Karl Smesko took a bold leap from FGCU to the Atlanta Dream. It paid off with a WNBA Finals run

Karl Smesko built an absolute women's basketball juggernaut at Florida Gulf Coast.

His teams led the country in 3-pointers made almost every year. He had eight 30-win seasons there, took the school to the NCAA tournament 10 times in a 13-year span and was basically an annual lock for his conference's coach of the year award.

But there was a ceiling. And the Atlanta Dream called him at the right time.

Smesko had come to grips with the fact that winning a national championship at FGCU was highly unlikely. Highly, highly unlikely. So, when the Dream called two years ago with an offer — leave the campus that has a beach and come take over a WNBA club — Smesko stepped out of his comfort zone.

The result: Another pair of 30-win seasons, and now a trip to the WNBA Finals. The championship he was never going to get at FGCU is now four wins away, with the title series against the favored Golden State Valkyries set to begin on Saturday.

“As good as we were at Florida Gulf Coast, the odds were very stacked against us to make that type of championship run," Smesko said. "In the pros, I definitely thought there was more of an opportunity. It's a more equal playing field to win the whole thing and that was appealing to me.”

To the finals in Year 2

It's a matchup of second-year coaches: Smesko in Atlanta and Natalie Nakase in Golden State, which is in just its second year of existence. The Valkyries went 3-0 against the Dream this season, making them just the second team to sweep Smesko's club in his tenure there. Las Vegas did it last season, and the Aces went on to win the WNBA title as well.

But in Smesko they trust, and the Dream have gone 5-0 in the playoffs to earn their finals berth.

“He’s a coach that really believes in you and he knows what’s best," Dream center Angel Reese said. "And I’m really thankful for him, for being able to help me with my career and help me be better for the team — because I don’t think I would be in this situation and thriving as I am individually without him.”

Smesko is quiet in many ways, and fiercely loyal. The offer from the Dream came as FGCU was starting its 2024-25 season; he wound up leaving after two games that year, though some at the school believe he was tempted to try to handle both jobs at once for a few months and finish that season. He ended up turning the keys to FGCU over to longtime top assistant Chelsea Lyles, who did what her mentor does — won 30 games and got the Eagles to the NCAA tournament.

Lyles wound up following Smesko to Atlanta after that season, as did others with FGCU ties. He has made clear that the familiarity has made life easier, and the Dream have back-to-back 30-14 regular season records as proof of how it paid off.

“It's been huge,” Smesko said, “because we think about the game a little differently.”

They do, indeed. FGCU, in the Smesko era, had an offense like few others in college basketball.

How the system works

Midrange shots were essentially banned. The only acceptable shots were layups, 3-pointers and free throws. It wasn't a gimmick. It was math. Layups and free throws are the easiest shots to make in basketball, and if his teams could make more than one-third of their 3-point tries then that would lead to more points than making half of their midrange shots.

It doesn't work quite that way at the WNBA level; a 24-second shot clock has forced Smesko to grudgingly accept that some midrange shots will have to be tried. But he still preaches the taproots of what he used in college: layups, 3s and free throws.

“The moment that Karl and the coaching staff got here, we were working on 3s," Dream guard Jordin Canada said. "He just talked about how making one more 3 every 25 shots would increase your percentage. Like, something that small. And we constantly worked on it, worked on it, worked on it. ... I think it’s just a testament to him believing in that everybody can shoot the 3 and working on it consistently.”

Part of the annual schedule at FGCU, it seemed, was frustration over how the NCAA selection committee would seed the Eagles. There were a number of years that school officials, conference officials and even other coaches felt that the committee didn't give FGCU its deserved spot on the bracket and seeded them far lower than what was merited.

But in the WNBA, that's not an issue. Teams earn their seed. There's no subjective system. Everybody plays everybody. Smesko — who went 611-112 at FGCU and won 25 games in each of his last 14 seasons there, a run matched by only mighty Geno Auriemma and UConn in that span — took the leap into the pro world. And a trip to the finals shows he made the right move.

“First, I was ready for a new challenge, and two, the WNBA was something that I would have never thought I would be able to do," Smesko said. 'I am a big fan of the WNBA, and to me, it seemed like the most exciting move was to get to work with the best athletes in the world and do it against the best competition and see if you could make something work at that level.”

He made it work.

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