Cheryl Reeve Has Already Cemented Her Legacy, But She’s Nowhere Near Finished

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.

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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.

“It’s more than just me,” says Reeve, 59, sitting in the team’s practice facility this summer. “I can guarantee you, if I wasn’t married and didn’t have a child, I would have left a long time ago.”

She believes that staying has cost her in a literal sense. Reeve has a saying: You get what you accept. A player who accepts less effort from herself gets less out of her performance. And it applies in contract negotiations, too. Reeve, who is also the team’s president of basketball operations, is the winningest coach. She is almost certainly not the highest paid.

“I have a choice,” Reeve says. “I know I’m accepting less.”

Yet she has ultimately chosen the same way every time. That has been about her wife, Carley, and son, Oliver, of course. But it has also been about what she wants and how she wants it. Reeve has a vision of how basketball should be played, and she has been able to execute it in Minnesota, where she has built a system granting her control over even the smallest details. She is very clear that she wants to win, and she wants to do it on her terms, and so she has stayed.

Reeve was delightedin free agency this offseason to hear a player describe the Lynx’s style of play as fun. (The player in question was veteran forward Nia Coffey, who signed on and unlocked a career season, a development that has been frequent under Reeve.) Of all the compliments she has received about her brand of basketball, fun has not traditionally been among them. Disciplined, yes. Balanced. Unselfish. This is ethical hoops: It’s aesthetically pleasing, certainly, but in the sense of anything done with fine attention to detail and crisp execution. Perfect hospital corners on a bed. It can fill a film session without giving much for a highlight reel. Reeve sometimes finds herself explaining to outsiders that she is not a drill sergeant, in fact, and is a full person with a real sense of humor.

“I actually enjoy not being serious,” Reeve says with a smile. “I like to have fun. But, you know, sometimes, a good shell drill is really fun.”

This has always been her style. In her earliest days on a coaching staff, when Reeve was a graduate assistant at La Salle, the head coach showed her something. John Miller pushed his hands nearly all the way together, just a few millimeters of space between them, and said: “Cheryl, the box of things you accept is this big, which means that box is going to have to grow.” He wanted her to accept more. She felt like it meant accepting less. The question of how to give players more space while holding them to her standard was one that she would spend years untangling.

“I knew when he said it,” Reeve says. “It meant something.”

Her fastidiousness helped make her a head coach a few years later in 1995, when she was tapped to run the program at Indiana State at the age of 28. There was no grander domestic platform for her dreams at the time than college ball. But when the WNBA launched a couple years later, Reeve knew that she wanted to be part of what was being built, and she joined the Charlotte Sting’s staff as an assistant in 2001. The fledgling league was shaky and unglamorous. It paid almost nothing. (Reeve’s salary for her first season was $5,000.) She loved it anyway.

Reeve went from being an assistant in Charlotte to Cleveland and back to Charlotte. She learned plenty. But she never felt quite fully herself. She had carried a tough, spiky confidence from childhood: Reeve’s father, Larry, was an Air Force master sergeant who served in Vietnam and made a point of treating her the same as her two brothers. Sometimes, people assume her strong personality is a product of geography. Cheryl made a name for herself playing high school ball in South Jersey. But the Reeve family lived in Nebraska before moving to the East Coast, and she was just as stubborn and plucky a kid in Omaha. It made all the sense in the world that she had been a college head coach before turning 30. Which made it difficult for her to spend a lengthy stretch as an assistant in the WNBA.

And then she found a team where her personality fit right in. Bill Laimbeer hired Reeve to join his Detroit Shock staff alongside Rick Mahorn in 2006. That gave Detroit two former NBA teammates who brought the city a title as the Bad Boys, and one former Rhodes Scholar nominee with a degree in computer science and management information systems who spent a college summer interning with the IRS.

“It was a natural fit,” Laimbeer says.

He did not particularly care if his assistants were a bit prickly or intense. If anything, he preferred it, and he found exactly what he wanted in his new hire. “She’s a very competitive person and a strong-willed individual,” Laimbeer says. “I’d challenge her. I’d listen to what she said and try to poke holes in it.” She always gave as good as she got in response. The NBA vet recognized something valuable in Reeve.

