A League of Her Own

One of the greatest assets for a basketball coach is flexibility: knowing how to veer from the original game plan, devise a new strategy, and win. And if anyone in the sport has mastered the art of the pivot, it’s Sonia Raman, the new head coach of the Seattle Storm. After all, many years before she made history in October by becoming the first person of Indian descent to be named a WNBA head coach, Raman was on a very different career path.

A former high school basketball player, Raman majored in international relations as an undergrad at Tufts University, where she was a walk-on on the women’s basketball team. Sidelined by an injury during her junior year, she became interested in coaching. Raman used her time off the court to review videos of opposing teams, take notes on their gameplay, and share them with her teammates. After graduating in 1996, she stayed on for a time as an assistant coach.

Raman eventually enrolled at BC Law, where she enjoyed playing basketball at the Quonset Hut on Newton Campus every Friday with classmates and her favorite constitutional law professor, Kent Greenfield, she told Boston College Law School Magazine. After graduating in 2001 she pursued a career in corporate law, working for the US Department of Labor’s Benefit Security Administration and later in the risk and compliance division at Fidelity Investments. Even as her legal career took off, Raman never lost her passion for basketball. She worked for six years as a part-time assistant coach at Wellesley College, and eventually realized that coaching was her true passion.  Raman stepped away from law and secured her first head coaching job with the MIT Engineers in 2008. It turned out that some of the analytical skills she’d developed during her BC Law days were applicable to her methodical coaching style. Plus, she told CNBC, “I was impacting people’s lives in a way that was much more fulfilling to me than anything I had done before.” In all, Raman spent twelve seasons at MIT, leaving in 2020 as the winningest coach in program history. From there, she spent four years with the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies, becoming the first Indian American woman to hold an assistant coaching position in the league, before transitioning to the WNBA in 2025 and spending one season as assistant coach of the New York Liberty.

Ahead of her first season as head coach of the Seattle Storm, Raman told The New York Times that she enjoys being able to show the next generation what’s possible. “It’s a privilege. I do take it as a tremendous responsibility, being the first,” she said. “You never want to be the last.” ◽