'Everybody else can go to hell': Inside Stephanie White's ruthless pursuit of a WNBA title

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  Katie BarnesSep 25, 2026, 07:10 AM ET

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  Katie Barnes is a writer/reporter for ESPN.com. Follow them on Twitter at Katie_Barnes3.

STEPHANIE WHITE KNOWS how good she has it coaching the Indiana Fever. In 25 seconds in June, Caitlin Clark shook her defender for a step-back 3, Aliyah Boston blocked a driving Angel Reese, and Kelsey Mitchell beat everyone up the court for an easy layup. A big three featuring two of the best young superstars in the WNBA in Clark and Boston and a veteran scoring machine in Mitchell. From a basketball perspective, it's hard to beat that balance of win-now with sustainability.

The Fever play in packed arenas at home and on the road. Fans fill Gainbridge Fieldhouse, to the tune of 16,426 per game. Fever No. 22 jerseys invade rival arenas. A Fever national TV game can attract more than a million viewers, something no regular-season game could sniff in the pre-Clark era.

"When the ball goes up in a game, I love it," White says. "I love the chess match. I love the intensity. I love the competition. I love putting players in positions to try to be successful."

She also knows how tough she has it.

Across 74 days of this 2026 WNBA season, White clashed with Clark, and the sharpest shouters on social media called for her head. She was bombarded by demonstrators who wanted to leverage the Fever to make political statements about transgender athletes. She was booed at home.

Social media lights up with criticism of White's perceived mistakes, dissecting her interactions with players and her postgame comments to reporters. Players are animated on the court and vocal in the world. Fans are impatient for a championship, and trolls are quick to point out flaws.

"There's an infatuation with our team, and there's an infatuation with some of our players, and there's a lot of negativity that surrounds anything that's different from what the fandom wants to see," White says. "And that is challenging as a coach to navigate."

Starting Sunday, White and the Fever embark on the playoffs, where the spotlight burns brightest and voices grow loudest. To win, White will need more than Clark 3-pointers and Boston rebounds. She'll need support in the stands and unity in the locker room. Harmony produces victory, and White needs nine more for the Fever to reach their goal. It might be the most difficult calculus in sports.

"I think the vortex of everything that we deal with, with our team and our franchise, is definitely challenging," White says. "It's hard to escape it."

WHITE IS THOUSANDS of miles away when Briann January sits in the glitziest room the Indiana Fever have to offer. The assistant coach and former Fever player squeezes her right hand into a fist. She opens her hand back up. She subconsciously closes it and shapes another fist.

January has spent 10 of her 39 years playing for or working with Stephanie White, and she has been riding sidecar with the Fever head coach throughout this whiplash-inducing season.

Sitting across from me while White helps coach the national team in Germany, January shakes her head. And closes her fist.

Relaxing against the plush gray fabric of her chair, surrounded by a golden hue of the bar behind her, she tells me her repeated hand movement isn't a nervous tic or a practice playcall. "That's a Steph thing," she says.

She tells me she is channeling White on this muggy September day. Across 3,000 miles of ocean and 625 miles of land and four regular-season games to go. The Fever are 26-14 and have the talent to win a title. But the criticism is never-ending and resolve has its limits.

Close the fist. It's a symbol for when it's time to fight.

Close this fist. It's a symbol for team unity.

Close the fist. It's a call to action.

"If you go to hit somebody with an open hand, you might make a red mark," January says. "But if you're swinging with the fists, with a closed fist together, you can do some damage. And that's ... we have to stay strong, and we're strongest when we are together, when we're connected, and that's the whole thing."

THE FEVER'S CONNECTION showed signs of crumbling early on. During a May 30 game in Portland, White laid into Clark on the bench. The star fired back, gesturing in frustration. White motioned for backup point guard Raven Johnson to take Clark's place on the bench. Clark stood up and drank from her water bottle while the timeout finished. Johnson entered the game and Indiana lost 100-84 and dropped to 4-4 to start the season.

A video of the interaction circulated on social media, driving calls for the Fever to choose between White and Clark. It was a far cry from how the previous season ended, when White was lauded for steering the Fever to Game 5 of the semifinals against the Las Vegas Aces despite missing multiple injured players, including Clark and Sophie Cunningham.

"We were an underdog," former Fever general manager Lin Dunn says of last season's playoff push. "We were just scrambling, trying to figure out a way to do this. Bandage that one, pull this one, pick up another one. Expectations were not as high. With Caitlin back and healthy, everybody healthy, expectations go up. So you have to adapt and adjust to what they are."

