Life in the WNBA wasn't all that bad for nine-year veteran Mistie Bass.
On a typical weekday with the Phoenix Mercury the past three seasons, Bass would wake up at a fairly normal hour and head to morning practice. By the time she was done with her team workouts and individual work obligations on a non-game day, she'd be home by 1 p.m. just in time to take a nap.
It's been a while since she's lived a day quite like that.
Now a graduate assistant for IU women's basketball, Bass regularly clocks in well beyond the typical 40-hour work week in and around IU's Cook Hall practice facility. Her duties include — but are not limited to — handling dirty laundry, ensuring the players have food to eat and making sure everything on road trips gets where it needs to go when it needs to be there all on top of on-the-court coaching and class.
There is little in the form of luxury while being a graduate assistant.
"I miss my naps. I really do" Bass says, laughing after wrapping up practice at Cook Hall.
"There is no napping in coaching."
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Bass knows her playing career is nearing an end, but the 2014 WNBA Champion isn't quite ready to leave basketball.
If she gets her way, she'll never leave basketball.
Entering the world of coaching made a great deal of sense in Bass's mind. She's always prided herself in being a "player coach" on the floor, guiding teammates during games and at practices like an extension of her head coach. So last year, she started looking at what options were available.
Lin Dunn, a longtime coach who guided the Indiana Fever to a WNBA Championship in 2012 who is now an assistant at Kentucky, suggested Bass looked at a graduate assistant role. She knew Teri Moren was looking to add one to her staff and suggested Bass take a look at the Hoosiers, who she knew little about.
"(Dunn) told me Coach Moren had an opening and that it could be a really interesting situation given that Indiana is on its way up," Bass said. "I would be trying to take this team to another level with my championship experiencing and my professional experience. Coach Moren thought I could really help her team in this type of situation, so I decided to give it a go."
For Moren, the opportunity to hire such an accomplished professional was a no-brainer.
WNBA veterans don't just walk into Cook Hall's doors asking for entry-level coaching jobs every day.
"I thought she was going to be great for us," Moren said.
It is strange, though, the hire. Generally speaking, graduate assistants are typically fresh out of college or just a couple of years removed from school. Eddie Praley, IU's other graduate assistant, graduated from Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 2015.
Bass, 33, graduated from Duke in 2006 before going to the Houston Comets in the second round of the WNBA Draft. Now she’s back in the classroom after a decade away working toward a Masters Degree in Education Leadership all while adjusting to a different perspective on the floor as a coach and not a player.
Bass effectively went from the highest level of women's basketball in the United States to the lowest rung on the college coaching ladder in a matter of months. But along the way, she's recalled advice legendary Stanford coach Tara Vanderveer once passed along.
"When you're a coach, there's no job too big and no job too small," Vanderveer told Bass.
Not even a graduate assistant job.
"Your job is basically to give what you were taking as a professional," Bass said. "So it's been a learning experience that's been very, very humbling."
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Those WNBA mid-afternoon naps? They're gone.
Bass arrives at work around 7:30 a.m. and sometimes doesn't leave until 8 p.m. She lives a real-life version of the old adage, "First one in, last one out" and isn't slowing down any time soon.
"If you want to be a coach, I think the best place to start is being a graduate assistant," Moren said. "Because you really get your hands in a lot of things, and you really figure out from there if this is the lifestyle you want to be in."
The list of things Bass doesn't touch is probably shorter than her actual job itinerary, she jokes. But she's getting what she signed up for.
"I'm getting thrown everything inside the lines and outside the lines, which coach gave me full disclosure of before I came in," she said. "Coach Moren said that she'd be giving me everything, and she's done that."
Away from the practice court, Bass designs and lays out the playbook for each game. On road trips, she's the one making sure everything gets from the bus to the plane to the hotel to the bus again and eventually to the stadium. Then she reverses it and does it again.
On the floor, she's in charge of the all-male practice squad that serves as the Hoosiers' scout team. She'll also work with individual players, focusing predominantly on the posts, to make sure individual players have all the tools they need to grow.
