This all looks familiar, doesn’t it? A rookie coach with no previous head coaching experience, one who had been a great high school and college player in Indiana, comes in and brightens the mood, utilizes the bench, hires experienced and capable assistant coaches, and relies on veteran leadership in the locker room.

What Stephanie White is doing with the Fever this season seems like a not-so-instant replay of what Larry Bird did with the Pacers 18 years ago, transforming a losing team to playoff hopeful. The formula is proven as long as the talent is sufficient, yet many coaches stray from it. They’re too ego-driven to pick the brains of other coaches, too insecure to bring in experienced assistants who might be capable of replacing them as the head coach, and lack the personal qualities to communicate effectively with the players, management and media.

PHOTO GALLERY: First-Year Head Coach Stephanie White >>

White has done all that, which is why the Fever are 17-11 heading into Sunday’s game at Tulsa after overcoming a 3-6 start. The micro mood is one of frustration after dropping consecutive home games to losing teams, Los Angeles and Atlanta, but the macro picture is brighter. The Fever are coming off consecutive 16-18 seasons, so to reverse that trend with a rookie head coach, an aging icon in Tamika Catchings and an otherwise young roster that has lost 37 games to injury qualifies as a successful transition and a promising start to White’s coaching career.

She’s a legitimate Coach of the Year candidate, another similarity to Bird, who won the NBA’s award in his first season with the Pacers in 1998. If White gets to 19 wins – a likelihood with six games left in the regular season – she’ll tie for third in WNBA history for victories for a rookie head coach. Unlike the other candidates for the honor, she has no legitimate league MVP candidate. And, she’s won victory away from setting a Fever record for wins by a rookie head coach.

For now, what counts is the sudden turnaround, and how she’s managed it.

Bird, remember, took over a team that had finished four games below .500 in 1996-97 and won 56 games and reached the conference finals. He did it by injecting optimism into the collective mindset, digging deeper into the bench and bringing in veteran coaches Dick Harter and Rick Carlisle for assistance. White has achieved her about-face with help from assistants Gail Goestenkors, who was a nationally prominent head coach at Duke for 15 years, and Gary Kloppenburg, formerly the head coach of the WNBA’s Tulsa franchise and an NBA assistant with Charlotte and Toronto.

She’s also made liberal use of her bench. Catchings leads the Fever scoring with a 13.3 average. From the department of arcane (but meaningful) statistics comes this: No WNBA playoff team has ever averaged 75 or more points per game, as the Fever do, with a leading scorer with an average that low. In other words, they have balance and depth, something for which the coach gets at least partial credit.

Eleven Fever players have started games this season, and all 12 average at least 10 minutes per game.

“You never know whose night it’s going to be and that’s pretty cool,” Catchings said following Friday’s loss. “Just being able to share the ball, which we didn’t do tonight, makes it fun.”

Other indications of coaching include the fact the Fever lead the WNBA in three-point percentage while also leading in three-point defense, and also lead in forced turnovers. An improved defense, in fact, has been the driving force behind the improvement from a 3-6 start while everyone was getting acquainted.

A truly democratic society, of course, requires that everyone be treated the same. That means Catchings, one of the all-time greats of women’s basketball, gets no privileges. She was yanked from the first game after the all-star break, at Connecticut, for missing a defensive rotation. That could be regarded as an unseemly thing to do to an icon, but in White’s coaching world there are no one-percent elitists.

“Of course I got mad about it, but after the fact I regrouped and came back and finished the game strong,” Catchings said, recalling the overtime victory in which she finished with 15 points, eight rebounds and five steals.
“She expects the same thing from every single person, from me to the 12th man on the bench. That says a lot, when you’re taking me out of the game when I’ve messed up and the rest of the team can see it. That makes the trust level that much higher.”

White smiles at the memory, too.

“In order to gain trust and respect from everybody, you have to be the same,” she said. “And I think Tamika wants to be challenged, wants to be coached, and held to the same standard.”

White’s relationship with Catchings is an intriguing and crucial dynamic for the Fever. White (38) is just two years older, and they were teammates for two seasons with the Fever, in 2003 and ’04. Catchings was the team’s leading scorer and best player while White was a part-time starter averaging 6.9 and 4.1 points. Memories of those days could compromise White’s coaching authority, but there’s no evidence of that. Catchings remembers White as a heady coach-on-the-floor point guard and appreciates having a coach who played professionally. She also enjoys the absence of the generation gap she sometimes feels with teammates, who are as much as 13 years younger.

“I relate to her more than I relate to the team,” Catchings said.

