▶ Watch Video: Valkyries’ Coach Natalie Nakase reflects on her Los Angeles roots
Long before becoming the Golden State Valkyries head coach, Natalie Nakase was already spending most of her time on the court. She could be found at an Orange County basketball court on any given night in the 1980s.
She and her sisters took score during their father’s Japanese American pickup basketball games.
Gary Nakase co-founded the league. He would take his three daughters with him to make sure they were learning the sport analytically.
“My mom said, ‘If you go play basketball two times a week, you’re taking the three little girls,'” Nakase told CBS News Bay Area in a sit-down interview.
Basketball was life for the Nakase family. No sleepovers, no vacations. The sport was the priority.
“I thought that was my normal childhood,” she said. “Now I look, and he was training me for this moment.”
Nakase is the first Asian American WNBA coach, but before even entering the world of coaching, she was a great basketball player.
Her older sisters, Nicola and Norie, played at Marina High School in Huntington Beach. Nicola had graduated by the time Natalie was entering as a freshman. Norie was set to be a senior, but it looked unlikely that they would play together based on a rule head coach Pete Bonny had.
“He thought there was no way I was going to make varsity,” Nakase said. “He said, ‘I don’t put freshman on varsity.'”
More than 25 years after he coached his final game there, Bonny strolled into Marina High School on a Sunday afternoon before the Valkyries faced the Los Angeles Sparks. He looked around the gym, locating the banners with the many accolades he won there.
He coached at Marina High for a decade, racking up six league titles. A demanding coach, he wasn’t sold on a player he had never seen despite the rave reviews he was hearing about her in 1995.
“Everyone said, ‘You’re getting this really great point guard.’ And I thought, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,'” Bonny said.
It didn’t take long for him to realize what he had in the youngest Nakase. During a June practice well before the school year began, he lined up the returning varsity players on one court and the incoming freshman team on another.
As Nakase remembers, she didn’t even last a single hour with the other freshmen.
“I think I spent 30 minutes on the JV court, and he was like, ‘OK, let’s see it,'” Nakase said.
Bonny was sold.
“I watched for about 45 seconds and I said, ‘Number 11, you’re going to be on this side for the next four years,'” he said.
Making the varsity squad was the easiest part of her four years at Marina High School. Bonny pushed Nakase to her limits, making practices tougher than games.
“My high school coaches were tough,” she said. “We played up-tempo basketball. If we didn’t play hard and with pace, we would get yelled at. We had a lot of victories because of the practices we had.”
All of that hard work paid off in 1998. Marina High School won its first CIF Section Title in program history, and Nakase was named the County Player of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and Orange County Register.
“It was all about winning championships,” she said. “I’d rather win and not be an All Star or MVP, that meant more.”
When asked about her importance to the 1998 team, Bonny couldn’t help but laugh.
“That was really the epitome of a team,” he said. “She was the choreographer. Defensively, she told people what to do, and offensively, she put people in their place.
The 5-foot-1 point guard left Marina as the all-time leader in career assists, steals and three-point shots made. She walked on at UCLA and started three years and then played pro ball.
Eventually, she felt a calling to coaching. It didn’t take long before she recognized Bonny in herself.
“Him giving up his time, I think that has impacted me,” she said. “I love giving my time on the court to the players. I would say I’m a mirror image of him.”
Many of the lessons learned from Bonny helped her score opportunities with the Los Angeles Clippers and then later in the WNBA, where she was an assistant with the Las Vegas Aces.
Before the Valkyries came calling, Nakase and Bonny reunited inside that Marina High gym in 2024, when the school retired her number. She became the first girls’ basketball player to be honored in that way.
“There’ve been a lot of great players throughout the years, but as far as basketball, when you think of Marina High School girls’ basketball, that’s kind of one of the first names that jumps out,” Bonny said of Nakase.
She continues to represent her roots, now on a national stage. While she’s busy living out her dream in the Bay Area, she has acted as a hero to many in Southern California who look up to her.
“I would have never thought that going after my passion and doing it as a job would ever inspire people,” Nakase said. “It means the world that I can impact someone by just following my passion.”