DeMarco beat out former player and current Phoenix Mercury associate head coach Kristi Toliver, Toronto Raptors assistant coach Jama Mahlalela, and former Brooklyn Nets assistant Will Weaver for the role.
DeMarco will become the Liberty’s tenth head coach in franchise history and will succeed Sandy Brondello — both the winningest coach in franchise history and the first to win a championship for the franchise — who was dismissed as head coach after the Liberty fell to the Phoenix Mercury in the first round of the 2025 WNBA playoffs.
DeMarco’s hiring fits a growing WNBA pattern which prioritizes head coaching candidates with NBA experience, which often comes at the expense of expanding diversity across the league. Now, with the Liberty’s opening filled, DeMarco will be one of eight men to be in head coaching roles in the WNBA.
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For the first time since 2021, more men currently lead WNBA teams than women. And DeMarco joins six other WNBA head coaches who all had NBA experience as a prerequisite. He will enter a league that employs nine white head coaches, four men and five women. 2026, with its two expansion teams, will see a WNBA that has six non-white head coaches, and it will also be the first year since 2020 without a Black woman head coach in the league.
As the WNBA continues to prioritize NBA coaching experience in its search for head coaches, it’s worth noting that this opens up fewer pathways for women than men. The NBA, which had more than 10 women coaching five years ago, no longer boasts those numbers. Around half of the women on this list of trailblazing female coaches in the NBA compiled by ESPN have since either moved onto roles in the WNBA or women’s college basketball.
Lindsey Harding, a coach from this list that is still coaching in the NBA, was initially a candidate for the Liberty because of both her former WNBA playing career and her NBA coaching experience. But as she revealed in a story from ESPN’s Dave McMenamin earlier this month, she didn’t want to make the switch to the WNBA just yet. She has her eyes set on being the first woman to rise to the top in the NBA, which counters a lot of the public skepticism from both Becky Hammon and Dawn Staley about the viability of a woman breaking the NBA’s glass ceiling.
While there has been a lot of hoopla surrounding the fact that New York was targeting someone with NBA experience and most likely wouldn’t hire someone without it, simply having NBA experience wouldn’t guarantee someone the role.
The Liberty dealt with a myriad of injuries and, as a result, endured effort problems in 2025; these experiences made clear the must-haves for the head coaching role. The franchise wanted someone who could hold players accountable, manage the personalities and needs of star talent, be flexible and adaptable in a rapidly changing WNBA and manage the high pressure that is required to coach in New York. The Liberty are a franchise that has ownership with sky high expectations, a franchise that desperately wants another championship and desires having a dynastic legacy.
The Liberty don’t want to be known as a one-hit wonder.
The impact of DeMarco’s career with the Warriors
DeMarco comes from a franchise whose successes were anything but short-lived; he has been with the Warriors since before Steve Kerr became the team’s head coach. Prior to the Warriors, DeMarco played college basketball at Edgewood College and then at Dominican University while earning his MBA in global management.
He’s been highly involved and served in a variety of roles within the NBA’s most modern dynasty, where he helped Golden State win four titles in eight years.
The Warriors’ owner, Joe Lacob, is no stranger to the WNBA. He famously proclaimed that he wanted his WNBA team, the Golden State Valkyries, to win a title within the first five years of their existence. If DeMarco gleaned anything from this experience, it’s how to manage high pressure expectations and perform.
But DeMarco hasn’t just been a part of a pro basketball dynasty. He’s also helped to shape the culture behind it, and has been instrumental in developing trusting relationships with some of the franchise’s most dynamic players and personalities. Draymond Green, one of the league’s best defenders with a notoriously fiery personality, has sung DeMarco’s praises publicly since he was named New York’s new head coach.
DeMarco famously held Green accountable for his lackluster play during the Warriors 2023 playoff series against the Lakers. The pair had a film session where DeMarco told Green that he didn’t recognize him on the floor during Game 1 and that he was ” f–king awful, defensively.” As a result, Green stepped up his play and helped the Warriors win the following game.
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“At times you get in these locker rooms and you have stars and coaches won’t always challenge,” Green said in a 2023 interview with NBC Sports Bay Area. “DeMarco will challenge anybody, from Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, myself, Steve [Kerr]. He’ll challenge anyone. He’s not afraid to hear his voice and he’s not afraid to have tough conversations. He’s not afraid of confrontation.”
This confrontational, solution-oriented personality is what the Liberty want in their head coach. Complacency has been one of the franchise’s most apparent issues ever since Breanna Stewart and Jonquel Jones arrived in 2023. The franchise needs a voice that can be both challenging and motivational, for stars like Sabrina Ionescu, Stewart and Jones.
