Wherever Noelle Quinn went, wherever basketball took her, from UCLA to WNBA stops in Minnesota, Los Angeles, Washington and Phoenix, she always came back home. No, not to Torrance, Calif., where she grew up. But to Seattle, her adopted base, where she played for the Storm in 2013 and ’14, left, came back for part of ’16, all of ’17 and all of ’18, retired, and returned once more, the next season, as an assistant coach.
In all those stops, Quinn immersed in the Tao of a distinct WNBA franchise. She didn’t just play with Sue Bird and Breanna Stewart; she watched them, studying them, their processes, up close. She saw community impact beyond basketball but also in basketball: tons of elite basketball, a system, a soul, a way of operating that netted four championships in one 17-season stretch. She came to learn one lesson above all. “There is a tradition here,” Quinn says, “that needs to be upheld.”
Every time she departed and came home, she compared her latest stop with her experiences in Seattle. The Storm felt like family. The Storm fit.