It's the on-floor activity that Bass said has been the most rewarding part of her job. It's that moment where a player says, "I got it," and proves that she can do it that makes the hours of behind-the-scenes repetitions when nobody's watching worth it.
Take for example sophomore forward Kym Royster. She was struggling with a particular move in the post, so Royster and Bass set off together working on a combination of things in practice to get an open look.
Then, one game, Royster got the ball in the post and had her chance to show her growth with all the lights on. Royster faked one way, dribbled to the middle, made a jump stop and then rose up to finish through contact.
To an unknowing onlooker, it appeared to be a move Royster could do in her sleep. Far from it.
"It was like, one of the greatest moves we've seen her make," Bass said, speaking clearly with pride as she retold the story. "But it was something we worked on again and again and again. That right there? To see it all pay off and for her to smile? That's what's rewarding to me."
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Bass stays relatively quiet during practices, mostly keeping to herself and passing words of advice along in practice.
When she wants to pass along tips, she pulls a player aside and gives her hands-on instruction just as she did for Royster. As a graduate assistant, Bass lets Moren and her assistants run the show while injecting whatever she can as she sees fit.
"She brings instant credibility," Moren said. "So when she speaks, I think our kids do listen a little more intently."
What Bass lacks in coaching experience, she makes up for in playing experience. She's worked under the guidance of more head coaches than she can count and oftentimes finds herself having flashbacks to her own playing career during the middle of IU practices.
When she sees something like a post play or a scheme that reminds her of something she's already played against, she speaks up. She shares her story of what happened and translates it onto the Hoosiers' floor.
"She's somebody you can really look up to," junior forward Amanda Cahill said. "It's kind of interesting to hear the stories and just listen to her talk."
As a coach, Bass said it can become easy to forget just how hard playing can be. She keeps a keen mind on paying attention to body language and the smallest details. When she sees a player like Cahill or anyone on the floor have even the most minute alteration in facial expression, she pounces and tries to see what's wrong.
That's where the Masters Degree in Education starts to kick in.
"I can latch onto things," Bass said. "I can read people very well, so when I see something I can relate right there. That's huge for me."
Perhaps her most impressive work has been with sophomore forward Danielle Williams, who has yet to get her game in shape to see any worthwhile minutes in games. Bass has taken it upon herself to work with Williams to a point where she was physically and mentally in the best shape she's been in up until having to undergo a recent knee scope.
Bass watched on as Williams reached new levels of agility, shed 20 pounds and seemed poised to be on the track to impacting the team sooner rather than later. The knee scope was a setback, no doubt, but the growth Bass saw in Williams helped her feel accomplished as a teacher and coach.
Sometimes, it's those private sessions that make all the difference.
Truth be told, Bass isn't ready to give up her playing career quite yet.
"I'm not ready to give it up," she said.
Bass makes sure she stays in shape so that whenever she's ready to jump back into the professional ranks she can but is also expecting her first child at some point in 2017, which will set her training off.
Retirement isn't something she's ready to accept yet, but reality is sinking in that coaching will be the next leg of her basketball journey as soon as she decides to hang up the jersey for good.
"Whatever my next contract I sign is will probably be the last," she said. "It's just hard. I'm not ready to stop yet."
So she doesn't. A graduate assistant hardly ever stops.
Bass's ultimate goal is to get into a head coaching position. She knows the next step after two years of being a graduate assistant is to jump into an assistant role but doesn't like to think like that. She's always setting her eyes on the ultimate goal and moves toward it as quickly as she can no matter what route it takes to get there.
Case in point: Bass never expected to return to school.
She never expected to be working at Indiana.
She never expected any of this.
From touring the country with the WNBA to worrying about dirty laundry, Bass's career has taken its share of twists and turns over the last few months. But if there's one thing she's figured out, it's that this is where she wants to be.
Because what she's gotten out of coaching is worth sacrificing those afternoon naps.
"Coaching has given me more than I ever thought it even would," Bass said. "Whenever I'm ready to stop playing, I know this is where I should be."
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