“It was being unapologetically myself,” Reeve says. “Being an assistant coach, I had different people that I worked for where maybe that wasn’t always welcomed.”

They won two titles in their first three years together with the Shock. But they disagreed on plenty, including, early on, Reeve’s prospects as a WNBA head coach. Laimbeer once told her that she did not have the presence to lead a team-a remark that dug at her and never really left. (“He was just really wrong about that.”) But it was not an uncommon belief in that era. As the WNBA battled for relevance in the mid-2000s, executives flocked to big-name coaches, and that generally meant hiring men from the NBA. The year that Laimbeer brought Reeve to Detroit, 11 of the 14 coaches in the league were male, and two of the three female coaches were former Olympic players who had won gold with Team USA. There was a very specific vision of coaching presence. It was not one that easily accommodated Reeve.

“Her opportunity, just from who she was at that point in time, was not the greatest,” Laimbeer says. “She had to earn it and prove it.”

The pair did not always act like traditional mentor and mentee. “He really cared about me,” Reeve says. “But you wouldn’t know it.” Laimbeer left the Shock in 2009. In his absence, Mahorn became interim coach, with Reeve still an assistant. But a few months later, a head coaching spot opened up in Minnesota, and Laimbeer gave his insight to franchise leadership: You’d be stupid to hire anyone but Cheryl Reeve.

The Lynx announced Reeve as their next head coach on Dec. 8, 2009. They won their first championship two years later. They won three more in the next six seasons, with a yearly playoff run essentially a guarantee ever since.

It bothers Reeve that she has not won a championship since 2017. Of course it does. It bothers her that she won those four titles in seven years without ever going back-to-back. (“A first-world problem, but yeah, damn it.”) It bothers her that Minnesota had a bad season four years ago that disrupted the farewell of retiring forward Sylvia Fowles. (“I just get nauseous thinking about it. She deserved so much better.”) It bothers her when she has to watch sloppy basketball. (“I break out in hives.”) So, yes, obviously, it bothers Reeve that Minnesota raised a quartet of banners with the same dynasty core in the Maya Moore era but has not raised a single one since.

This season she has been prompted to look back on her career. Reeve broke the WNBA record for career coaching wins and was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, with all the celebratory speeches and tributes that implies. It was all very nice. (Governor Tim Walz announced July 11 as “Cheryl Reeve Day” in the state of Minnesota.) But the combined effect made her feel like she was being eulogized, or at least being sent on a very elaborate, well-intentioned retirement tour.

“I’m still working,” Reeve says. “That’s how I look at it. I’m still working, and we haven’t won a championship outside the dynasty years. That’s what I want. I want it. I want to win with another team.”

That pursuit looks different than it did a few years ago. More than half of current active coaches had never worked in the WNBA before 2023. The game has changed significantly; Reeve has changed aspects of her spacing and ball movement and shot diet, too. But her overarching philosophy is as straightforward as it has ever been.

“We’ve never been a team that’s been about doing hard things,” Reeve said in a press conference early in the season. “It’s not what the game is. Do you have incredible players that can do incredible things? Yes. But that’s not what the game is filled with. It’s doing ordinary things extremely well.”

Nothing is too small or too mundane to escape critique. “Something starts to slip, and she catches it right away,” says Coffey. “And we work on those things until we correct it.” The platonic ideal of a player suited for Reeve is Minnesota star Napheesa Collier, who has become a five-time All-Star with that same consistent, unglamorous attention to footwork and fundamentals. The Lynx drafted her at No. 6 in 2019. “I thought I should go higher,” Collier said in the spring of 2025. “I’m so thankful I didn’t. I’m so happy I ended up in Minnesota.” This is not the dream environment for everyone, but for a certain disposition and skill set, there is nothing better.

