It is an understatement to label Arizona State women’s basketball assistant coach Nikki Blue as more than just a basketball coach.
Coming from a basketball family, playing basketball was a no brainer for the first-year Sun Devil assistant coach.
“I come from a basketball family where my uncle (Carl Tony) was a star,” Blue said. “He actually…went into training camp with the Clippers back in the 70s. My mom was a star in high school. I have several cousins that were all-state.”
Growing up in 1980s Bakersfield, California, Blue was close enough to Los Angeles to be enthralled at a young age with the “Showtime” Lakers and Magic Johnson. Having these Lakers’ teams on television growing up also contributed to Blue’s love for the game.
“…I was around basketball constantly and it was constantly on TV,” Blue stated. “And this was the era of Magic Johnson and the Lakers and the Showtime and all that stuff. And so I just fell in love with it then. And Magic Johnson with the number 32 and all the fancy passes. I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”
After a great high school career at West High School in Bakersfield, Blue had a couple of options to play Division I in college. She was recruited heavily by perennial power Connecticut but decided against playing for Geno Auriemma. She decided to stay close to home and play for UCLA, a team that had finished 10-20 in 2001-2002, the year before what would be Blue’s freshman year.
Blue said she chose UCLA over UCONN because she liked the “idea of establishing a program” and loved the campus.
During her time at UCLA, her team’s flipped the script on the program’s identity, making the NCAA tournament in both 2004 and 2006.
Individually, Blue had an incredible career. During her time with the Bruins, she was an All-American and a four-time All-Pac-10 selection, giving her the opportunity to live out her childhood dream of playing in the WNBA.
“…Ever since the WNBA came out in… ’97, I was glued to the TV,” Blue said. “That’s all I wanted to do was play in the WNBA. When I woke up, that’s all I thought about. When I went and played on the playground…the countdown 5,4,3,2,1. I was envisioning that I was in the WNBA and when the opportunity came in the 2006 draft when I got selected 19th overall, it was a dream come true.”
Blue went on to play in the WNBA from 2006-2010 with the Washington Mystics and New York Liberty, an experience she will cherish for the rest of her life.
“I was great being able to learn from those players,” Blue said...”I got a chance to play against my all-time favorite player, Lisa Leslie, for the Sparks and I went and tried to poke a rebound from her and she gave a mean elbow and almost took my face off. So then, she wasn’t my favorite player anymore.”
In 2008, while still playing in the WNBA, Blue took a job with UNLV as an assistant coach under her former coach at UCLA, Kathy Olivier.
“My coach that was at UCLA, Kathy Olivier, got the head coaching position at UNLV and she asked me if I was interested in getting into coaching and I thought about it and I said yeah, sure, I would love to at least try and I didn't know that it was going to be my profession,” Blue said. “I thought I was going to play basketball forever and maybe coaching was something that I might do and maybe I'll just do something else but it ended up being an experience that I just fell in love with…the players and…the programs that I've been in and I've had an amazing experience…”
Blue coached at UNLV from 2008-2014 and said it was a learning experience with it being her first coaching job. Her time in Las Vegas was also marred with tragedy as she lost her beloved cousin, Tia Gay, the day after Thanksgiving in 2010 due to heart failure.
“We were more like sisters than cousins,” Blue explained. “We were two years apart. We would go to church together. We grew up together in my grandmother's house, under the same roof. We did everything together. When I got older, she was down at UCLA…during my college career every weekend…”
Gay left three children when she passed and Blue said it was not even a question to help raise her kids.
“…It was a no brainer…helping raising her kids because I knew she would do the same for me if something were to happen to me and I had kids,” Blue explained. “But her mother, which is my aunt is…she's their primary guardian. And so we just made an agreement wherever I went, that her (my aunt) and the kids would go. And so, I don't call them my cousins. I call them my kids.”
Blue’s time at UNLV was also marked with the birth of her own child, Cali. This meant she would be raising her own child along with her cousin’s three, all while coaching Division I basketball.
Blue said there is no such thing as balance with her busy life but said the kids are great at understanding the demands of her job as a coach.
“…Balance is a tricky word because I don't think that there is a balance,” Blue explained. “You can't say I’ll give 50/50 here and 50/50 there. There’s 100 percent love, 100 percent of the time…My cousins are my kids. So they get the same attention as my daughter. They are so great with my work and my job and the demands of it. So they know when I'm at home on recruiting calls to be quiet but they also know that if they need anything that everything shuts down for them. And so I guess that's the balance. But there's really no balance…with the house full like I have. There's chaos but we have loved so it works.”
Blue left UNLV in 2014 to be closer to her family in Bakersfield, taking a job as the highest-ranking assistant coach on the bench at California State Bakersfield. During her time with the Roadrunners, she helped the school to a 23-win season and a WNIT appearance in 2014-15.
In 2017, Blue was contacted by a former teammate of hers, Nicole Powell, who is the head coach at Grand Canyon University, to take a job as the top assistant and recruiting coordinator for the Lopes.
Blue said her love for the Phoenix area and the Arizona weather led her to take the job at GCU and move, along with the kids and her aunt, to the Phoenix valley.
After two seasons at GCU, Arizona State came calling after Sun Devil assistant coach and current Phoenix Mercury guard Briann January decided to resume playing overseas in the WNBA offseason.
Blue said taking the job with ASU was an easy decision because she would be coaching under ASU head coach Charli Turner Thorne, a coach she admires tremendously.
Turner Thorne said while Blue is a great coach, her character was what made her decide to bring Blue on.
“I think she's an incredible person, which was obviously part of why we hired her here,” Turner Thorne stated. “It wasn't that she was a great basketball player. And…she's a very talented up and coming coach. But probably first and foremost was just knowing what kind of person she is. I don't you know…how many people do that? She's…got her own good kid and she's a single mom and to adopt three more children is amazing. And she handles it with incredible grace and works her tail off and, yeah, she's done a great job for us.”
Blue said coaching in the Pac-12 has made her grow as a coach and “better professionally.”
Turner Thorne has seen this growth.
“I think every week…just got more comfortable with everybody here, the players, coaching staff, support staff and feeling more and more confident to just give everything she can give, Turner Thorne said. “And that's been fun because she's got a lot to give. And I don't like yes people. I don't hire yes people. Like don't come to our staff meetings and sit there and take your little notes…what do you think, let's go. I don't plan an hour, an hour and a half of my day for a staff meeting (to) talk at people. So I'm not about that. And so I'm encouraging her and she's really responded well and contributed a ton.”
ASU senior guard Robbi Ryan said the experience Blue brings has been beneficial.
“We love her,” Ryan said. “We love to have around and she's super knowledgeable, obviously, and has had a great experience playing at UCLA…and then played in the league. So she definitely has not just the coaching experience but the playing experience also. So…it's great to learn from her every day.”
