After graduating with a J.D. from Boston University in 2001 and taking a job at the Department of Labor and then the financial services company Fidelity, Sonia Raman thought she would forever be a lawyer.
Then, in 2008, she left behind a career in corporate law to become a women’s basketball coach.
“I really loved my day job at Fidelity, but I think (my) passion was in coaching,” Raman, 51, told CNBC Make It. “Basketball kept drawing me back.”
It was a “calculated risk,” she says, and it seems to have paid off. Raman was named the next head coach of the WNBA’s Seattle Storm on October 28. She is the first Indian-American to hold a head coaching position in the league.
Raman, who joined Tufts University’s Division III basketball team as an undergraduate, said he first became interested in coaching during his junior year, when he was out with a serious injury.
Her “love for the game really started to evolve into a coaching lens,” she says, when she started spending her free time reviewing video of her team’s upcoming opponents, taking notes to share with her team to help them get competitive.
Coaching was always meant to be a part-time passion
Mr. Raman has always coached basketball in some capacity since graduating from college in 1996, including coaching youth teams while in law school and coaching summer league teams while in law school.
As an attorney on Fidelity’s risk and compliance team, she spent weekdays advising nonprofit organizations on sponsored retirement plans and nights working as an assistant coach for Wellesley College’s women’s team.
“Playing different roles was enough to keep me inspired from morning till night,” she says.
For six years, she says, she would rush from work to Wellesley, bag in her car, quickly change into sportswear and be on time for her team’s scheduled practices.
Although Wellesley College’s head coach continued to encourage her to pursue coaching full-time, she says balancing her assistant position with her job at Fidelity was a sustainable lifestyle that she enjoyed.
take a pay cut to bet on yourself
Then a great opportunity presented itself at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The school was looking for a head women’s basketball coach who could also lead the athletic department’s compliance team.
Although the pay cut meant she was no longer eligible for taxes at Fidelity, she says the trade-off was worth it because “it ended up not being as bad as I thought it would be.”
“I felt like I was betting on myself and investing in my own growth and passion for what I really wanted to do,” she says. “I also felt like I was impacting people’s lives in a much more fulfilling way than anything I had ever done before.”
After 12 seasons at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was twice named Women’s Basketball Coach of the Year in the New England Women’s Athletic Conference and Men’s Athletic Conference, she left in 2020 to become an assistant coach with the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies. Last season, he served as an assistant coach at WBNA for the New York Liberty.
“If you’re going to preach a growth mindset, you need to practice it.”
Always a big fan of planning and preparation, Raman said leaving a career as a lawyer was the biggest decision he had ever made because it was “completely out of place and off track.” Despite her doubts, she said, she also knew she could make a career out of basketball and that she had a law degree to fall back on even in the worst case scenario.
She says intentionally pushing herself outside her comfort zone – an important trait she frequently encourages her players to embrace – also forced her to change her personal way of thinking about uncertainty.
“If I’m going to preach a growth mindset, if I’m going to preach getting better every day and accepting failure, then I need to practice that,” Raman says.
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