Reeve has never deviated from this standard. But she does not apply it exactly how she once did. “You’ve got to try to sense when you’re driving too hard,” she says. “I’m not always the best at that. Especially not earlier.” She has not mellowed, but she has developed a better sense of when to delegate; when to chat with a player casually instead of calling her in for a meeting; when to rephrase something rather than simply repeat it louder. Reeve has learned when she can afford to be a bit looser. Earlier in her career she might have easily clashed with the flashy, freewheeling Courtney Williams, who’s in her third season with the Lynx and her second as half of the WNBA livestreaming duo, along with Natisha Hiedeman, known as the StudBudz. Now, Reeve can embrace (or at least endure) some of those antics, because the coach knows that she can trust what Williams does in the gym and in the huddle. “The two of us in our later stages are a good fit,” Reeve says. “We would not have been good fits in the beginning of our career, for sure.”

Or in the words of Williams: “Cheryl is my dawg, for real.”

A little of this shift has come through aging, Reeve thinks, and a little has come through her experience raising her son. Mostly, it has been that she always wants to be a better coach, and she has realized adapting is a key part of that.

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“You have to approach different players in different ways to get the best out of them,” says Brunson, who was a key member of those title-winning teams before joining the coaching staff. “She tries very hard to have a connection with the players where she can figure those things out. You change, you adapt to the players, that’s what you do. But her commitment to the details in the game of basketball has not wavered.”

The box of what she accepts has gotten somewhat bigger. “I want the players to want to be here,” Reeve says. “The greatest gift you can give somebody is to allow them to be themselves.” She takes pride in the fact that she is not the same coach that she was a decade ago. There is a meaningfully different energy in her teams now.

This has brought Minnesota very close to a WNBA title in each of the last two years. Reeve, of course, derives no joy from “very close,” and she has found the experience to be excruciating.

After the Lynx fell in overtime of a winner-take-all Game 5 of the 2024 WNBA Finals, with a controversial foul call in the closing seconds of regulation, Reeve strode into her press conference and declared, “This s— was stolen from us.” It set up a revenge tour of sorts, with the Lynx as the undisputed best team in the league in 2025, finishing the regular season with the best record, best offensive rating and best defensive rating, as complete a team as any ever coached by Reeve. They breezed through the first round of the playoffs and into the semifinals against the Mercury.

And then …

“I take full responsibility for 2025,” Reeve says. “We were better than Phoenix last year, for sure, and we botched [Game 2]. I botched that game. And I’ve been around long enough to know that could change a series.”

Minnesota blew a 20-point lead, fell in overtime and went on the road with the series tied 1–1. But no one remembers Game 2. The lasting images of this series came from Game 3: Alyssa Thomas colliding with Collier’s leg as she stole the ball; no call with Collier lying out in pain; Reeve storming onto the court; Hiedeman valiantly trying and failing to hold her back; Reeve coming entirely undone, getting tossed and lobbing some choice words at the crowd on her way out. Minnesota lost by eight. Reeve turned to the Lynx’s head of PR before she walked into her press conference. “Are you ready for this?” Reeve asked. She then launched into something for which no one could have been ready.

“I want to call for a change of leadership at the league level when it comes to officiating,” Reeve said. “It’s bad for the game. The officiating crew that we had tonight, for the leadership to deem those three people semifinals-playoff worthy is f—ing malpractice.”

(Reeve clarifies that this statement was not directed at the league’s commissioner. “People thought maybe I was targeting Cathy [Engelbert], and I wasn’t. It was Monty McCutchen,” she says, meaning the NBA senior vice president and head of referee development, who also oversees refereeing in the W. “I was disappointed in Monty’s leadership.”)

She unleashed a few more f-bombs. She then got hit with the biggest individual fine ($15,000) in league history and a suspension for Game 4. And so the WNBA’s winningest playoff coach watched her team’s next postseason game alone in a hotel suite. The Lynx ended their season with an 86–81 loss in Game 4. “One of the s—tiest times in my career, for a lot of reasons,” Reeve says. But she does not exactly have major regrets.

For her, it was about the larger conversation on WNBA officiating and physicality over the last few years. Before this outburst, she had made calls around the league to get clarification on how games were being called for two seasons. Then, well, she was past making phone calls. Reeve knew that she would only get what she accepted.

