Who is next in command?
On March 24, Northwestern women’s basketball head coach Joe McKeown announced his retirement following the 2025-26 season. McKeown’s contract was initially set to expire at the end of the 2024-25 season, meaning he signed a one-year extension.
McKeown, 68, has been Northwestern’s coach since 2008. He led the Wildcats to a Big Ten regular-season championship and won Big Ten Coach of the Year in 2020. In addition, he helped the team to NCAA tournament appearances in 2015 and 2021. However, the program has been on a downward spiral lately, combining for an 8-46 Big Ten record across the past three seasons.
Moreover, McKeown staying an extra year has several implications. If an internal decision has not been made about a replacement, potential recruits will have to factor in not knowing who their coach will be for most or all of their college careers. The same goes for transfers with more than one year of eligibility.
There’s also the question of how the search for McKeown’s replacement occurs — will it start right now, or will it happen after next season ends? Is there someone already waiting in the wings?
In this article, we analyze possible replacement candidates for McKeown. Everything written is purely speculative and reflects our thoughts only. It does not represent any information from Northwestern’s actual coaching search.
Tangela Smith, Northwestern associate head coach
If Northwestern were to hire from in-house, Smith would be the obvious choice. She’s served as McKeown’s second-in-command as associate head coach since 2022 and has been on staff since 2018. For a six-game stretch of the 2023-24 season when McKeown sat out with a health issue, Smith even took over as head coach, posting a 1-5 record.
Smith is the head of post-player development and skill development at Northwestern. Some of the most successful players she’s worked with include former All-Big Ten First Team forward and 2021/2024 Nigerian Olympian and 2019 WNBA draftee Pallas Kunaiyi-Akpanah (2015-19) and All-Big Ten First Team forward Abi Scheid (2016-20) — though neither player was recruited or started their careers with her on staff. This season, Northwestern graduate transfer forward Taylor Williams was one of two Wildcats to earn Honorable Mention All-Big Ten from the media.
In addition, Smith had a successful playing career, spending 15 years in the WNBA and winning two league championships with the Phoenix Mercury. However, as much as she’s accomplished with Northwestern, the team’s recent pitfalls could indicate that getting a fresh perspective from outside the program could be a better solution.
Carrie Moore, Harvard head coach
Moore’s head coaching stock is one of the fastest-rising in women’s college basketball. Since she just signed an extension with Harvard running until 2030, it will be difficult to lure her away from the program she built to success. However, she should be at the top of Northwestern athletic director Mark Jackson’s list of coaches to go after.
Since Moore joined Harvard as head coach in 2022, the Crimson has been on an upward trajectory. In her first season, the team improved from 13-14 to 20-12, its most wins since the 2016-17 season. Her latest season saw the Crimson finishing with a program-best 24-4 record (including a 90-75 defeat of Northwestern inside Welsh-Ryan arena), its first-ever Ivy League tournament championship and its first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2007. Guard Harmoni Turner, one of Moore’s best players, recently became the first Ivy Leaguer to win the Becky Hammon Mid-Major Player of the Year award.
Moore has Big Ten coaching experience, having coached at Michigan as an assistant from 2021 to 2022. She also played collegiately at Western Michigan from 2003 to 2007 and grew up in the state. Notably, Smith was also a WMU assistant between 2014 to 2018. Northwestern offers academic prestige comparable to Harvard but with more athletic department resources as a Big Ten program. Evanston could be an excellent way for Moore to return to the Midwest while getting started as a power conference head coach.
Carla Berube, Princeton head coach
Berube joined Princeton in 2019 after spending 17 seasons at DIII Tufts. During the 2019-20 season, she led the team to a 26-1 record and an undefeated Ivy League regular season before it shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She was named the 2019-20 Ivy League Coach of the Year for those successes The 2020-21 Ivy League season was canceled, but the Tigers have been in every NCAA Tournament since then, including two second-round appearances in 2022 and 2023. They’ve also won Ivy League regular season and tournament titles in 2022, 2023 and 2024.
Several great players have represented Princeton under Berbue’s tenure, including 2023 WNBA first-round draft pick Abby Meyers and three-time Ivy League tournament Most Outstanding Player Kaitlyn Chen, who is currently the starting point guard on UConn’s 2024-25 national championship game squad. As shown through 2023-24 men’s basketball transfer guard Ryan Langborg, the Princeton-to-Northwestern pipeline is real. In addition, the same logic about Northwestern being a Midwest Ivy-like university in a power conference applies to Berube the way it did to Moore.
