Toronto Tempo head coach Sandy Brondello speaks during a preview event at Coca-Cola Coliseum in Toronto ahead of the team's inaugural season.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Long before she became a player-turned-coach in the WNBA, Sandy Brondello earned her muscle on the family sugar cane farm in Australia.
Standing in fields in knee-deep mud just outside of Mackay, Queensland, the youngest of four kids pitched in to move irrigation pipes some 15 metres long. The Australian honed her basketball skills on the farm too on a makeshift hoop her dad built at the base of a water tank.
He painted some boards white with a black square and added a hoop for his daughter – initially a shy girl who attended a primary school of just 50 kids. Her grass court on the farm wasn’t ideal for dribbling, and the overhead water tank prevented her from doing layups, but Brondello could catch and shoot. She crafted what would later become her money shot in professional and international basketball – a one-bounce pull-up.
She’s gone on to be an Olympian, a late WNBA draft pick turned all-star, then a coach who built championship teams in Phoenix and New York and had a fashion magazine writing about her “effortless swag.” Now, at 57, Brondello has arguably her biggest challenge as the inaugural head coach of the expansion Toronto Tempo, the league’s first franchise outside the United States.
Tempo centre Temi Fagbenle doesn’t want team to be limited by expansion status
Brondello had other WNBA coaching offers for this season – reportedly including the Dallas Wings and Seattle Storm – but, feeling connected to general manager and fellow former player Monica Wright Rogers, she chose the Tempo.
“I’ve never done an expansion, and I love the idea of doing it in a whole new country,” Brondello told The Globe and Mail in a recent interview from her home in Phoenix just before arriving in Toronto for training camp.
“How cool is that? That’s very unique. I get to build something from the ground up, and I know how hard that is, but I’m ready for the challenge. ... I want to keep winning championships. I want to win another one so it can be with the three different teams.”
While she hasn’t coached an expansion team before, Brondello did play for two of them, so she can relate to the Tempo players she’s now coaching, who have all arrived in a new WNBA market not knowing what to expect, ready to create a team from scratch.
(L-R) Toronto Tempo general manager Monica Wright Rogers, head coach Brondello and team president Teresa Resch.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
In 1998, after Brondello starred in the WNBL (Australia’s women’s pro league) and helped her country to a bronze medal at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the expansion Detroit Shock picked her in the fourth round of the WNBA draft. While grateful to be chosen, the 5-foot-7 guard knew she was better than a 34th overall pick. Shock head coach Nancy Lieberman showed Brondello the toughest training camp of her life, but she soon found her way in the WNBA. By 1999, the Aussie earned a selection to the league’s first-ever all-star game.
But in 2000, she was taken in the expansion draft, selected by the Indiana Fever then swiftly traded to the Miami Sol.
“I’m a true Australian. I don’t get too high or too low, and I just make the most of every opportunity that comes my way,” said Brondello. “It could have been nerve wracking, but it wasn’t for me. I love playing basketball. It was all about playing and these unique experiences.”
Brondello with the Australian team at the 2018 FIBA Women's Basketball World Cup.JAVIER SORIANO/AFP/Getty Images
Her final season on court was 2003 in Seattle, where she played alongside Sue Bird and Australian star Lauren Jackson. After retiring she launched into coaching, landing as an assistant with the San Antonio Silver Stars by 2005. It led to the one regret from her coaching career – accepting her first head-coaching job there in 2010, while pregnant with her second child for a team down to one coach and one assistant. The team lost in the first round of the playoffs and fired her.
“I thought I was Superwoman. I wasn’t quite,” said Brondello. “Travelling and trying to work, and my first-year experience. But still it was a great experience, because it put me in a leadership role.”
She was an assistant for the Los Angeles Sparks before the Phoenix Mercury hired her as head coach in 2014 – a magical season. Led by Diana Taurasi, Brittney Griner, DeWanna Bonner and Penny Taylor, Brondello’s team went 29-5 and swept the Chicago Sky in the WNBA Finals. She was named WNBA coach of the year.
At the 2024 Paris Olympics, Brondello coached Australia to bronze, the nation’s first Olympic medal in women’s hoops since 2012, underscoring her ability to return the Opals to the elite of international basketball (and adding another medal after her three earned as a player).
She also guided the New York Liberty, loaded with stars like Breanna Stewart, Sabrina Ionescu and Jonquel Jones to the 2024 WNBA title.
Brondello during a New York Liberty-Phoenix Mercury game in New York, June, 2023.Bebeto Matthews/The Associated Press
During Brondello’s time in New York, Ionescu and Stewart encouraged their coach to elevate her outfits for patrolling the sidelines at the Barclay Center in the fast-growing fashion-forward WNBA. So Brondello enlisted the help of a fashion designer to choose her gameday fits – everything from power suits to barrel-legged jeans and matching jackets.
“She’s just swaggy,” Ionescu said in a press conference after Brondello’s outfits were featured in a 2025 edition of fashion magazine Marie Claire, which dubbed the Aussie coach “the WNBA’s latest style MVP.”
It surprised many when the Liberty did not renew Brondello after the 2025 season. It ended in a first-round playoff exit, but she’d been the winningest coach in their franchise history.
Now she has arrived in Toronto, a city that’s already embraced women’s professional hockey, and has long been salivating for its own women’s pro basketball team.
Her team is busy in its first week of training camp, with the opening preseason game next week, and the inaugural game on May 8. Now she must bring together a group of players just settling into the city, a roster built through the expansion draft and free agency, plus youngsters just selected in the WNBA draft.
“She’s a players’ coach, like, she’s fun to talk to. She gets after it. She gets on you,” said Toronto’s veteran guard, Brittney Sykes. “Even if you did something wrong, you don’t feel like you did something wrong. It’s just a teaching moment.”
Tempo centre Temi Fagbenle doesn’t want team to be limited by expansion status
The Tempo were just able to select players in the last couple of weeks, after off-season business was delayed due to the months-long negotiations between the WNBA and its players on a transformative new collective bargaining agreement that has earned players much bigger pay. Brondello has adopted a “be quick, but don’t hurry” philosophy while players are learning about each other, and the style of basketball the coach wants to play
“She never gets too high and never gets too low, and I think especially for someone like me, that really helps,” said Tempo guard Marina Mabrey. “Because she’s not, like, reacting to things, so it’s easy to kind of feel like a sense of poise and calm.”
Brondello’s husband, Olaf Lange, a two-time WNBA champion himself and head coach of the German national team, is on her Tempo staff as associate head coach. The family, including teenage kids Brody and Jayda, who both also play basketball, have kept a homebase in Phoenix for years so the kids had consistency in both school and friends. Lange and Brondello come and go from Phoenix, and the teens often join their parents with their WNBA club too.
“I am a mother too, and that’s very important for me, and I want to be the best at that role too,” said Brondello. “Sometimes I have mother’s guilt too, because you’re not there as much as you want. But our kids are very mature. They love what we do. They’re with us whenever they can.”
The family will come and go from a place in downtown Toronto.
“A lot of people keep telling me how great the summer is in Toronto,” said Brondello. “Friends will come and go, and we love that. So we’ve got people saying ‘I’m coming to visit.’ Well, no problem. Let’s go.”