“Our league lost touch from an officiating standpoint,” she says. “It’s never just that single moment. That press conference was not about just that game. … It’s a buildup, and it’s trying to do things the right way, going through the proper channels, doing what you’re supposed to do and still getting the same result over and over.”

Reeve concedes that she did a little too much when she watched her star player go down last year. Before she answered to anyone else, she had to answer to her elderly mother, Rae, who watches every game: “This one, she didn’t quite understand.” If Reeve could do Game 3 over, it would be nice if she did not have to be restrained by multiple players and staff members. Not a great look. She’ll give you that. But she would not change much else.

All of which is to say, yes, it bothers her that she has not won in nine years. Are you kidding? All of it bothers her.

The WNBA reshaped itself heading into this season. A new collective bargaining agreement ended up roughly quintupling players’ salaries. Two new expansion teams launched. More are on the way. The higher pay and improved facilities are drawing more international talent. And there is more roster movement than ever before: Players finally have legitimate choices about where to play, with a more robust free-agency system, and a new class of team owners wooing big stars. The 2026 season was fueled by unprecedented cash and set up for unprecedented competition.

In a league that changed so much, Minnesota was assumed to have stalled, if not slipped. Collier had surgery on both ankles in the offseason and was going to miss at least two months of play. The offense would be led by a rookie point guard. Although the Lynx still had Williams and Kayla McBride, they did not have any other player who averaged more than five points for them last year, all gone through free agency or the expansion draft.

The result has been a team not unlike any that Reeve has previously coached.

There have certainly been some familiar components. Reeve and the Lynx held the best record in the league for nearly the entire summer, even those early months without Collier, and they became the first team to clinch a playoff berth. They had a characteristically balanced offensive attack with five starters averaging double figures. Multiple veterans who joined the franchise in free agency suddenly found themselves enjoying career renaissances. The franchise looked perfectly at home in this new era of competition. Yet there was something different about how it all came together.

And it was mostly due to that rookie point guard. Olivia Miles does not play like anyone the WNBA has ever seen. The No. 2 pick has an old-school cool, with her Afro and goggles and her accompanying nickname, the Spectacle. She has talked about hoping to be a “retro point guard,” and in some ways, Miles feels like exactly that, a classic facilitator and table setter. Yet the rest of her game feels very much of the moment. Miles brings audacious scoring and slick handles and juuuust-this-side-of-reckless decision-making.

“It’s been exhilarating,” Reeve says. “Cathartic.”

Not every rookie works in her system. Minnesota is among the oldest teams in the league, with an average age of almost 30. Yet Miles has fit in almost seamlessly. The 23-year-old has a surprising amount in common with her coach. Both of Miles’s parents are engineers, and she has a healthy appreciation for an if-then-else statement. “She gets me,” Reeve says. They have a similar intensity of confidence, and they forged a quick, natural connection.

“It’s been special,” Miles says. “She gives it to you how it is, and she won’t sugarcoat you, but she wants you to be great. That’s all I can really ask for as a player.”

Miles’s presence has brought out something different in the team’s style of play. If Minnesota has not conventionally been a franchise that people saw as fun, well, here is a rejoinder. Which has required some adjustment from Reeve. This is a coach not known for improvisation, and she has never much tolerated statistically inadvisable shots that come from going off script. Yet with a player like Miles, on a roster so otherwise crisp and efficient, Reeve knows that she cannot get the highlights without allowing space for the occasional lowlight. Her rookie is simply too good to constrain.

“You can’t put a player like that in a box,” Reeve says. “That’s the worst thing you can do.”

She has maybe one comparison. “It’s starting to feel like Maya,” Reeve says. “Maya would just do some s—.” It has been a decade and a half since Minnesota drafted Moore, who did some s— and won a championship in her first season, with three more in those years to come. It has been a long time for Reeve. There is so much that frustrates her still. But often enough, she can watch her team and see all the details that she wants to see, maybe even a few that she did not even know she wanted, and she can be glad that she has stayed.

This article was originally published on www.si.com as Cheryl Reeve Has Already Cemented Her Legacy, But She’s Nowhere Near Finished.

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This story was originally published September 25, 2026 at 4:00 AM.