Stephanie White Details Downsides of Coaching Young Fever Team
Stephanie White has received a ton of credit for how she coached the Indiana Fever during the 2025 WNBA season. Not only was White coming to a new head this offseason, but the team's personnel experienced a staggering amount of change during the season due to the many injuries Indiana had to face.
The most notable of these was with star guard Caitlin Clark. And given that the Fever's entire offense revolved around Clark, her being sidelined meant that White and the rest of her coaching staff had to adapt their team's offense on the fly, figuring out how to maximize their players while still being unsure about how long Clark would be out for and whether she would return at any point in the 2025 season.
While a big part of the Fever's last offseason was adding veteran players with playoff and championship experience to the roster, that doesn't detract from the fact that Indiana's core of Clark, Aliyah Boston, Lexie Hull, and Kelsey Mitchell (who is 30 years old but barely had any playoff experience before 2025) is among the youngest in the league.
Stephanie White Gets Honest About Coaching Young Fever Team
White detailed some of the unique challenges that comes with coaching a relatively young team during her December 5 appearance on the Bird's Eye View podcast.
"We had a lot more practice time, I can tell you that," White said of coaching a young Fever team compared to an older, more experienced Connecticut Sun team the season prior. "Not just were they young... With young players, you're having to repeat things a lot. And oftentimes, there's a lot of slippage from one day to the next. It's not always about building. It's, 'Hey, we just did this yesterday. We have to do this again?'
"Or if we want to play a certain defense... This is our base way we're gonna play it. We shouldn't have to go over that in shootaround every single day. Just our adjustments, right? Well, with a young team, sometimes you do," White added. "So a lot more time in that. It was also a team, in Indiana, who had been at the bottom of the league in defense. So we spent a lot of time, just on defensive expectations, defensive expectations, defensive principles. And we didn't have to do that in Connecticut."
White later added, "We can get away with, in Connecticut, a drill that covered four things at once. With young players, you can't do that yet... And there's no substitute for experience. And this is a group that, while they had some experience, they hadn't been there yet. So, understanding what it takes on a daily basis. There were some games that we lost early in the season, and even late in the season, that we shouldn't lose.
Steph White talks about the differences when coaching the younger Fever team versus a more veteran team.
— allison (@_girltalk) December 5, 2025
Mentions combatting slippage each practice, focusing on 1 vs multiple disciplines at once, learning through experience, and how their energy kept the coaches feeling young. pic.twitter.com/kB8nLOnapN
"That's the difference in whether you're hosting or whether you're going on the road, which is then the difference between playing Game 5 in your home arena and playing Game 5 in an away arena. So you have to learn these things... As coaches, it demanded more from us in terms of our energy, in terms of our ability to keep them at a certain level," she added. "So it was a different type of challenge. But it was a fun challenge."
Props to White for being honest about the struggles of coaching such a young squad. And the Fever experiencing all of this in 2025 will only serve them next season.
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Grant Young covers Women’s Basketball, the Indiana Fever and the New York Mets for Sports Illustrated’s ‘On SI’ sites. He holds an MFA degree in creative writing from the University of San Francisco (USF), where he also graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing and played on USF’s Division I baseball team for five years. However, he now prefers Angel Reese to Angels in the Outfield.
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