It is propaganda season in the WNBA: every team is cranking out videos from training camp, and every video makes every team look like best friends for life who are destined to win the WNBA Finals this season with five All Stars on every roster and zero injuries. This probably won’t be true for every single team, given the one championship trophy, but every team should be excited about the infinite possibilities lying ahead of them, and of the opportunity to finally be together and hoop.

Let’s talk about what the players and coaches have talked about so far.

The biggest story of the Fire’s pre-season was the hiring of a rookie coach who wrote a book on a new way to train, to practice, and to play. Alex Sarama has been working with a Constraints Led Approach (CLA) for years, focusing on creating game-like environments that inspire creative solutions and are always building towards translatable results. Typical practices in basketball, even at the highest levels, will involve many standardized and simple drills that repeat patterns that players recognize. With CLA, the Fire aren’t doin’ all that.

(Assistant Coach) Syliva Fowles - “I think I would have appreciated having something different playing 15 years in the league just because everything was so routine,” Fowles said. “Can you imagine in your 15th season that you’re still doing like layup lines and stuff like that? It becomes pretty old. But just to test the brain to do stuff that’s unordinary out of the things that we was taught to do all our life.”

Serah Williams - “We jumped right in learning,” Williams said. “I think most places you do a whole bunch of, you know, drills and all this stuff the first couple days, but we jumped right in and he started teaching us.”

On day 5, Alex revealed that the team did no 5-on-5 practicing for the first three days, but rather worked on constrained drills and demos and workouts, building up to 5-on-5 play, trying to implement smaller chunks of strategies and concepts before giving players a chance to implement them in 5-on-5.

In his very first experience leading the highest level of basketball, the 30-year-old has jumped directly into his unorthodox method of teaching systems – new systems. What is the first impression from the players who have been training and practicing in one way their whole lives now that they are being asked to do something different?

Emily Engstler - “He’s really an intelligent man. He’s really good at what he does. … Everything that he has put out for us to learn is the kind of basketball that I like to play.”

Megan Gustafson - “He’s really paying attention to little details that other coaches might not be focusing so much on. It’s a great way to learn.”

Maya Caldwell - “The terminology is new. You can tell how much he trusts it, you can tell that there’s science and math behind it. It’s fresh, it’s a new perspective.”

Maya Caldwell - “(His passion) is contagious.”

Haley Jones - “He’s crazy smart. It’s been a little bit different, but different in a good way. He shows the research. I’ve really liked it so far.”

Sug Sutton -” I love Alex, I love what he’s doing here. His philosophy … is a lot of fun.”

We have yet to see or hear anything concrete about coach Sarama’s style of play that he wants to implement with his team. There are infinite answers to this question, and every team will run a blend of many strategies. What have the players seen so far in terms of running plays, having strategic goals, and other such considerations?

Nyadiew Puoch - “I think it’s kinda similar to Australian style, all the cutting and stuff.”

Sug Sutton - “Drive and cut and shoot”

Megan Gustafson - “We’re more concept driven than x’s and o’s. We don’t have to memorize 50 different plays. We haven’t really added any plays.”

Maya Caldwell - “I feel like we’ve grabbed our coach’s concepts really well. A lot better than we thought we or than I thought we had,” Caldwell said. “Being able to see it live, it was actually kind of comforting to see that. Oh no, we’re picking this up really well. Like we’re really going to be ready for the season, but also that there’s room to grow and you can’t be mad at that.”

Reporter - “The pre-season file only has one play in it”.

Alex Sarama - “We’re going to put things in as we go. For our first pre-season game, we’re probably gonna have one play. And that’s by design. … Until we know one play and we know it inside out, … once we can do that, we will add others.”

Alex Sarama - “I don’t ever want to say it’s ‘my system’. It’s not. It’s principles, and it’s principles of play that we’re developing collectively, being intentional to design it around the strengths and weaknesses of the players. It is a different way of playing, because it’s all about them being put in places to make decisions instead of me calling stuff from the sideline.

The only concrete piece of strategy, coming from Sarama himself, is that they have a specific way they would like to defend pick-and-rolls, which is probably the most common action that an offense will run to try and create space or an advantage for the ball-handler. That will be the first thing I look for in the pre-season games, and I’m excited to show those things with film clips soon.

There is a small smattering of quotes about leadership structure within the players: who is stepping up, how many are stepping up, and what does the coaching staff want player leadership to look like?

Alex Sarama, after being asked about the formation of a Leadership Council - “Still building it. I’m deciding on the final players who are in it. Bridgit (Carleton)’s certainly going to be in that group, Carla (Leite)’s in that group already. Once we finish Eugene, we’re gonna take a look at how we can involve them in decisions we’re making as a team.”

Alex Sarama - “It’s multiple leaders as opposed to one, and that’s really the way we wanted it. It’s ‘how can we create that environment where multiple players feel like it’s a safe place for them and they can speak up’, an environment of psychological safety. It’s been multiple players a week.”

We have quotes from six days of practices, so far. That is not a ton of time, but it is enough to start forming real opinions about the group you are playing with, and where you might expect to be at the start of the season. So, how are the players feeling?

Emily Engstler - “I’m gonna be completely honest, I think we’re gonna have a lot of growing pains this season, and I think that’s going to start in our preseason games. I’m intrigued to see how good we are going to get at these things that we are working on right now.”

Emily Engstler - after the first 5-on-5 session - “We did things that we need to learn from. Getting to the second side quicker, defensive tendencies quicker.”

Nyadiew Puoch - “We’re having a lot of fun. Lots of team bonding sessions, which is good, we’re getting to know each other. We’ve only known each other for a week-and-a-half, but we all love each other. I think it’s good to know where people come from and why they play basketball, and I think the bonding off-court is helping us on the court, and making us connect really well.”

Alex Sarama, on the style of play - “It’s gonna take time, and it’s going to be messy at the beginning.”

Sheesh, what a firehose of information training camp is. I can’t imagine what it must be like for the players and staff trying to crunch all of these things into such a short amount of time. I know that we’re all excited to turn these words into action against real opponents. And folks? That happens in less than 48 hours.

I’ll see you on Wednesday for the Fire’s first ever pre-season game.

You can watch every training camp video on the Fire’s very well-used YouTube channel: