Sandy Brondello knows firsthand what it is like to join a WNBA expansion franchise.
In 1998, she made her WNBA debut as a player with the Detroit Shock in the same season the franchise joined the league.
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“There was a freshness about it,” Brondello said. “There was just a lot of excitement because it was new.”
Then, as is the case now, Brondello recognized the importance of building relationships. She worked to develop genuine connections with her Shock teammates outside the gym. She believed it would pay off when Detroit faced adversity.
That is one lesson Brondello is set to apply in her upcoming opportunity.
On Tuesday, Brondello was officially named the head coach of the Toronto Tempo, one of two WNBA expansion teams debuting in the spring. She says building a cohesive and lasting culture will be important.
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“I’m a firm believer that the more connected you are off the court, that’s going to help on it because you can overcome adversity. We’ll invest time into doing that,” she said. “But it’s not my culture. It’s their player-led culture.”
Despite winning a championship with the New York Liberty in 2024 and being the franchise’s all-time winningest coach, Brondello and the Liberty parted ways after four seasons, just days after their 2025 season ended. She previously won a title coaching the Phoenix Mercury, helping establish her as the hottest coaching free agent this offseason. She interviewed with the Seattle Storm, Dallas Wings and Tempo.
Before Toronto’s announcement, The Athletic chatted with Brondello about what it was like to garner that much interest, her departure from New York, the lack of former players who are now WNBA head coaches and why she decided to join the Tempo.
(This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)
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For years, you have talked about culture and the importance of creating a player-led culture. However, in the past, you’ve done so while already knowing who is on your team. How do you think about making something player-led when you don’t currently have any players?
I’ve learned about that with the Opals (the Australian national team), where I also coach. I facilitated it in the beginning, and then there’s so much investment in that sisterhood that you hope that player involvement in it grows. Getting to know each other in the beginning will be important in Toronto. But a lot of these players are gonna know each other. It’s about how we develop that chemistry and that cohesiveness so that we can play our best basketball.
What do you think that will look like?
We’re going to try and make the best team that we can and be very versatile, athletic and tough. It’s a global game. It doesn’t matter where you’re from. You’re gonna be on a new team. It’s about getting to know each other, building deeper relationships so that you can have tougher conversations and so that you can have the values that you want, so that you can grow. Here, it’s really about what kind of legacy you want to leave behind, obviously for the future, but for the present as well.
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You mentioned legacy. Did a desire to leave a personal legacy with this franchise factor into your decision to join them?
Leaving a legacy is ultimately one of the reasons that led me to Toronto. I’ve won championships with two franchises. I still have so much passion. But it was also like, let’s do it this way, build something from the ground up with really good people. General manager Monica Wright Rogers is a championship player. You have two former players, in a GM and a head coach role, leading this team forward and making it a world-class franchise. We’ve both been on winning teams, we know what that looks like. So now the goal is to get there here.
How do you do that?
The league continues to grow, and with free agency, hopefully, we can get some new players that want to go to Canada because Toronto is a great city. Another thing that drew me to Toronto is that it’s a different country. It’s an opportunity to grow something and do it even more globally, and I’m sure players will want to come to Toronto in the summer.
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Let’s jump back a bit. How do you reflect on your exit from New York?
It was a great four years. We got to win that championship and build something special, building something into what it is today. To be a part of that, that’s pretty cool, and New York is going to continue to grow, get bigger and bigger. But we faced a lot of adversity this past year, and it was hard without our main players there. I just kind of thought it was time, probably not as aligned as I would have hoped, and that goes both ways. This is a business, and if they feel I’m not the right person for the job, then that’s fine. That’s a part of the business, and they have to make that decision. And I felt like I needed a new challenge, too.
Do you feel like coaches around the league face more pressure or different expectations than they used to? In consecutive cycles, coaches have been fired after their first season as WNBA head coaches. Contrast that with longtime WNBA coaches like Dan Hughes and Mike Thibault, who didn’t win titles until after they had been head coaches for more than 15 years in the league.
Look, in New York, obviously, we want to win. When you win one, you want to win another one. You want to have sustainable success for such a long time. But that’s with every team, regardless of where you’re at. Winning is hard. Expectations and pressure, but that’s a part of our game. Teams want to win. They have that expectation, which is fine. I want to win and I handle pressure quite well. I wish that we had played better, but we didn’t. That’s always going to fall on the coach, and I’m fine with that.
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How do you make sense of the fact that, as of now, only three head coaches in the WNBA are former WNBA players?
That disappoints me a little bit because we have so many great coaches who are former players. They just need those opportunities and the right support around them. With these former players, we’ve been in this league for so long and invested in it, and it’s a little sad that it’s going in a different direction. But organizations have to do what they think is going to result in the best team they can be.
What was it like being a coaching free agent this cycle, knowing you had so many options?
I got to experience what the players go through. It was nice. In New York, four years was great. It was time, and you could feel it. I’m smart enough to know. Just to get immediate teams reaching out and interest coming in, going through the whole process, it was fun. It was overwhelming and a little stressful at times, but it was also enjoyable because I had three great possible situations that I just had to work out what I felt was best for me.
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How did you compare the situations?
In Seattle, I probably could have had a chance to win straight away. In Dallas, there’s Paige Bueckers. But I just felt like building something from the ground up, doing something new, and doing it in a different country. I’m Australian. Canada is part of the Commonwealth of Nations. And then ultimately, it comes back to the people — the vision Monica and team president Teresa Resch had. They sold me on that.
What was that vision?
Doing something special in Toronto, in a different country. Women’s basketball is getting bigger here in Canada, but we can make it even bigger. We’re not just a Toronto team; we’re Canada’s team. We’ll play a few games in Montreal and a few games in Vancouver. That’s great. We will promote women’s basketball and these wonderful players that we will have on the floor. Being able to really have my imprint on what it looks like, and working alongside Monica, a former player, I thought that would be fun. We still want to win, but we want to make sure that we’re building a world-class franchise in the right way and bringing in the right people, developing the game in Toronto and around the country.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
New York Liberty, WNBA
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