Seimone Augustus is in her first season as a college basketball coach at her alma mater, LSU. The soft-spoken superstar is the latest WNBA great to pivot to coaching.
GREENVILLE, S.C. — Bob Starkey always thought that Seimone Augustus would be a coach one day.
After she finished her storied playing career at LSU — leaving the program as a two-time National Player of the Year, a four-time All-American, and having guided the Tigers to three consecutive Final Fours — she embarked on a long career as a professional, spending the first 14 seasons of her 15-year Hall of Fame career with the Minnesota Lynx. And when the WNBA offseason rolled around, Augustus, like many of her peers, would go play overseas in places like Turkey and Russia.
Each year before she would hop on a plane out of Minneapolis to go play on foreign soil, she could always count on getting a package from Starkey, the longtime LSU assistant who once recruited the product of Baton Rouge’s Capitol High School hard.
Inside the box were books. Specifically, books about basketball, leadership and coaching.
“You got to find something to do overseas,” Starkey said with a chuckle, reminiscing about those days while standing outside LSU’s locker room at the SEC Tournament at Bon Secours Wellness Arena in Greenville, South Carolina.
Starkey wasn’t just providing his former player with a way to pass the time while she took long plane rides. He was attempting to plant a seed, and then provide it with all the things it needed to grow.
“Always thought she could be a coach because she has a great mind for the game. If you watched her play, obviously she had a great skillset, but she had the ability to think the game,” Starkey told SB Nation. “So, I just always thought that she would be around the game in some sort of way and I thought coaching would be it.”
Fast forward nearly two decades after her playing days at LSU ended and Augustus is back on the bench for the Tigers again, this time alongside Starkey as an assistant coach under Kim Mulkey. Augustus joined the staff last offseason and, just like she did when she was a player, has already made a big impact on the Tigers.
Take it from Aneesah Morrow, an All-American this season who leads the nation in rebounding and is likely to be a first-round pick in the upcoming WNBA Draft.
“What I’ve learned from coach is just be yourself. She teaches you to feel, and that’s a good thing,” Morrow told SB Nation. “With the four position, you’re unique. A lot of fours are very unique. You can play with your back to the basket and you’re basically a mismatch nightmare — that’s what she always enforces. She encourages me to take my shots.”
Unlike her boss, Mulkey, Augustus is not a coach who gets overly animated on the sideline. She doesn’t do a lot of screaming and shouting. Often, she sits with a clipboard in her lap and watches the game unfold in front of her, quietly taking notes.
Then, when the moment strikes during a break in play, she’ll pull a player aside and deliver messages that break through loud and clear. This seems to be a superpower of Augustus as a coach, the ability to get a message through to a player in an intimate setting. She’s relatable to them, because it wasn’t that long ago that she was one of them.
“Seimone is a quiet leader,” Mulkey said recently ahead of LSU’s first-round NCAA Tournament game. “I think her approach is, she’s going to do a lot of things one-on-one with the players. She doesn’t project loud, but I can tell you she has been really, really loud in things that she has said to them, whether it’s in a timeout or whether it is in the locker room or the film room. I have watched her say things, and I’m thinking — you needed to. That’s good to see.”
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Augustus never seeks to be the center of attention or be the loudest voice. If a dozen people were asked to describe her, more than half of them would probably use the word “quiet,” as Mulkey did. They might also use the term “basketball savant,” because she very much is. Augustus doesn’t aim to command rooms, even though her resume would allow her to do so if she wanted.
Even after winning three Olympic gold medals and spending 15 seasons in the WNBA, where she won four championships and would eventually be named one of the league’s 20 greatest players of all time, Augustus is still a bit shy and humble. When a reporter approached her in LSU’s locker room after the Tigers’ SEC Tournament quarterfinal win over Florida, she said with a laugh, “What do you want to talk to me for?”
Augustus is part of a growing pipeline of WNBA players to pursue coaching gigs in college. Kara Lawson is the head coach at Duke. Niele Ivey now leads Notre Dame. Dawn Staley, of course, has guided South Carolina to three national championships. Brooke Wyckoff is in charge at Florida State. Coquese Washington coaches at Rutgers.
There are several more, spread throughout the ranks of the sport.
“As we see great coaches like Coach Mulkey and (Geno) Auriemma start to transition out of basketball, what better way than to fill those spaces with players that have been there, done that, seen things, been around the world, and can basically keep the game going, and grow the game as much as we can,” Augustus told SB Nation.
One day in the not-too-far distant future, Starkey sees Augustus becoming a head coach too.
“100 percent. And a successful one too,” Starkey says. “She’s very knowledgeable and she knows how to connect with kids. And that’s a big thing right now and not as easy as it used to be. Because of her resume, people tend to listen to her more than they might the old man here.”
One person who did — and still does — listen to that old man is Augustus. When she first got into the WNBA, being a coach after her playing days were over wasn’t something that was on her radar.
