By: Chinedum Ohanusi
Head coach of Nigeria’s senior women’s national basketball team, D’Tigresses, Rena Wakama (MON) will begin her new job, as Head Coach of Hive BC,
in the Unrivaled Basketball League in January 2026.
Unrivaled is an eight-team women’s basketball league in the United States, co-founded by Women’s NBA stars Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier in 2023, and it made its debut in January 2025 with six teams.
The league announced its head coaching lineup for the second season on its website on Thursday, confirming Wakama’s appointment alongside seven others across the league’s eight clubs.
Wakama, who was an assistant coach for the Chicago Sky in the WNBA, led D’Tigresses to back-to-back FIBA Women’s AfroBasket titles, first in 2023 and then in 2025.
In between time, the 33-year-old, Rivers State born gaffer, guided the team to a historic quarter-final berth at the 2024 Olympic Games, in Paris, France.
At Hive BC, she will take charge of one of the league’s two franchises, as the nascent league enters its second season in January.
Wakama played collegiately at Western Carolina University; and began her coaching career after spending two years at Manhattan College as the director of basketball operations, that’s before advancing to an assistant coach role, Chicago Sky..
My inquest into this matter revealed that, not even a single coach of the various national teams, including those that won laurels for the country in the last eight years of the reign of Engineer Musa Kida as President of the NBBF, was on a contract.
From American, Oris Hugely who won the first two of the five titles D’Tigresses won on the bounce; to Mike Brown, NBA Coach of the Year (2015) a former Head Coach of D’Tigers; to all the Nigerian coaches including – Abdulrahman Mohammed, Ogor Odaudu, Alex Nwora, and Rena Wakama, non was, or is on a valid contact.
Ironically, but for the exception of Wakama, and the duo of Odaudu and Abdulrahman, the leadership of the NBBF has without minding the achievements of these Coaches, been heartless in the manner these selfless coaches were relieved of their jobs; as some on learnt of their fate on pages of newspapers or social media.
“Why not? Even before she became coach of Hive BC, a 3×3 basketball franchise, she was Assistant Coach of Chicago Sky in the WNBA, and that was because she is not tied to any contact by the NBBF; so. She is a free agent”, the stakeholder asserted.
Being a free agent, means Wakama, ranked as the best Coach in Africa by FIBA Africa, two-time winner of the women’s Afrobasket titles, needed not to consult with Nigeria, talk more of seeking clearance before joining any team. For the same reason, she can walk away as Head Coach of D’Tigresses even without blinking an eye.
Regrettably, the board that is complicit in all of these anomalies, in the past eight years, are pushing so hard to stay in power for another four years.
Despite an injunction by the Nigeria Olympic Committee (NOC), and an unequivocal directive of the National Sports Commission (NSC) that the federation holds its polls in January 2026; Engr. Kida with the scribe of the NBBF, Amina Amanchi are pushing for a tenure elongation, and an unprecedented third term in office, something majority of the critival stakeholders are opposed to, and have vowed to stop.
