The Portland Fire have officially announced the hiring of the first head coach in franchise history. The WNBA expansion team accidentally leaked the name two days earlier, but now it is official that Cleveland Cavaliers assistant coach Alex Sarama will be the first coach to take the reins of the Fire.
“The Portland Fire have hired Alex Sarama, an assistant with the Cleveland Cavaliers, as the WNBA expansion franchise's inaugural head coach, the team and Sarama told ESPN on Friday,” Ramona Shelburne reported.
Sarama is 30 years old and hails from Guilford, UK. In addition to being an assistant coach for the Cavs, he also held the title Head of Player Development.
Seemingly, Sarama's biggest selling point is his ability to implement a CLA (Constraints-Led Approach) to training, which, according to Shelburne, is “an innovative training system that has become popular in European basketball, soccer and increasingly in the NBA, counting players like the San Antonio Spurs' Victor Wembanyama and coaches like Cleveland's Kenny Atkinson as true believers.”
The 30-year-old is a “leading authority” of this type of training system, and newly-hired Fire general manager Vanja Černivec is a fan.
“To me he was a genius,” she said, per ESPN. “He was producing documents and papers that would take me two hours, he would do it in five or 10 minutes. I was just like, ‘How does this kid's brain work?' And his obsession was always coaching.
“I thought he was so brave that at 22 he left a great career at the NBA league office to go coach,” Černivec continued. “He went to Italy and established his own academy, and then was just testing it out and figuring it out on his own for five years.”
The Portland Fire is one of two WNBA expansion teams joining the women's basketball league next season, along with the Toronto Tempo. An expansion draft will (hopefully) be held in the near future, but is currently on hold until after the league hammers out a new CBA.