Former Golden State Warriors assistant coach Chris DeMarco before the game against the Sacramento Kings at Golden 1 Center on April 3, 2022. (Photo Credit: Darren Yamashita | USA TODAY Sports)
Leading the Bahamas men’s basketball team
While DeMarco is most known for his role as a Warriors’ trusted assistant and defensive specialist, he has also had notable experience leading a team. In 2019, he was hired as the head coach of the Bahamas Basketball Federation’s men’s national team. DeMarco’s hire came as a result of the recommendation of Buddy Hield, one of the NBA’s most known Bahamians.
Flash forward to August of 2023, when DeMarco led the Bahamas to a berth in the Paris Olympic qualifiers. DeMarco and his team made history, as this was the furthest any Bahamas Men’s National team had ever gone in Olympic qualifying. He led a team with limited resources and infrastructure to its first Olympic qualifying tournament, when the Bahamas beat Argentina 82-75 on the road in Argentina. This result would have been completely inconceivable just five years prior.
DeMarco maximized a group that was led by NBA role players in Hield, Deandre Ayton and Eric Gordon. This experience, in addition to his work with the Warriors, impressed New York as they went through the interview process with DeMarco.
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While at the helm of the Bahamian team, DeMarco made sure to hold his players like Hield accountable. Hield told reporter Dalton Johnson a story about when DeMarco locked Hield out from the film room after he showed up late.
“That showed his leadership of, we’re going to have fun and play around and all those things, but if you can’t be on time and be respectful, I’m not going to give you a trump card and let you in,” Hield explained.
Limitations that DeMarco will need to overcome
DeMarco clearly knows how to coach basketball and gain the trust of players. But still, he hasn’t coached women’s basketball at either the college or the professional level. This very fact will provide an unavoidable learning curve.
The New York Liberty can both facilitate DeMarco’s adjustment to the league and help him earn respect around the league and from the fans by surrounding him with a predominantly female staff. If the Liberty want to be part of the solution to the coaching pipeline issues the WNBA continues to deal with, the franchise will consider this.
DeMarco may not have coached women, but he has experience coaching with them. During his tenure with the Bahamas, he made sure to hire a woman as one of his assistants. He hired Addison Walters, an up-and-coming coach who played Division I college basketball at Stetson University, Santa Clara University and Cal State Bakersfield. Walters, whose father is former NBA player and coach Rex Walters, now is an assistant coach on the Iowa Wolves, the Minnesota Timberwolves’ G League affiliate. She served as an assistant for the Bahamas men’s national team as recently as for the 2025 FIBA AmeriCup Qualifiers this past February.
Walters is one woman that DeMarco could possibly even bring to New York. But even if his coaching staff is mostly women, that may not be enough. There will need to be at least one person on his bench with years of WNBA institutional knowledge. Black women also need to be heavily considered. And one assistant will have to be a former player, as that’s the only way WNBA teams can have three assistant coaches on their front bench.
Speaking of women with NBA experience, the Portland Fire announced on Monday that they hired Brittni Donaldson, who has an extensive NBA coaching background, to become a dual assistant coach and assistant general manager. While coaching professional basketball, generally, is a significant qualification for a coach, experience in the WNBA, which is very different from the NBA, comes with its own acclimation process.
The Portland Fire have hired Brittni Donaldson to their basketball operations staff. She will serve dual roles as an assistant coach and an assistant general manager. She has worked in various roles for the Hawks, Pistons and Raptors.
— Sean Highkin (@highkin) November 24, 2025
Even Las Vegas Aces head coach Becky Hammon, who played in the WNBA for 15 years and then spent eight years coaching in the NBA, had to adjust back to the league she left when she returned as a head coach. There was a reason why Bill Laimbeer stuck around within the Aces organization for a year to help with the transition.
While the WNBA and the NBA are both two of the top professional leagues in the world, there are clear differences in not only the style of play but also in what’s needed to lead grown women rather than grown men.
Hammon reflected herself last month on what losing the institutional knowledge in her former assistants Natalie Nakase and Tyler Marsh was like. They are two coaches with NBA backgrounds who had adjusted to the WNBA over the three years they worked under Hammon. Once Marsh and Nakase left to coach their own WNBA teams, Hammon hired a whole new staff around her that had NBA experience and hadn’t yet coached women.
“I was really on them to learn the league, because they weren’t coming from the women’s side,” Hammon said on Oct. 5. “It’s a completely different league. You need to know these players, names, tendencies.” Hammon told her new staff to start watching games as soon as they could.
DeMarco will need to do the same.
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