As Nicki Collen followed her husband from job to job, she sometimes worried that people doubted her coaching skills. Then last year she led the Atlanta Dream to the playoffs.
In July of 2018, Nicki Collen was in the seventh week of her first season as a head basketball coach — at any level. And her team, the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream, was not off to a good start.
All this might have been enough to derail another rookie head coach. But Nicki Collen knows how to be patient. She’s had a lot of practice at it. The family home in Wisconsin wasn’t near any tennis courts. But it did have a concrete driveway with a steel-pole hoop."I have one of those fathers that, you know, you don’t do anything without a plan," Nicki says."And so very quickly, it became dribbling around cones so we could develop the right form and do things the right way. And I kind of learned the game very fundamentally.
After college, Nicki played one year in Greece. But she knew she’d never make it to the WNBA as a player. So she moved back in with her parents and started interviewing with companies where she could use her degree in mechanical engineering. "Initially it was like, ‘I’m not really sure I’m interested. I’m ready to move on,’"Tom remembers Nicki saying."I said, ‘But Nicki, I know you love basketball. Just do me this one favor. Just jump on the plane and come out here and visit this place. And I know you'll fall in love with it.’"Tom was the head women’s basketball coach at Colorado State University. Nicki signed on as his assistant."She was terrific," Tom says.
"You know, gosh, she — I moved her when she was eight months pregnant, and so the timing really wasn’t best for her to come back on the floor," Tom says."But I knew in the back of my mind that for me, this was my last hurrah. I knew Arkansas was my last job. So when I spoke to the AD, I made it clear that I wasn’t going to make this transition — I wasn’t going to take this job — if, at some point in time, that I couldn’t move her back onto my staff."The university agreed.
"And I remember just kind of going, ‘OK, thanks for the help.’ And turned around and made an adjustment, switched to zone — we had a game-winning shot. It came down to the last play." "I still didn't know what the perception was, though, nationally," she says."You know, people that didn’t know me — people that didn’t see how hard I worked — what were they thinking from the outside?"Despite the success he and Nicki were having at Arkansas, Tom was asked to resign.
"It was a unique opportunity to build a relationship with my own two feet and to bring ideas to the table that were very much my own," Nicki says."I think my husband is a very, very good coach, but I had different ideas about how I would do things.""He's definitely turned into 'Mr. Mom' and knows the schedule and runs the calendar," Nicki says."He's kind of learned to manage a totally different world.
After just two years in Connecticut, Nicki found herself talking to a friend about making the move from assistant to head coach. But Nicki and Tom decided to move the whole family to a suburb of Atlanta so everyone could be there to support Nicki in her new role. "They saw me all those years — they saw me as the breadwinner and the ‘Dad,’ which is the typical description of a lot of families," Tom says."So I think it gives our children a chance to see her through a completely different lens. They always knew that they loved her and that she was a good mother. But now they’re seeing her as this successful coach, as this businesswoman, as this leader and mentor.
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