The Fever largely did at the start of the 2026 season. On June 11, Clark and Boston became the first teammates in league history to have a 30-point double-double in the same game. Later that month, Cunningham, a reserve guard and steadfast enforcer, drew a slew of new admirers -- and some detractors -- for defending Clark and pointing her finger at DeWanna Bonner. On July 17, Clark scored a career-high 45 points and 10 assists to record the first 40-10 game in WNBA history. All the while, Mitchell poured in points at a historic pace. Boston, Mitchell and Clark were all named All-Star starters and Indiana took a 17-10 record into the break. White was named the WNBA's Coach of the Month in July.

The serenity would soon be snapped.

In a July 21 article on ESPN.com, Cunningham shared that she supported barring transgender girls and women from girls' and women's sports.

"I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I'm like, 'I never once said that,'" she said. "I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn't have to go against biological men."

Demonstrations supporting Cunningham and counterdemonstrations followed Indiana around the country for the rest of July into August. Players and coaches were asked their opinions on transgender athletes, a hotly debated topic.

"I don't know that I would say that I'm educated enough from a scientific standpoint," White said ahead of the Fever's game in Portland on July 31. "I don't ever believe that exclusion is an answer. I just don't. I do think, when we think about various levels of sport, various governing bodies of sport and things that go into that. As I said, I'm not educated enough at the different levels. I know growing up that I played with the boys all the time."

The controversy exploded when former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White declared they were eligible for the WNBA draft on Aug. 7. Advocates for excluding transgender and intersex women pressured the WNBA to clarify its policy, but the league resisted.

"There are no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA and we strongly denounce the bad-faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others," the WNBA said in an Aug. 12 statement.

Then, on Aug. 23, Kanter Freedom sat courtside when Indiana visited Chicago. He was ejected, and later banned from the arena, following a confrontation with Sky guard Natasha Cloud. Royce White showed up to the Fever's Aug. 28 game against the Sun wearing a blond wig.

Through it all, the Fever kept playing -- and scoring. The team boasts the league's top offensive rating at 117.0. They surpassed 100 points a league-record 20 times this season.

"I think that people have these expectations of our group and our team as if we are like superhumans, man," Mitchell says. "Like we got superpowers and s---. And as a coach, they probably think that she has superpowers."

Omniscience isn't one of them.

"This has not been anything that I've experienced before at this level, right?" White says. "So, for me, it's trying to learn how I can weather the storm."

Make that storms. Another one already was brewing. And tracking even closer to home.

WHITE DEFINES HERSELF as a purist. She's a real-life Jimmy Chitwood from an even smaller Indiana town than fictional Hickory or Milan, the town "Hoosiers" was based on. As of the 2020 census, a little under 700 people live in White's hometown of West Lebanon, Indiana, a town snuggled next to the Illinois border in Warren County.

White often says a lot of words when she gets on a roll, but she doesn't speak quickly. She thinks through each sentence, often pausing with an "um," that sits at the back of her mouth. She loves to use a refrain -- like a pastor -- to hammer home a point. She has a thick Indiana accent, adding a sing-song lilt on her r's and l's. It almost sounds Southern, but it's from the Indiana countryside. The kind of accent found in the rural counties where cornfields and cows outnumber people.

Born to young parents with very little money, basketball was a refuge.

"Basketball was my lifeline," White says. "Like it was my savior."

She met Dunn in elementary school and was a regular at her camps. She practically lived in the gym. She would go shoot when she was pissed off or needed a break.

After high school, she journeyed some 35 miles beyond the West Lebanon town line to West Lafayette to play for Dunn at Purdue. In 1999, White was named the winner of the Wade Trophy and led Purdue to its first -- and still only -- national championship. After averaging 17.2 points, 5.3 rebounds and 4.6 assists over her four seasons with the Boilermakers, she was drafted in the second round by the Charlotte Sting, where she played for one season. She was traded in 2000 to the expansion Fever, who averaged 11,266 fans per game in their inaugural season. She played four seasons with the Fever and retired after the 2004 season, when the Fever's average attendance was 7,589.

Basketball, remember, is her life. After spending time on college staffs as an assistant, White took a job as an assistant coach with the Chicago Sky. Dunn and Fever president Kelly Krauskopf intervened in 2011 and brought White to Indiana. Even as a young assistant, she craved having a ball in her hands and worked out her frustrations by pounding it on the hardwood or chasing the high of a swish. When Dunn retired, White took the head job in 2015 and led Indiana all the way to the finals after starting the season 1-4. Following the 2016 season, White left for Vanderbilt. She was fired in 2021 after the Commodores opted out of the season due to injuries, illness and scheduling difficulties due to COVID-19.

