Cherokee Nation Citizen Latricia Trammell is the only Native American coach in the WNBA
by Troy LittledeerJuly 13, 2026
(Dallas)- Latricia Trammell was midway through an interview at the Chicago Sky’s shootaround Sunday when a fan named Walt Chisholm walked over to courtside and told her about his grandmother.
His granny had never been to a sporting event in her life, he said. Not basketball, not football, nothing. Then Trammell took over the Dallas Wings, and the old woman got off the couch to come see “Coach T.” She prays for her at church now.
“Tell her to keep praying for me,” Trammell said. “Tell her I appreciate that.”
Two seasons ago Trammell ran the Wings from the home bench at College Park Center in Arlington, 20 miles from where she sat Sunday. In 2023, her first season as a WNBA head coach, Dallas won 22 games — its most since relocating from Tulsa — took its first playoff series since the move, and Trammell finished runner-up for Coach of the Year. A year later the roster collapsed under injuries, the Wings went 9-31, and Dallas let her go. It was one hard season in a career that had known almost nothing but winning: a 105-45 record across Oklahoma and Texas high schools, back-to-back NAIA national championships at Oklahoma City University in 2014 and 2015, NAIA Coach of the Year both seasons, an 85-10 record across her three years running the Stars. Sunday she was back in the market as an assistant on Tyler Marsh’s Sky staff, hours before facing the franchise that dismissed her, at American Airlines Center, a downtown showcase building that was never hers. The Wings won it, 96-91, in front of 13,236.
She is a Cherokee Nation Citizen, and the only Native American coach in the WNBA. “I’m part of the Cherokee Nation from my mother,” she said. Her mother, Edna Trammell, was raised by her great-grandparents near Tahlequah. Her great-grandfather was a medicine man. The family always went back. Her mother’s parents died young and are buried in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, just across the stateline from the Oklahoma Cherokee Reservation.
“I remember a lot of, I say, our people, Cherokee people, came and supported me here,” she said of her Dallas tenure.
The league’s Native history is short enough to hold in one paragraph. Ryneldi Becenti, Diné, became the first Native American to play in the WNBA with the Phoenix Mercury in 1997, the league’s first season. Angel Goodrich, Cherokee, ran the point at Sequoyah High School in Tahlequah and at Kansas before the Tulsa Shock drafted her in 2013 — at the time, the highest a Native player had ever been taken. Shoni Schimmel, of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, went eighth overall a year later and became a WNBA All-Star Game MVP as a rookie. Alissa Pili, Iñupiaq and Samoan, went eighth overall in 2024, the first Alaska Native player drafted into the league. All of them players.
Trammell is the coach.
The coaching came from Seminole, Oklahoma, where she grew up after her family moved from Claremore when she was one. Her brother Donnie coached the boys at Seminole High School while she was a student there. She watched film with him and saw what he was building. “I just saw the rewards in the relationship he built with his players and team,” she said. “I don’t ever remember a time that I did not want to coach. It’s always been in my DNA.”
