The WNBA\u2019s first game in South Dakota, which will feature the Phoenix Mercury and the Chicago Sky, is a sellout.<\/p>\n
The game \u2014 which sold out in seven minutes, according to a team source \u2014 will be played at the Sanford Pentagon in Sioux Falls, S.D. on Saturday, roughly 73 miles from the town of Jefferson where Mercury coach Nate Tibbetts grew up.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m excited to go back to South Dakota,\u201d Tibbetts told reporters earlier this week. \u201cI get to go back once in a while, but I haven\u2019t been back in a long time \u2026 to coach in front of a lot of family and friends. It\u2019s a lot of people that have watched my career as I\u2019ve grown. It\u2019ll be neat. I\u2019m looking forward to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Sanford Pentagon has a capacity of 3,250. Remaining tickets for Saturday\u2019s game are being sold for resale prices of up to $3,454 on StubHub. The cheapest available seat was listed at $237 as of Friday evening.<\/p>\n
\u201cYear 16 and I\u2019m going to South Dakota, how crazy is that,\u201d veteran Mercury forward DeWanna Bonner said.<\/p>\n
Tibbetts went to high school at Jefferson before transferring to a school in Sioux Falls as a junior. The son of South Dakota Hall of Fame coach Fred Tibbetts, his transition into the WNBA aligns closely with his father\u2019s career.<\/p>\n
Fred Tibbetts coached high school girls\u2019 basketball for almost three decades, amassing more than 500 wins, including a 111-game winning streak and seven undefeated championship seasons. He died of colon cancer in 2008.<\/p>\n
Nate Tibbetts played for the men\u2019s basketball team at the University of South Dakota before beginning his coaching career as an assistant for the University of Sioux Falls men\u2019s basketball team. In 2005, he began a nearly 20-year journey in the NBA coaching ranks, starting as an assistant with the Sioux Falls Skyforce \u2014 the Miami Heat\u2019s G League affiliate \u2014 and ending with a three-year stint as an Orlando Magic assistant before the Mercury hired him in 2023.<\/p>\n
The Mercury advanced to the WNBA Finals last season, Tibbetts\u2019 second at the helm, where they were swept by the Las Vegas Aces. Mercury general manager Nick U\u2019Ren couldn\u2019t keep Phoenix\u2019s three best players \u2014 Kahleah Copper, Alyssa Thomas and Satou Sabally \u2014 in free agency. Sabally, the Mercury\u2019s leading scorer last season, signed a two-year deal with the New York Liberty, casting doubt on the Phoenix\u2019s potential to return to the finals in 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The WNBA\u2019s first game in South Dakota, which will feature the Phoenix Mercury and the Chicago Sky, is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":604683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[438,5551,99,434],"class_list":["post-604682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-chicago-sky","tag-phoenix-mercury","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=604682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/604683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=604682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=604682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=604682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}