Sue Bird to become managing director for the USA women’s national team: Sources

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USA Basketball will announce a major shift in its structuring on Thursday when Sue Bird is announced as the managing director for the USA women’s national team for the 2028 Olympic cycle, according to two sources close to the program.

The 44-year-old Bird, who won five Olympic gold medals and four World Cup titles playing for Team USA, will take on what is now known as the “Grant Hill” role on the women’s side — A person with unquestioned credentials as a player at every level who is largely responsible for selecting both the player rosters and coaching staff for both the Olympic team and the World Cup team. Her hiring is a departure from a longstanding structure of using a committee to select players and coaches for national team rosters and comes on the heels of a very close call for the USA women in Paris.

As financial opportunities for women grow in the sport and in marketing, USA Basketball wanted to make sure it was doing everything possible to ensure the allure of playing major international events remained strong, and a phone call from Bird is going to go along way with players, one source close to the USA program said. The announcement will come Thursday at the Nike HQ in New York City.

The USA men’s national team has used a managing director for nearly two decades. Jerry Colangelo, a four-time executive of the year in the NBA and former owner of the Phoenix Suns, served in the role from 2005 to 2021, resurrecting the men’s national team from turmoil following the 2004 Olympics (a bronze medal, after golds in 1992, 1996, and 2000). In 2021, USA Basketball named Hill as Colangelo’s successor. Hill, one of the greatest college players who enjoyed an All-Star, albeit injury-plagued, NBA career, and won Olympic gold in 1996, took over for the 2023 World Cup and selected the Team USA men’s squad that won gold in Paris this past summer.

Hill, and Colangelo before him, work hand in hand with Sean Ford, who has run day-to-day operations for the USA men’s national team for more than two decades. The set-up on the women’s side will be the side with Bird and Briana Weiss, who has held a role similar to Ford’s since 2021.

This marks the second significant shift in leadership for the Team USA women’s program over the last several years. In 2021, Carol Callan — who had been the national team’s director since 1995 — retired to take a role with FIBA. She was succeeded by Weiss, who led the women’s national team through the Paris Olympic cycle where the program won its eighth-consecutive Olympic gold medal.

Along with nearly losing the gold-medal game to France, the U.S. women’s team was caught up in controversy leading up to the Olympics because Caitlin Clark was not on the team. The argument not to take Clark, a rising, global megastar in the sport, was in part because she had not participated in many Team USA offseason functions, and also because there were women with more national team experience who had earned the right to play at the Olympics. Bird’s presence doesn’t necessarily mean the next Clark will automatically make the Olympic team during her rookie year, but having Bird as the face of the team could help smooth some of the politics and also perhaps ensure that USA mini-camps — a long tradition for the women’s team — remain well attended.

The 2026 FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup will be held in Germany from Sept. 4-13, 2026. The first event for qualifying will take place in the November 2025 window, a year out from the championships and just six months from Bird’s announcement. This makes the naming of a coach and camp rosters (including player evaluation) a high priority in the coming months as Bird takes on her new role.

There could be a significant amount of turnover in ahead of the World Cup roster announcements. Cheryl Reeve, who led the team in Paris, could be a potential coaching candidate, but she’d be the first Olympic coach in the gold-medal span since Geno Auriemma (2012, 2016) to coach more than one Olympic cycle. Another name to watch: On Tuesday, USA Basketball announced that Duke coach Kara Lawson would coach the 2025 USA Women’s AmeriCup Team, which will be comprised of collegians and play in a senior national team event in Santiago, Chile, this summer from June 28 to July 6. She was one of Reeve’s assistants during the 2024 Games and the head coach for the Team USA 3×3 team for the Tokyo Games, where the squad won a gold medal in the sport’s Olympic debut.

From a player perspective, there could also be a good amount of turnover. Diana Taurasi, even before her retirement this summer, had announced that the Paris Games would be her last, but the inclusion of other vets on the roster is not a given, especially with a significant amount of young talent coming up through the ranks, including Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers. Those early senior national team training camp rosters will be important data points in seeing how Bird might approach roster construction moving forward.

(Photo: Gregory Shamus / Getty Images)

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