This past Sunday saw a filled Barclays Center host the deciding game of the WNBA Finals. The tense thriller ended with the New York Liberty fighting past the Minnesota Lynx in an overtime finish that ended a watershed year for the WNBA.
Among the 18,000-plus in the attendance was Indiana Fever General Manager Lin Dunn.
The 77-year-old Hall Of Fame coach has been a part of women’s basketball — and the march for respect for women’s sports — for 54 years. Now, all these years after her foray into sports, she’s a 2024 Outsports Power 100 honoree.
She remembers a time when a scene like Sunday wasn’t allowed to exist, even as a dream.
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“Back in the ’50s and ’60s when I was growing up, it was against the law for girls to play interscholastic sports in Alabama,” she recalled. “That’s why we moved to Tennessee where we got to play two years of the old six-on-six half-court game. When I got to college there was no basketball.”
Dunn graduated from University of Tennessee at Martin in 1969. That was one year before a women’s team was formed at the school and three years before Title IX was passed.
She found her place as the head coach of three sports — women’s basketball, women’s volleyball and women’s tennis — at Austin Peay State in 1970. She became the star of a long march through the pre-NCAA era for women’s college sports of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women.
The early Title IX days where filled with dubious thoughts about women in sports, as well as fights for every cent of shoestring budgets. Those fights have extended well into the NCAA’s stewardship of women’s college sports, which started in earnest in 1982.
It was also an era of deep closets. Dunn was among those who didn’t come out until later in life and career, when she was in the final years as the Indiana Fever’s head coach, a role she had for seven seasons starting in 2008.
As a college coach, she was once asked by her athletic department to cut a player who was thought to be gay. Her response, quoted in Indianapolis Monthly at the time of her Women’s Basketball of Hall of Fame induction in 2014: “I removed myself from that program and went to another job.”
To her, that is one of the marked changes where her sport and society that have merged.
“I never thought I would live long enough to see gay marriage,” she said. “There were a lot of things I’d never thought I’d see in my lifetime. We’ve come to a time where you can be who you are, you can live your life, and you can be proud of who you are.”
A battle over budgets at Purdue — where she coached the team to to seven NCAA tournament appearances and a Final Four in nine seasons — led to her firing in 1996, a lawsuit, a settlement and a trajectory away from college basketball.
Dunn headed to the women’s professional game with two leagues each trying to find a foothold.
After a year with the American Basketball League, she soon found a home in the WNBA, first as General Manager and Head Coach of the Seattle Storm. Dunn was called on to again build from the ground up. The additions of legends Lauren Jackson and Sue Bird put to the team in the playoffs and on a trajectory to a title as Dunn resigned in 2002.
In 2004, she joined with the Fever as an assistant and became head coach in 2008. It was beginning of a grand final act.
“Once I moved from college to the professional ranks, I grew my knowledge of the game of basketball,” she said. “The technical knowledge and the Xs and Os was like getting a master’s degree versus an undergraduate degree.”
She built a team of basketball scholars who turned her knowledge into points and wins. Among the players she coached was perennial all-star Tamika Catchings, whom Dunn cited as perhaps the best player she coached her career. Katie Douglas, who was coached at Purdue by a Dunn protegè in Stephanie White (the current Connecticut Sun head coach who is also a 2024 Outsports Power 100 honoree), was also a part of a team that ended a long drought for the coach and Indiana.
In 2012 the Fever won the WNBA championship. Dunn, after years of seeing other coaches reap the harvest she planted, was at the peak.
She was content to leave the stage in 2014, but when the Fever needed a General Manager in 2022, Dunn answered pleas to step in as an interim GM. The interim title was removed last year, and just in time for this year’s frenzy when Caitlin Clark came to town.
In Dunn’s second year as GM, the team made its first WNBA Playoffs in eight seasons.
“It’s been wild. It’s been crazy. It’s been wonderful,” she said. “She’s had such a huge impact on what we are trying to do with women’s professional basketball. America and the world are seeing these women and seeing that they can play. And I love it.”
Dunn says after next season, her 55th in the sport, she will truly retire. Even though being a part of the game still brings her joy, Dunn says it’s time for the next generation to enhance what her generation built and fought for.
“My legacy and what would matter to me is wherever Lin Dunn worked, college or pro, she left it better than when it was when she got there,” she reflected. “The team got better, the players got better, and she left an impact with the job did. That is how I’d like to be remembered.
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