NBA team hires league’s first female full-time assistant coach

The reigning NBA champion San Antonio Spurs hired WNBA star Becky Hammon on Tuesday, making her the first female full-time assistant coach on an NBA team.

Hammon, a member of the WNBA’s San Antonio Stars for the past eight seasons who retired last month, worked with head coach Gregg Popovich and the Spurs last season in practices and made an impression.  

"This is a tremendous opportunity, and I take it with great responsibility," Hammon, who befriended Spurs all-stars Tony Parker and Tim Duncan after competing in an NBA All-Star Weekend competition in 2008, told reporters. "[I’m] just incredibly blessed and humbled by the whole thing."

When asked about the historical significance of her hiring, Hammon said while it was a "tremendous honor ... the bigger point is I’m getting hired because I’m capable."

"There’s women who have trail-blazed much bigger paths," she said. "Even me sitting here today to be able to have the playing experience that I have as a professional basketball player, women went before me to pave that trail and so I’m really just reaping the benefits of all their hard work and labor."

"I very much look forward to the addition of Becky Hammon to our staff," Popovich said in a statement on the team’s website. "Having observed her working with our team this past season, I’m confident her basketball IQ, work ethic and interpersonal skills will be a great benefit to the Spurs."

Hammon is not the first woman to break barriers at the NBA. Violet Palmer became the first female to officiate a game in 1997. Earlier this year, former UCLA point guard Natalie Nakase was assigned to an assistant coach for the Los Angeles Clippers’ Summer League team. 

During the 2001-02 season, then-Cleveland Cavaliers coach John Lucas brought Lisa Boyer — currently the associate head coach of the University of South Carolina women's basketball team — into some of the team's practices. Boyer was an assistant coach with now-defunct WNBA Cleveland Rockers at the time, but worked unpaid with the Cavaliers players and coaches that season.

The Spurs, meanwhile, will go into next season as the defending champions after beating the Miami Heat to win their fifth NBA title in June. The organization, headed by Popovich and RC Buford, the general manager, are viewed as the league's gold standard.

Other women with NBA coaching aspirations said they hoped Hammon's hiring would be the first big step toward integrating more women into the league.

"The one thing that people have to remember is that the San Antonio Spurs don't do anything for effect," said Nancy Lieberman, a former star basketball player who was a head coach in the NBA Development League in 2009 and now serves as the GM of the Texas Legends, told The Associated Press. "That's not who they are. They don't do this for the record-breaking barrier. They do things out of respect."

Hammon, who went undrafted in the 1999 WNBA draft before signing with the New York Liberty, made six All-Star teams and averaged 13.1 points in her 16-year career in the league, the last eight seasons of which were with the San Antonio Stars.