While White has to ignore Catchings’ considerable career accomplishments on occasion, she does have to keep track of mileage. Catchings – who has announced plans to retire after next season – had played 15,305 minutes in the WNBA as of Saturday, more than 10 ½ days of nonstop basketball. She’s at the stage where she feels good some nights and not so much on others, and the aches and pains are reflected by her statistics. She’s had five games of 20 or more points, including a splendid performance on Friday when she contributed 24 points, seven rebounds, three assists, three steals and one turnover in 28 ½ minutes. But she’s also had games of 0, 2,4 and 5 points.

White, therefore, has to walk the tightrope of keeping her best player on the floor often enough to give her team a chance to make the playoffs while keeping her fresh enough to have something left in playoff games. That eases the sting of taking her out when things aren’t going well.

“My communication with her is that it’s OK, because you’re not 10 years younger,” White said. “You’re at a different part of your career. You’re going to have lulls. We have to find ways to conserve her energy.”

White shows unusual poise and confidence for a rookie head coach, as Bird did. That comes from her pedigree as an All-American in high school (Seeger) and college (Purdue), as well as her experience as a stripes-earning assistant on the college staffs at Ball State, Kansas State and Toledo and the WNBA staffs in Chicago and the Fever. In that regard she’s most unlike Bird, who stepped into coaching with zero experience on the bench.

White’s experience doesn’t require her to delegate to her assistants as much as Bird did, but she still seeks the opinion of other coaches. Most prominently, she spent nearly a week with Brad Stevens in Boston’s training camp last year, she talks regularly with the Pacers’ staff, particularly head coach Frank Vogel and assistant Dan Burke, and she’s made several trips to South Bend to learn from Muffet McGraw and her staff.

That partially explains White’s calm sideline demeanor. It’s her nature, but it’s also the impression left by coaches such as Vogel and Stevens, who maintain control without histrionics. Her cool was on obvious display late in Friday’s loss when consecutive passing errors led to Atlanta layups that dropped the Fever from a one-point lead to a three-point deficit with 3 ½ minutes left. White watched them unfold silently from the sideline, showing no reaction other than to call a timeout.

How does a rookie coach learn patience and understanding so quickly?

“Having kids has certainly helped that,” she said, while her nearly four-year-old son Landon sat nearby eating popcorn. (She has three sons, Landon by birth and twins by adoption with her partner Michelle.)

“But it also comes from being a player. I felt I was a calm player. I was intense and raised my voice at certain moments, but I didn’t get too crazy. Part of that is my personality and part is understanding your team.

“Players see that. The last thing you want to see when you know you’ve screwed up is your coach throwing her hands up in the air, because on top of their own disappointment they’re disappointed for disappointing you. I don’t want to be that person.”

White’s skull sessions with other coaches go well beyond demeanor, though. She gets into the nuances and niches of Xing and Oing, such as the angle a ballhandler should take when driving into the lane, defending the pick and roll. And she’s been around long enough to give as well as she takes.

“She loves talking and exchanging ideas,” said Burke, an 18-season Pacers assistant. “The times I’ve been with her, she’s asking me questions and I’ve asked her questions. ‘How do you do this, why do you do that?’ She’s very inquisitive. I enjoy talking basketball with her. I learn from her as well.

“She’s a student of the game. A basketball junkie. A lifer.”

While White can easily talk directly with the Pacers coaches, she converses with Stevens with an occasional text message, follow-ups to her observations during the Celtics’ training camp last season.

“A lot of subtleties,” she said. “I love the way he communicates. He and Frank communicate in a certain way. They get the most out of their players. I listen to the verbiage they’re using, the tones they’re using, how they’re responding to certain situations – in practice more than games, because practice is where your team grows. What positions are they putting their players in to be successful, how are they adjusting their systems to the players they have, and how are they handling rotations and things that are happening within the game?

“I try to absorb all those subtleties rather than just what plays they’re running, what defense they’re in, how they’re playing the pick and roll.”

White’s television work, which she plans to continue during the Fever off-seasons, enables her fact-finding missions. Her work as a studio analyst for Pacers games gives her all the more reason to attend practices, where she can observe as often as she likes. Her work with the Big Ten network puts her in touch with more coaches, and exposes her to more games.

She worked the sideline for a Purdue-Michigan men’s game a few years ago, and was impressed with the plays both teams executed in the final few minutes. So she obtained a DVD of the game and studied it.

“I feel it makes me a better coach, just like being a coach makes me better at TV,” she said.

The Fever have yet to wrap up a playoff spot, but the magic number for an 11th straight appearance is down to two. It’s difficult to predict beyond that. Only two other WNBA teams, New York and Minnesota, have more wins (19), but three other teams have 16 or 17. The Fever’s postseason fate will hinge on health – particularly that of Catchings, but also the likes of point guard Briann January, who sat out the second half of Friday’s game and will miss Sunday’s game at Tulsa – and the normal issues of fate and circumstance that guide teams lacking dominate talent.

Less than one season in, however, the coaching part of the equation appears to be covered.