And then the books from Starkey started showing up in Minneapolis. She tried pleading with him that she didn’t need them, to which Starkey replied, “Just in case.” She remembers reading ones about former LSU and Alabama football coach Nick Saban, and others about John Glenn — the former U.S. Senator and astronaut who was the first American to orbit the Earth.
Starkey wasn’t the only one who thought Augustus could be a coach. During the end of her run with the Lynx, she remembers Minnesota coach Cheryl Reeve asking her, “Have you ever thought about coaching?”
“I think Bob always kind of had that inkling that I was a player that could possibly coach one day. When you’re playing, you’re not thinking about that. You’re just trying to finish your career,” Augustus said. “Then afterwards you’re like, ‘Let me try it.’”
Augustus got her first crack at coaching in the WNBA, working for two seasons with the Los Angeles Sparks and then spent some time coaching in Athletes Unlimited, the short-season U.S.-based women’s basketball league that plays in the winter.
Pretty quickly, Augustus got hooked on coaching. A Sparks practice in 2021 is the day that she refers to as “the day I fell in love with it.” The moment came when she pointed something out about the defense to a player, Nia Coffey, then instructed her how to attack it. Augustus taught her how to read the defense and then when to make her cut to her position. Coffey followed Augustus’ instructions perfectly and wound up wide open. The problem was, the way Augustus tells it, she forgot to tell the point guard to look for Coffey.
“We didn’t get the bucket, but she was open,” Augustus says now with a laugh. “But it was that feeling, like, something just clicked inside.”
Photo by Kristen Young/University Images via Getty Images
Mulkey, who spent most of her childhood in Louisiana like Augustus, took the reins at LSU in 2021 after spending 20 seasons at Baylor where she won three national championships. She aimed to lead the Tigers to one too and as she was assembling her initial staff, she called Augustus, who was then about to begin her first season on the bench with the Sparks.
But Augustus wasn’t ready to return to Baton Rouge and didn’t feel like the timing was right for her to return to college basketball. Put more simply, Augustus knew Mulkey had lofty ambitions and wanted to win big right away, and she wasn’t sure she was equipped to be part of that.
“I was still trying to figure out if coaching was something that I wanted to do. And I knew when she got to Baton Rouge, expectations were high, so she needed a staff that was going to be ready to go,” Augustus says. “So, I respectfully declined.”
After a nine-season stint at Texas A&M and one year at Auburn, Starkey returned to LSU and joined Mulkey’s staff in 2022. The next spring, they were celebrating after winning the national championship in Dallas, Texas, as a squad powered by Angel Reese defeated Caitlin Clark’s Iowa in one of the sport’s most memorable matchups.
But still, Mulkey’s desire to have Augustus on her staff never wavered. Last spring, she called her again. And this time, Augustus was looking for a job.
Mulkey simply asked her, “What are you looking for?” Augustus explained she just wanted experience, the chance to learn strategies and techniques. Mulkey replied: “Well, the best experience is to actually get in and do it. You’re going to be here with Bob. You can learn from him.”
And so, Augustus returned to Baton Rouge and was reunited with Starkey.
This season, she’s often coached in the arena where a statue of her is stationed just outside of it. Of the former WNBA players breaking into coaching now, not many can say that.
“To be honest, I wasn’t really looking to get into college (coaching). Things just worked out. Everything just fell into place that I could come home and be a part of this program,” Augustus said. “I see these young ladies and I see myself in them. All of them are aspiring to get to the next level, and every day they’re just picking my brain. I can see myself really pouring into them.”
For LSU star guard Flau’Jae Johnson, having Augustus on the bench has been a luxury. She often asks her for advice about what life is like pros, where Johnson hopes to be playing one day.
And she’d like Augustus to teach her some of her signature moves too.
“She got one of the nastiest crossovers over ever, so I’ve been trying to figure that out,” Johnson said. “She’s great. And she’s like really consistent as a person.”
When Mulkey drilled down more into what Augustus wanted to get out of her time on her staff, Augustus was honest and self-aware. She told Mulkey she needed help in finding her voice as a coach.
“I don’t really talk loud. I really don’t talk much at all,” Augustus said. “But she was like, ‘Find yourself, be yourself.’ She basically evolved into the brand that she is with the clothes and the demeanor and the personality. So, she’s definitely been helping me in that department.”
Augustus added that, when it comes to x’s and o’s, Starkey has been her mentor. Throughout the season, he’s seen growth from her in all areas, but particularly in finding that voice and finding a coaching style that works best for her.
“I would hear her have one-on-one conversations with players and it’s just fantastic information she’s giving them,” Starkey says. “So, we’ve tried to encourage her in practice and in team meetings to step up and speak her mind, because we really value what she has to say. And we’ve seen that growth. She’s more confident in expressing herself.”
All season long, Augustus says she’s been looking over Starkey’s shoulder during film review and game-planning. In basketball and in herself, she’s beginning to see what he sees.
When asked if she thinks she’ll be a head coach one day, Augustus echoed Starkey’s confidence, simply saying: “Hell yeah. One day.”
