Nell Fortner had already won an Olympic gold medal before she ever coached a game in Indianapolis. The Fever named her their first head coach and general manager in August 1999, but she was committed to USA Basketball through Sydney. Anne Donovan ran the bench for the 2000 expansion season. Fortner came home from the Olympics with the gold around her neck and took over the Fever for 2001.
Her first official act for the franchise was the one that mattered. With the third overall pick in the 2001 WNBA Draft she chose Tamika Catchings, the Tennessee senior who had torn her ACL in January and would miss her entire rookie season. Other front offices flinched at the injury. Fortner took her anyway. The Vault is, in many ways, the house that pick built.
The team she actually coached on the floor those first two years was the team without Catchings. The 2001 Fever finished 10 — 22. The 2002 group, with Catchings finally healthy, went 16 — 16, broke .500 for the first time in franchise history, and reached the playoffs as a five seed. Catchings won Rookie of the Year. Fortner had handed the franchise its identity in a single April afternoon and then spent two seasons coaching it into being.
The 2003 Fever slipped back to 16 — 18 and missed the playoffs. Fortner resigned after the season with a 42 — 56 overall mark in Indianapolis. She moved into broadcasting at ESPN through 2004, then took the Auburn job in April of that year. She coached the Tigers for eight seasons, won an SEC regular-season title in 2009, went back to ESPN for seven years, and ran the Georgia Tech program from 2019 until she retired in the spring of 2025. She is back at ESPN now, calling SEC games.
The long view is the only one that does her tenure justice. Fortner was the head coach for two and a half seasons. She left in 2003. The franchise she handed to her successor was built on a 6-foot-1 wing who could guard four positions and play every possession like the building was on fire. Every banner this team has ever raised — 2012, 2015, the ones the current group is chasing — runs back through the Catchings pick.
The Vault keeps her here because the coach who picked Tamika Catchings is the coach who built every era that came after.