapolis to become a WNBA head coach in 2009. And through some mix of success and ego and family and compromise, without exactly meaning to stay, Reeve did not ever leave.
The result is one of the longest active coaching tenures in major professional sports. Reeve is the winningest coach in the history of the WNBA. (“Everything matters for her,” says Lynx assistant coach Rebekkah Brunson, who played nine seasons under Reeve. “There’s nothing that’s too small.”) Reeve has shown a remarkable ability to evolve where needed while refusing to waver anywhere else. (“She’s keeping hip to the new generations coming in,” says Lynx forward Natasha Howard. “But she’s still pointing to that same portrait of what we need to do.”) She has four championships, the coaching record for playoff victories and, right now, once again, Minnesota holds the top seed heading into the postseason and is a title favorite. All of this means that she has not lost her job. What has proven trickier is her actively deciding to keep it.
