Rena Wakama, head coach of Nigeria’s nationwide ladies’s basketball staff, D’Tigress, has been appointed as the brand new head coach of Hive BC, a membership competing within the Unequalled Basketball League in america.
The announcement was made in a league assertion on Thursday.
The Unequalled League, based in 2023, is a ladies’s three-on-three basketball competitors created to supply an alternate platform in the course of the low season of the US Girls’s Nationwide Basketball Affiliation (WNBA). The league’s first season occurred in early 2025, with its second season scheduled for 2026.
Wakama will lead Hive BC of their debut season when the subsequent marketing campaign begins.
Earlier this yr, in March, the 33-year-old coach joined the Chicago Sky of the WNBA as an assistant coach, persevering with her spectacular rise in basketball administration.
Wakama made historical past in 2023 when she turned the primary feminine head coach of D’Tigress and guided the staff to victory on the FIBA Girls’s Afrobasket, changing into the primary girl to win the title as a head coach. She repeated the feat in August 2024 by main Nigeria to a fifth consecutive Afrobasket crown.
Her outstanding achievements continued on the Paris 2024 Olympics, the place she was named the match’s finest coach after steering D’Tigress to the quarter-finals — the primary time any African basketball staff, male or feminine, had reached that stage.
It’s common in basketball for coaches to handle each nationwide groups and golf equipment. For example, Mike Brown served as an affiliate coach with the Golden State Warriors whereas teaching Nigeria’s males’s staff, D’Tigers, on the Tokyo 2021 Olympics.
Wakama’s new position with Hive BC is anticipated to additional increase her profile as certainly one of Africa’s most profitable and provoking basketball coaches.