"Sport and life is a series of failures, right?" White says. "It's what you do with those failures."

In 2023, seven years after she'd last coached in the pros, White returned to the WNBA to coach the Connecticut Sun. Former MVP Jonquel Jones had been traded to the Liberty. Still, White led the Sun to the semifinals in her first season. She did it again in her second.

"This game is evolving, all the time, and she's a consistent learner," January says. "She never thinks she knows it all, and I think that's why she's been successful."

Dunn had returned to the Fever in 2022. Krauskopf returned from working across the street with the Pacers in 2024. With Dunn and Krauskopf back with the Fever, White came home ahead of the 2025 season.

She had observed the Fever spotlight from afar in Connecticut. At the onset of Clark-mania, the Fever averaged more than 17,000 fans in 2024 and regularly drew a million viewers for televised games. White had seen for herself the venomous and racialized response to the Sun's DiJonai Carrington poking Clark in the eye in a postseason game in 2024.

White harbored some trepidation about what coaching in Indiana would be like in this new reality. The fame. The fans. The impact on her partner and sons.

"There's a difference in being critical and in being a jerk," White says. "So that's more in reference to protecting my family and protecting my peace."

Did she ever stand a chance?

A DAY AFTER Kanter Freedom announced his draft eligibility, Cunningham saw nothing but blue Sky paint ahead on her way to a breakaway layup in Chicago. But Carrington chased her down and swatted her left arm across Cunningham's face and neck. Cunningham fell hard to the floor before confronting Carrington.

The referees assessed a flagrant 2 foul on the play and ejected Carrington, who had played two seasons under White at Connecticut.

"One of the things about Nai is that she's going to play her butt off, man," White said after the game. "She's going to compete. Nobody is going to go walking in for a layup. I don't oppose the hard foul but I also don't think she intentionally went for the neck."

The perceived pro-Carrington comment infuriated Fever fans. Indiana's Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith posted on X calling for White's firing. "The Indiana Fever need to let Stephanie White go. No solid coach would ever take the side of the opposing team's player who committed a flagrant foul on one of your own players. Terrible coaching! The Fever need to defend their players."

White long ago deleted social media from her phone, intentionally creating a barrier between fans and critics and her ear. But this storm was powerful and her barriers were not impenetrable.

"I don't typically get caught up in it, but I was hurt with the implications of me not caring about my players," White says.

She decided she needed to say something on the drive to Gainbridge on Aug. 11. It had been three days of unending criticism and indictments of her character.

White later said that she had not seen the clip in full. But she prides herself on her relationships with players, past and present. As well as her integrity. "I just felt compelled because you don't know me," White says. "And you don't get to say that."

White spoke with Cunningham after she saw the full clip and the intensity of the foul. White told her that she'd never intentionally have another player's back, former or not, over her own team.

"That was between me and DiJonai, and people try to make things weird between me and Steph," Cunningham tells me. "I know that if I ever needed anything, that she's going to show up 100% and give me love and give me whatever I need."

Before the Fever took on the Liberty that Aug. 11 night, White, wearing a red leather jacket and speaking through her own emotion, gave a fiery statement condemning the rhetoric around her team and the league.

"This is more for an online community trying to create narratives that simply don't exist, trying to create a fabrication or distortion of who I am and what I'm about," she said. "Our players' success, our players' health and wellness, and our players' safety is always a top priority for me."

She ended by saying, "Love will win. Grace will win. Humility will win. And kindness will win. I stand by them, I will always stand by them. Everybody else can go to hell."

She grabbed the paper with the statement and stormed off the dais.

She gets emotional talking about it with me now.

"You don't get to create a narrative about who I am," White says. "I was not going to personally be hijacked like our league is being hijacked."

An hour after her speech, the raucous cheers for the Fever players dissipated when White's name echoed through the speakers. The cheers were replaced by a chorus of boos.

White's players heard it.

"It was just weird for all of us to be honest," Cunningham says. "Because at the end of the day, you got to show respect. That's our head coach, and we're proud to play for her."

White's staff heard it.

"It pissed me off, if I'm gonna be completely honest," January says. "it just doesn't make sense to me, you know. And it's just very disrespectful."

Clark walked over to White and embraced her. She told her coach that she loved her, that the team had this one. The Fever defeated the Liberty 106-92. After the game, sitting at the dais for her postgame news conference, Clark didn't mince words.

"I hated that our fans booed her before the game," Clark said. "It made me a little sick to be honest."

