Note from the author: Happy November, friends and readers. I hope you enjoyed your time since my last post, a.k.a. the entire playoffs, championship, and initial off-season. My personal sports season is over, and I hope to be more available to write and report here. But, as always, we can only do the best that we can each day. Cheers to you and I having a fruitful and thoughtful winter.
The Portland W team, and its general manager Vanja Černivec, have made two important hires: a Vice President and a Head Coach.
Let’s start with the Vice President, which is less interesting role in the franchise to the everyday fan, and a less interesting selection of an individual. Ashley Battle will be the new Vice President, Basketball Operations, Strategy and Innovation, which is a role that will have her “oversee basketball operations, including roster construction and talent identification, while implementing innovative strategies across player performance and analytics. She will report directly to General Manager Vanja Černivec, working closely to execute the Fire’s competitive and innovative vision as the franchise prepares for its return to court in 2026.”1
Unfortunately, the Fire have yet to have a press conference introducing Battle, so we don’t know much yet about the specifics of her role, but this interview with Portland’s local FOX affiliate was an informative listen:
That leads us directly into the first move the Fire have made that involves what the on-court product will look and feel like: the hiring of Alex Sarama as head coach. Sarama has a ton of basketball coaching experience at various levels in various countries. He has written a book about his vision of basketball coaching, and his vision has lead to a string of opportunities in the U.S., culminating in an important role with the Cleveland Cavaliers of the NBA, where Alex was singled-out as a visionary and very explicitly hired for his previous work, as opposed to Sarama applying for a role.
A concern I have heard voiced, and have felt myself, is that it feels tiresome and disappointing that another top leadership position in a women’s league has gone to a man, and that in a predominantly Black league, a white coach has been hired. Pair that with Sarama’s lack of direct experience with his role, and you’ve got a cocktail for valid concern.
I was pleased to hear, in the year of the death of journalism 2025, that reporter Demi Lawrence2 of Portland Business Journal led the questionnaire segment of Alex Sarama’s introductory press conference by asking Vanja about this very concern. Lawrence hit the nail on the head, asking Cernivec why she thought that hiring Sarama would show Portland that the Fire are dedicated to women and women’s sports. Cernivec said that of all the candidates of their “wide and varied search”, Sarama was the person who showed the values and skills that Fire leadership were looking for the best. It is apparently as simple as that.
What Sarama doesn’t have is experience working with a women’s team and experience leading a professional team on the court, both of which are important boxes I personally would have preferred to be checked.
Despite that lack of experience, Sarama, paired with Cernivec, are teaming up to create a very clear vision of a top-to-bottom basketball operation that is focused on innovation, player development, and system-wide contribution. Cernivec, in the Fire’s introductory press conference for their new head coach, talked about the backing that they have from RAJ Sports – the ownership group of the team (and of the Portland Thorns) – for taking a development-focused approach, and the messaging from the (small) team that is in place for the Fire right now is locked in.
For all of the positive, big idea responses we’ve heard to questions so far, I am left feeling loosely confident in the ideas being put in place, but I also have a concern that the new Head Coach sounds more like a President of Basketball Operations than a person who will lead the team during competitive games.
I reached out to my friend and coaching style consultant Cara Meyer, founder of Conscious Teams, to ask her about the hiring of Alex Sarama, his coaching ideas, and what she thinks about the Fire making this kind of hire at this time in their existence and in the league’s success.
The Fire are going to be a team of players that have probably never played together before, playing for a coach that has never led this high level of a team before, in a city that none of them have played in before, etc.
Do you think the methodology that coach Alex Sarama has discussed so far is a good fit for this kind of situation?
Obviously only time will tell, and it’s a lot of work to build a full program from the ground up. You need not only a good knowledge and skillset match, but also a personality match for that type of situation. But as I’m learning about his evidence-based approaches, the research he’s done to build his methodology, and his focus on self-organization, it looks like his approach is about the best fit for a high ambiguity situation as you could ask for.
The concept of self-organization is the idea that people inherently organize themselves, and it’s based in biology. You don’t have to tell your cells to take on certain tasks—they just do so according to their inherent qualities, skills, and environment. They’re adaptive. People are the same way. Put us in a room together and we will do something. Some people will start talking to others they perceive commonalities with, or someone they’re curious about. Some will sit alone and do something else.
