October 07, 2025

John-o-Logue: Tibbetts vs Hammon in WNBA Finals is no fluke; South Dakota, partly because of Nate's dad, has been badass at women's basketball for decades

24 minutes

Perhaps you've heard. Likely, you've heard it a hundred times within the last week:

The WNBA Finals features two head coaches who were born and raised in South Dakota, Nate Tibbetts (Jefferson and Sioux Falls) and Becky Hammon (Rapid City).

It is amazing if you consider the state's thin population, and moreso a source of immense pride for South Dakota sports fans. But it should not be surprising.

South Dakota has always been amazing at producing high-level women's basketball. It started well before South Dakota State and South Dakota combined for 16 of the 17 Summit League Touranment titles that have been staged in Sioux Falls, an event that annually draws some of the largest women's hoops tournament crowds in the nation.

The Jackrabbits and Coyotes were Division II powers in the 1980's and 1990's as well. Northern State won two national titles in the mid-1990's and continues to be a force. Augustana reached a Final Four as part of Dave Krauth's 34-year run of excellence in Div. II. Two blocks away, the University of Sioux Falls has sported successful women's teams off-and-on. Dakota Wesleyan has hung some banners, too.

For over 40 years, these programs have won big and taken down teams all over the region and nation with girls from South Dakota. That's not an accident.

Happy Hour host John Gaskins traces South Dakota girls basketball supremacy back to the bloodlines of Nate Tibbetts — his father Fred, who won 551 games (lost just 101) in 29 years as a high school coach at tiny Jefferson and then big city Roosevelt.

A larger-than-life personality, Fred Tibbetts mopped up 11 state titles inspired rivals and other towns statewide to catch up, spreading a girls basketball wildfire that helped fuel those juggernaut college programs, still to this very day. Tibbetts stated on record about 50 years ago how he wanted "girls basketball to be big in South Dakota."

Mission accomplished. Now his son — who played at Roosevelt and then USD and went up the coaching ranks through USF, the Sioux Falls Skyforce, the Tulsa 66ers, and as an NBA assistant for 12 years — stands at the coaching pinnacle of women's basketball with Hammon, one of the game's most decorated all-time players and coaches.

Nobody knows the roots of the quality of these coaches more intensely than Matt Wilber, the Northern State head men's coach who spent a year with the Mercury coaching under his long-time friend Tibbetts.

Wilber is a lifelong South Dakota hoophead who played (and reached the Top 10 chart in career three-pointers as a walk-on) at Augustana, was an assistant coach at Augie and USF and SDSU, and for 11 years guided Dakota Wesleyan to national heights. And he has been close to Tibbetts for over two decades.

The two were assistant coaches at USF in the early 2000's and started a local basketball camp together in 2006 when Tibbetts was an assistant with the Sioux Falls Skyforce. Tibbetts eventually became the team's head coach, then cracked through in the NBA as an assistant for 12 years before taking the Phoenix Mercury head coaching job in 2024 and convincing Wilber to join him. After a season, Wilber came back to South Dakota to take the Northern State job in Aberdeen.

In this John-o-Logue, hear some of Wilber's remarks on why it is indeed no accident that Tibbetts and Hammon are where they are.

Then, check out the Matt Wilber interview from today.

...more

View all episodes

By John Gaskins

2121 ratings