Two years ago, on an afternoon she remembers vividly, Ohemaa Nyanin sat beside Natalie Nakase as the Golden State Valkyries introduced Nakase as their first head coach.
Nyanin, the expansion franchise’s GM and employee No. 2, felt a hand gently graze her shoulder. It belonged to Nakase, who spoke with conviction.
“She’s not going to let me fail,” Nakase declared, turning toward her new boss, whom she’d met only months earlier.
At the time, the public-facing gesture was as much a pledge as an act of faith. The women knew little about each other and even less about what was to come.
That was October 2024, when the Valkyries’ roster was a blank page and their identity was still unwritten. The vision for a franchise forged in Golden State’s relentless pursuit of excellence was only that: a vision held by trailblazing women who stood hand-in-hand at the edge of the unknown.
This month, the Valkyries beat the defending champion Las Vegas Aces 87-77 in overtime on the road. As the final buzzer blared, Golden State completed a sweep and, in only its second season, earned a trip to the WNBA Finals. On the baseline, amid the chaos around them, Nyanin and Jess Smith, the team’s president and employee No. 1, pulled each other into a lingering hug.
“I get emotional thinking about it,” Smith said. “I have a front-row seat to how hard [Nyanin] works, how diligent she’s been, and how much care she puts into every layer of this organization. She knows every detail of everything and makes sure that people have what they need. This roster, this culture, exists because of her.”
Nyanin knew what laying the foundation with a strong culture could lead to. Perhaps not how quickly it would happen — no one could have predicted that. But she knew. Nakase knew too. And Smith, in her own lane of the organization, carried that same belief from her first day in February 2024.
Nyanin, Nakase, and Smith pose for a photo together at the opening of the Golden State Valkyries’ training facility in Oakland on Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2025. | Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/The Standard
Golden State owner Joe Lacob — who’d had an affinity for women’s basketball for more than 30 years and a dream of another Bay Area team since his San Jose Lasers folded in 1998 — knew from the second his ownership group’s expansion bid was granted that he’d commit to placing women at the forefront of the leadership.
“I felt that was an important statement,” Lacob told The Standard. “It’s a women’s sports league, and there are not just great women players but great women executives and coaches who deserve the opportunity too.”
These days, Lacob enjoys gloating about his hires. Deservedly so.
Nyanin, Nakase, and Smith are a trio of former deputies who, with the Valkyries, seized the opportunity to chart their own course. The convergence of the three in one place has made magic in Golden State.
“There was no ‘Well, this is what I’ve done for 15 years, and this is my tried and true,’” Smith said. “Instead, we came in with an incredible knowledge base, a network between the two of us, and more of the question of one another: ‘How are we going to do this differently?’”
In Smith, Lacob tapped a key architect behind the most commercially successful startup in women’s sports to that point — the NWSL’s Angel City FC, founded in 2020. In Nyanin, Lacob and Smith found a strategist, a builder, a soft-hearted human, and a clear-eyed basketball intellect.
Lacob’s Golden State staff conducted a search far and wide, then brought back a few candidates to interview in his Peninsula home.
He wasn’t simply searching for a basketball brain. He was looking for someone who knew the game’s far-reaching networks, who could identify talent before it fully blossomed, could envision what a player might become in the right environment, and would put a high-character culture at the center of the organization.
Nakase won the WNBA Coach of the Year award in 2025. | Source: Sean Fan/The Standard
Before leading the Valkyries, Nyanin spent a decade mastering the art of being a second in command — five years with USA Basketball’s women’s national team program, then five more in the New York Liberty front office. Her personal story too was alluring: a childhood that carried her across Ghana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Chile, the Philippines, and suburban Maryland, and a career pursued against her family’s wishes (her dad wanted her to be a doctor), followed by their eventual embrace of her calling.
“She was really the obvious choice for me,” Lacob said.
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“The job she has done is unbelievable. Un-be-lievable,” he continued. “She should get more credit than she’s gotten — to build a roster that fits your coach, to find all of those international players, a strategy that no one else had quite executed the same way is amazing.”
Nyanin handpicked the team’s expansion roster with a little bit of everything — unprotected castoffs, under-the-radar free agents, international talent, and high-upside risks in the college draft — as the franchise became the first expansion team in league history to reach the playoffs in its debut season.
Then she weathered an offseason unlike any other. With the WNBA navigating landmark collective bargaining negotiations with the players union and a watershed moment for the sport unfolding alongside an extraordinarily compressed calendar, Nyanin’s solution was just as intentional as it was in her first go-around.
“She’s obviously a pioneer that will be talked about forever when it comes to roster constructions or women’s basketball and the cards that she was dealt,” Smith said.
Re-signing a league-high nine players, Nyanin wove a thread of continuity and placed a bet on the player development system she and Nakase had fostered. Every addition — the biggest splash in All-Defensive first-team Gabby Williams, the biggest surprise in starting center Kiah Stokes, the last-minute savior in French rookie Aminata Gueye, signed in the final week of the regular season — was a box checked as part of a deliberate plan.
“Something I’ve talked about in the past is being a product of your experiences,” Nyanin said of assembling her team — one that, on the eve of the WNBA Finals, still reflects a collection of chippy underdogs. “Not allowing ‘no’ to be the end of your story, really trying to find ways to problem solve and pivot. I would say wanting to buy into a system and really wanting to be connected, not just on the court but off the court.”
Smith’s Valkyries are the first women’s sports franchise to generate more than $100 million in annual revenue. | Source: Godofredo A. Vásquez/Associated Press
It’s a system, a culture, that Nyanin and Nakase pride themselves on. They met only two years ago yet are completely in sync in their leadership — though they admit the detail-oriented collaboration took time to blend.
“They are both very strong-willed in terms of things, and I think there were certainly some disagreements early on,” Lacob said. “Maybe nothing big, but I think it took them a while to totally be on the same page. “But I view them as being very much on the same page, certainly today.”
When Nyanin met her future head coach, Nakase’s preparation — plus the expletives she let fly — was what struck her most.
“She showed me who she was from the jump, and I just thought that was really endearing, because our athletes need people who are going to be open, honest, direct, kind, provide clarity, and also be authentic,” Nyanin said. “She presented herself as if this was her calling.” From there, the two bonded quickly.
“I’m just so proud of Ohemaa and Natalie in this moment,” Smith said, preparing Golden State’s business empire for a Finals appearance — the president sits atop a billion-dollar franchise that brought in $100 million in revenue in this year alone. “To watch them shine in Year 2 and make so apparent what they’ve built together is awesome.”
How do you turn a vision into a Finals-bound franchise? Nakase was asked this at Golden State’s Sephora Performance Center, as the Valkyries began their week-long preparation.
She didn’t hesitate.
“Ah, just hire good people.”