This just out of the Bee.....So looks like there were no qualified female coaches available so they looked in the real estate section......
http://sacbee.com/24hour/sports/story/2606797p-11064275c.html
Charlotte replaces Lacey with Bogues
By JENNA FRYER, AP Sports Writer
Last Updated 4:33 pm PDT Wednesday, August 3, 2005
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) - Muggsy Bogues was working in real estate two days ago with no organized coaching experience. Now he's the head of the Charlotte Sting, charged with turning around the worst team in the WNBA.
Bogues was hired Wednesday to replace Trudi Lacey, who will remain as general manager. The Sting have the league's worst record at 3-21, with four fewer wins than San Antonio - the last-place team in the Western Conference.
"This opportunity for me came out of nowhere," said Bogues, who admits he has seen very few Sting games. "Before this I was in real estate and just raising my kids."
Charlotte president Ed Tapscott said Bogues name came up about a month ago when he and Lacey decided the team needed a fresh voice on the court. He invited Bogues to a game, and asked to speak to him later. During their talk, he asked Bogues what he thought about taking over as coach.
"For a minute he was taken aback," Tapscott said. "I asked him not to say anything, to think about it. Well, the more he thought about it, the more he began getting excited."
The hiring comes two days after the Sting traded Dawn Staley, a three-time Olympic gold medalist and face of the franchise, to Houston for a first-round draft pick. With two first-round picks, the organization decided it was best to make a change now and allow Lacey to focus on evaluating talent while giving a new coach the final 10 games of the season to start a foundation.
"We hope we we'll get on the path for moving into the new arena (next season) and celebrating the 10th year of the WNBA," Tapscott said. "We needed to change the direction of this team before those events."
Bogues ran practice Wednesday afternoon, where at 5-foot-3, he was the shortest person on the court. Helen Darling, Charlotte's point guard, is the smallest player at 5-foot-6.
The undersized Bogues endeared himself to basketball fans in North Carolina - first at Wake Forest then with the NBA's Charlotte Hornets - with his determined play at point guard.
He spent 14 years in the NBA, nine with the Hornets as an original member of that team. He retired to Charlotte, where he is a popular and visible member of the community.
With Staley now gone, and Tuesday's announcement that star Allison Feaster would miss the rest of the season with pain related to his recent pregnancy, Tapscott joked that "Coach Bogues is the new face of the franchise."
Bogues downplayed his lack of coaching experience. Admitting that teaching his daughter and the little girls who have attended his camps is the only experience he has with coaching females, he said he would rely on his days as a point guard to find his way.
"The way I played the game and the position I played, I was an extension of the coach," he said. "I ran the show."
Although the Sting are not mathematically eliminated from the playoffs yet, Bogues said the final 10 games will be difficult and his hardest job will be convincing the team they can win some games. But he doesn't think Charlotte has a realistic chance, and will use this time to begin preparations for next season.
"We are in a rebuilding stage. For me, this is more or less an evaluation right now. Our backs are against the wall."
Lacey, meanwhile, said the decision to relinquish the job as coach was not that difficult when she stepped back and made the decision as general manager. She struggled with the decision to trade Staley, pulling the trigger on the deal as a "one last gift" to a player nearing the end of her career and still searching for a WNBA title.
The Comets are in second place in the Western Conference and give Staley a much better chance at winning a championship.
Once the trade was complete, Lacey said she knew it was time for Tapscott to bring Bogues in.
"It was the right thing to do when I looked at the big picture," she said. Bogues becomes the 17th former NBA player or coach to coach a WNBA team. His first game will be Thursday night against Sacramento, his second is Saturday night against Detroit and coach Bill Laimbeer.