The only downfall with Berube is that she may be destined for greener pastures than Evanston. As an alum of UConn, she told CT Insider last year that “she’d take the call” if her alma mater offered her a job. With current Huskies head coach Geno Auriemma likely in the waning stages of his career (his contract expires in 2029), Berbue could be in the sweepstakes to replace the all-time great.
Christie Sides, former Indiana Fever head coach
Last summer, Sides was perhaps the most-talked-about coach in the women’s basketball world. As the head coach of the WNBA’s Indiana Fever from 2023 to 2024, she had the high-pressure job of coaching star point guard Caitlin Clark in Clark’s rookie season. And while Sides’ 2024 Fever squad finished with a 20-20 record and made the WNBA playoffs for the first time since 2016, her tenure at Indiana didn’t come without criticism — she was widely scrutinized by Fever fans throughout the season. Sides parted ways with the Fever in October 2024, right before the front office hired Stephanie White as her replacement.
As crazy as it sounds, Sides isn’t an impossible get for Northwestern. She was an assistant under McKeown during the 2016-17 NCAA season and got promoted to associate head coach in the fall of 2017, but resigned right before the 2017-18 season to take an assistant job with the Fever. She was also an assistant for the Chicago Sky from 2011 to 2016. Evanston could be an opening for her to get back into the coaching world at a program she’s already familiar with. Much of Sides’ criticisms came from the lofty expectations of a fanbase and front office in championship-now mode, and the standard will surely be lower at Northwestern.
Sides has valuable experience working with some of the best young pros in the women’s game. However, the WNBA is not the same as college basketball, and her lack of recent power conference NCAA coaching experience (before NU, she was last a power conference assistant at LSU from 2004 to 2007) could be a concern. Because of her lack of reps working within the modern college system, it may not be in Northwestern’s best interest to hire her. But nothing is ever totally ruled out.
Carly Thibault-Dudonis, Fairfield head coach
At just 33 years old, Thibault-Dudonis is a mid-major coach on the rise. She took her first head coaching job with Fairfield in 2022 and has seen instant success, qualifying the Stags for their first NCAA Tournament since 2001 in her first season as head coach. Fairfield also saw tournament berths in 2022, 2023 and 2024; and won MAAC regular season and tournament titles in 2022, 2024 and 2025. During the 2023-24 season, Fairfield cracked the AP Top 25 for the first time in program history and Thibault-Dudonis won MAAC Coach of the Year.
Thibault-Dudonis comes from a family of coaches — her father, Mike, and her brother, Eric, both have WNBA head coaching experience. She also has Midwestern roots, as she was born in Omaha, Nebraska before moving to Connecticut in high school. Before Fairfield, she spent four seasons as an assistant at Minnesota, including two years as the associate head coach. She also had two-year stints at Mississippi State (she was on the Bulldogs’ 2017 and 2018 staff that made back-to-back NCAA championship games) and Eastern Michigan.
A struggling power conference program like Northwestern could be the next step up for Thibault-Dudonis’s coaching career, especially since it allows her to return to the Big Ten. However, with her contract at Fairfield lasting until after the 2029-30 season (on unknown terms), Northwestern athletic director Mark Jackson must offer her something worth more than a possible buyout.
Carla Morrow, Ohio State associate head coach
Morrow has been Ohio State’s associate head coach since 2019. While she has no head coaching experience, The Athletic named her an assistant ready to take the next step. The Buckeyes have been one of the better teams in the Big Ten while Morrow was there, qualifying for four NCAA Tournaments and going as far as the Elite Eight in 2023. In addition, they won the Big Ten regular-season title in 2022 and 2024.
Before her time in Columbus, Morrow was an assistant with the Chicago Sky from 2017 to 2019 — like Sides, she’s also familiar with the Windy City region. During her time with the Sky, they made the second round of the WNBA playoffs with a 20-5 regular season record in 2019. She also served as an assistant coach for Xavier for ten years from 2007 to 2017.
If Northwestern wants to look at second-in-command coaches across the Big Ten, Morrow is a great choice. She has experience with one of the most successful teams in the conference and spent her entire coaching career in the Midwest — it’s only a matter of time before she gets promoted to head coach.