Valkyries' Natalie Nakase is learning her limits: ‘I don't know how to turn it off'
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Rarely in any sport is such a vulnerable moment captured for the world to see.
Television cameras zoomed in on her face as she pleaded with officials, then Golden State Valkyries head coach Natalie Nakase dropped from the frame.
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She crumpled to the ground holding her head, brow furrowed, as assistant coaches rushed to her aid and helped her up. Then in an instant, she picked up her marker and white board, drew up a play and coached the Valkyries through a nailbiter, clinching Game 3 win against the Dallas Wings.
The collapse was due to "a little bit" of exhaustion, she'd later explain.
A scary scene for those tuning in, but her moment of utter intensity was unsurprising to those who know Nakase best.
"She is a little mighty mouse workhorse," said Las Vegas Aces head coach Becky Hammon, who hired Nakase away from the Los Angeles Clippers to be her assistant coach in 2022. "There's no doubt about that."
Those who've seen her rise know Nakase thrives when pushed to her limit, from a promising basketball mind at Marina High and walk-on star at UCLA to valued member on NBA and WNBA staffs and Coach of the Year with the Valkyries. They also weren't surprised to see her bounce back up and work.
"The stress this time of year is real. The pressure," Hammon said. "You don't get a lot of sleep. You aren't eating as well as you probably should. There are a lot of factors. It was kind of scary to watch and that little sucker popped right back up on that marker and kept it pushing. She's tough."
Athletes and coaches alike so often try to explain the process of winning; how they pour themselves into the tedious details and spend countless hours training their bodies and minds into the late hours and early mornings.
It's a somewhat glamorized way to explain the disorientation a season presents, especially when a title is within reach: Quick turnarounds, high stakes, long days in the film room, sweaty practices, wrestling with ideas and concerns that puncture the night's sleep.
There's little rest for the successful, just ways to try to manage it.
"I'm going to be completely honest. No. Not until after the season," said Hammon, asked if she takes care of her mental health during the season. "I wait until after the season to check the mental. We got doctors around so if I have to pop in and see them, I can pop in and see them but I try to avoid doctors and everyone else during the season. I'm kind of a lone loner."
Pushing the mental limit can be endemic for coaches, and Nakase has been honest about her struggle to give herself a break. Before her second year at the Valkyries' helm - months after winning Coach of the Year for leading the franchise to the playoffs in its inaugural season - Nakase knew exactly what she needed to do to evolve. Not just for her players, but for herself: Prioritizing mental-health balance with a healthy dose of sleep every day.
At the All-Star break, after a loss to the Washington Mystics, she told reporters she was having trouble sticking to it.
"I'm battling that," Nakase said then. "I'm just going to be really, really honest. I wasn't at my best today because I don't think I did the proper rest and recovery. I have to figure it out.
"That's where I leaned on my mentors. That's why I called Ty Lue before the game today. Steve (Kerr) even advised me sometimes, when you sleep, to write down your thoughts if a thought comes up, because my mind keeps going. I don't know how to turn it off."
Assistant coach Kasib Powell explained how her work ethic has seeped into her assistants' lives. He told the Chronicle in August he will get text messages with questions, answers or any stray thoughts from Nakase in the sleeping hours or on an off-day designed to think of anything other than basketball.
"She's locked into it pretty much every minute of the day," Powell said. "So just being around her, you kind of get that energy as well. … You don't want to let her down. You want to do as much work as she does - if not more at times - to be able to help her out in spots.
"It's kind of nonstop for us, but in a way it's healthy for us, you know?"
Nakase's obsession comes from her father, Gary, who died in 2021. Her dad was a basketball junkie and Nakase's hero. Growing up in Southern California, basketball was the father-daughter duo's religion.
"All I knew was playing basketball every single day because he played," Nakase told reporters in her Valkyries introduction last year. "He made us play every single day. That's all we knew. Because he was passionate about the sport, I became passionate about the sport."
Nakase, 46, didn't grow up the prototypical basketball player, particularly because she's undersized, standing 5-foot-2. Underrecruited despite leading Marina (Orange County) to its first section title in 1998, Nakase was bullish on playing for the Bruins and managed to walk on. After tearing her ACL a year later, she worked to become the starting point guard by her senior year.
Before she became the WNBA's first Asian American head coach in 2025, she broke a few other glass ceilings. Her first was in the early 2000s, when she played for the San Jose Spiders to become the first Asian American player in the now defunct National Women's Basketball League.
After retiring as a player, Nakase coached in Germany, then went back to her roots to coach the Tokyo Apache and Saitama Broncos in Japan. She came home to reignite her NBA dreams.
The Los Angeles Clippers needed to spruce up their video team, so they brought in a group of candidates to work around the team during summer league workouts and draw up notes for the coaching staff to review. Nakase's notes were exactly what head coach Vinny Del Negro wanted to see.
"I knew she was thinking the right way, and I thought it meshed with what we were trying to do," Del Negro said in a phone conversation. "That's when I made the decision, and the rest is history."
Del Negro soon discovered Nakase was no ordinary video intern. She was all in.
"She was a gym rat. She was meticulous in her approach in terms of wanting to figure out her path - offensively, defensively, philosophies and the things that she feels comfortable doing in her own skin," he said. "She was always well prepared. She was always taking notes, and she was a student of the game."
She rose through the Clippers' ranks, serving as an assistant for their G League team for several seasons until Hammon brought her onto her Aces staff in 2022. That's where Nakase got her championship experience, winning twice with the Aces in 2022 and 2023.
Aces assistant Charlene Thomas-Swinson, who has coached basketball for 36 years, remembers long nights preparing with Nakase and Tyler Marsh, now the Chicago Sky head coach, in those years.
"It starts with defense," Thomas-Swinson said. "She's always been high on being able to help players understand the discipline they have to have on defense. It's something she always had in her and was innate with that. More importantly, she's a strategist and is able to understand the game and look at loopholes of other teams and attack in a way that allows your team to at least be in the fight."
With that kind of skill, head coaching called.
This second trek through the postseason brings her full circle, playing against the reigning champion Aces in the semifinals, now two wins from a berth in the WNBA Finals.
Hammon sees Nakase's fingerprints all over this Valkyries team. Her passion is contagious.
"I think the buy-in from her team is special," Hammon said. "If you put all 44 games together, all 44 of the regular season, I don't know that there's a team that played harder than her team, every 44 games and that's a tribute to her. That's a tribute to them.
"It's kind of the highest compliment I can give you, especially in a professional sports setting, where games can be monotonous at times during the season. Hard to get up for some games at times, but I think they do. There's something they built culturally that is to be respected."
Said Del Negro: "Natalie is all in. I mean, that's just her personality, and she was like that as a player. She's been like that her whole life … and you can tell they feed off of her energy because they know they're well prepared."
That Nakase reaching her limit right on the Valkyries' home court illustrates just how intense she is. And how thin a line can grow between passion and overextension.
"That's the standard," Thomas-Swinson said. "It puts you in opportunities to be in conversations when you're taking teams to the Finals."
When the series resumes with Game 2 on Wednesday at Chase Center, she'll wear a heart monitor, check her Oura ring and think again about what her father would say.
"He was an extremely hard-working man, I followed in his footsteps and I thrive in that," Nakase said. "He told me, ‘Natalie, do not ever let your career ever get involved in your mental health or your health get complicated.' So when that happened, it was a wakeup call for me.
"What I'm going to do, what my dad didn't do, was get proactive … I understand this job for me, I love it. Sometimes I love it too much to the point where I overwork. I just want to make sure I'm being smart."
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