So now you’re probably wondering that this actually has to do with basketball and basketball organizations. If the organizational development theory behind the approach is founded on self-organization, it steps away from the notion that we must build organizations like machines filled with isolated departments and hierarchical org charts. Instead, it allows for flexibility to change (which is at an all-time high in every industry right now) and offers a completely fresh take on how to build a new program.
This is exciting because it’s exactly what we’re hearing calls for from other women’s sports leaders like Michelle Kang and Emma Hayes: a desire to build something new for women’s sports, not based on the model of men’s sports, but creative and player-centric.
Let’s talk about a couple of key words that Sarama has mentioned so far in interviews:
As far as you know, what is a Constraints-Led Approach (CLA), and what could that look like for basketball?
The Constraints-Led Approach is supported by Ecological Dynamics and seeks to create a practice environment that allows athletes to exercise the process of adapting to continually changing variables in their environment. This goes directly against the conventional approach that focuses on muscle memory and has players repeat the same motion over and over.
A tangible example of this in another sport: US Soccer’s coach training actually teaches coaches to emphasize scrimmages and playing soccer over drills. They’ve found that players improve faster and have more fun when they’re simply playing the game. You can adjust field size, numbers of players per side, and other variables, but players should spend the great majority of practice in game-like scenarios.
Constraints are variables that shape movement and self-organization. They’re ever-present, continually interacting, and always creating unique situations. Especially in a game as complex as basketball, no two plays are ever the same, so it doesn’t really make sense for players to get used to practicing a scenario that’s exactly the same. As Samara says, you’re then teaching athletes to be good at practice, but that doesn’t make them good in a real game.
The WNBA is the most exciting, competitive, and successful that it has likely ever been, and it is growing bigger every year. What do you think about the Fire attempting to introduce a new way of coaching not just into the WNBA, but into the larger landscape of basketball overall?
Trying new approaches based on the latest research instead of coaching by tradition is well overdue. If Samara and the Portland Fire can show success in this new way of coaching, it could be revolutionary for basketball and other sports. Every team is looking for a way to improve, to get an edge, and introducing these more holistic approaches is how we do just that.
But these are NOT quick fixes. The improvements that Samara is introducing are full program overhauls. They’re wholly different ways of thinking throughout the organization, and it’s tough for humans to change the way we think, especially when it’s already deeply ingrained in us. The rewards are great but the road is bumpy, and at times it feels scary and a little nuts.
I’m hoping the leadership is truly as united around these new philosophies as they say they are, and that if they run into obstacles, they quickly hire a change management professional (if they haven’t already). Even though it’s a new program, the people in the program probably haven’t done something this fundamentally different. So it will require them to change the way they think.
I’ve been a part of organizations that have attempted to change to a self-organizing approach, and I can say that it requires three things: a strong and energizing vision (an end point, a north star), leadership that can operate and roll with high ambiguity, and a commitment to human-centered design.
You can follow Cara’s new newsletter right here. She just wrote about coaches connecting with players. Sounds relevant for a new franchise with a new coach!
When I first heard the news and mulled things over, I came up with what I thought would be the worst and best outcomes of this coaching decision in 2026:
Worst Possible Outcome
Sarama’s message does not get across to players
Sarama isn’t prepared to manage a team in live games against competitive opponents
The team fails to improve, fails to define a clear system, and fails to win many games
Best Possible Outcome
The Fire compete for a playoff spot (typically very unlikely in an expansion team’s first season)
The Fire actively see players improve throughout the season
The players respond to, and push forward, the organizational system
Sarama manages live games well
The real outcome will, of course, likely land somewhere in the middle.
Before we get out of here, let me echo two things Vanja noted in Sarama’s press conference: The team is “patiently waiting for rules” about the expansion draft (as I’m writing this, the league and the Players’ Association just agreed to extend the CBA agreement deadline another month, instead of expiring on Halloween3), and that, as she told the ownership group, she would like us to “trust (them) and jump into unknown waters.”
Despite the delays, the setbacks, the unknowns: I’m ready to jump.