White heard the boos too. How could she not? She felt them too.

She once believed that the noise around the Fever, the criticism, the obsession, the politics, that it all existed outside of Gainbridge. It was online. It was on television, but White could change the channel. Sometimes it was in news conferences, but the media left eventually. But that day, the noise infiltrated her home, her sanctuary, and it was directed at her.

"It hurt," White says to me now. "But at the same time, I think it was a moment of realization that this is not what it used to be.

"I mean it. Everybody else can go to hell."

HER 49-YEAR-OLD body no longer allows her to take refuge in the gym like she once did. Now White journals and meditates. Her pen has been getting a workout this season.

She also occasionally makes time for "Ted Lasso." She dressed as the titular character for Halloween one year. It's easy to see why she loves the show and Ted. White and Lasso share an earnestness and naivety (complimentary). White strives every day to get the most out of her players and work toward another championship for the Fever. Her drive isn't much more complicated than that. It's everything else that comes with the job that creates the complication.

And the one thing that sticks in her craw more than anything else are the assumptions.

There's a scene in the first season of "Ted Lasso" where Lasso was challenged to a game of darts. His challenger assumed that Lasso would be bad. But Lasso had grown up playing darts with his late father. Lasso won the match and the bet.

"Often when you don't know people, you assume things," White says. "Everyone is dealing with life experiences that we know nothing about. Sometimes we'll find out. Sometimes we won't."

White gets asked a lot if she still finds joy in the game. There's plenty to not love about what's happening around the WNBA right now, she says.

"The racism, the homophobia, the sexism, like all that stuff," White says. "That's just ridiculous. I often say it's not that hard to not be a jerk, but maybe it is. ... Maybe it's hard to be nice."

Against the Lynx on Sept. 22, White was trying to do just that. Clark cut to the basket late in the second quarter at Gainbridge Fieldhouse and caught a pass from Boston in stride. Nia Brodie fouled Clark as she went up for the reverse, and Clark landed on her butt, legs outstretched facing the Fever bench. White rushed from the sideline holding out her arms and helped her superstar guard off the hardwood. The Fever were up by 27. The moment looked pleasant and encouraging and innocuous. But not to everyone. As the clip circulated on X, White was accused of being "performative" and trying to save her job.

"I love my players," White says. "They know that. Every player that I've ever had knows that."

So-called lip readers and body-language experts have been doing this all season to White, to January too. Really to anyone within a country mile of Clark.

January tells me she's had a taste of what White goes through. Clips of January coaching Clark have popped up on social media too, roiling fans who think January has it out for the star Fever guard.

"I'm very passionate about this game. I'm passionate about this team," says January, who spent nine of her 14 WNBA seasons playing for Indiana. "At the end of the day, we know [Clark] can be great, and we're not going to let her off the hook. After those things, C and I are good. If we're good, I don't understand why everybody's not good. But that's something they can carry, and we're going to continue on to try and be the best team we can."

It's the part of the job White loves most. And she still gets that warmth of joy when the ref tosses the ball in the air and sneakers squeak against the hardwood and whistles pierce through the cacophony of the arena.

"When it's about basketball, and you're in there, and you're with these women, and you know they're working their butts off, it's what I love," White says. "When I stop loving that, I think that's the moment to be done."

WHITE ISN'T SURE when she started saying "close the fist," but she's been saying it for a long time.

The fist is about team over individual. "Each of the fingers is part of our ego," she says. "None of us get to where we are without one."

It's about intention. "You can't close your fingers without intentionally doing it," she says of closing a fist. "What happens when you're not focused on it? It's open."

Her smirk is practically audible through the phone.

"Five fingers can do a lot of things," she says. "But a fist packs a punch."

Like January, she makes a fist as she's talking about it. At least that's what she says.

This Indiana Fever season has been absurd and amazing. It's been joyous and heartbreaking. White still feels the sting. From the fouls and the fans and the fame.

And from the finish. The Fever scored their fewest points of the season in an 86-66 loss to the top-seeded Lynx on Thursday night in their final regular-season game. Boston and reserve guard Ty Harris left the game with injuries. Clark went 1-for-12 from the field and 0-for-7 on 3s. She finished with a career-low two points.

"We flush this one," White told reporters after the game. "We learn from it. We grow from it."

Because now it's playoff time. The sixth-seeded Fever open their bid for the franchise's first title since 2012 on Sunday against the defending champion Aces. White knows the time is now for coaches and players to silence the distractions and to take matters into their own hands.

"You don't win without connection," she says. "You don't win without the fist."