WNBA's Taylor joins Grand Canyon as assistant

Former Phoenix Mercury defender Celeste Taylor has joined Grand Canyon arsenic an adjunct coach, she told ESPN connected Tuesday.

Taylor, who played astatine Texas, Duke and Ohio State, joins the coaching ranks aft spending her rookie run successful the WNBA with the Mercury, Connecticut Sun and Indiana Fever. Indiana selected her No. 15 wide successful the 2024 draft, but Taylor -- who's known for her antiaircraft prowess -- played astir of the summertime for the Mercury (15 games). Overall, she averaged 2.6 points, 1.3 assists and 1.3 rebounds successful 14.9 minutes.

Taylor has been nursing a ft wounded that she suffered portion playing for the Sydney Flames successful the WNBL, cutting abbreviated her play successful Australia. She tried to enactment her mode backmost to afloat wellness portion with the Mercury for grooming camp, but wasn't a afloat subordinate until the last preseason crippled and was yet waived connected the last roster cutdown earlier the regular season.

Taylor told ESPN she volition walk the summertime recovering from the wounded and hopes to instrumentality to the WNBA successful 2026.

"There person been teams who wanted maine to travel backmost this season, and I deliberation for me, it's trying to get steadfast and trying to support successful the abstraction of being acceptable and looking astatine what's close for my body, listening to my body," she said.

Taylor links up with her erstwhile collegiate adjunct manager astatine Duke, Winston Gandy, who's taking implicit astatine Grand Canyon aft serving connected the staffs of Dawn Staley astatine South Carolina and Kara Lawson successful Durham. Coaching is simply a semipermanent extremity for Taylor, who said adjacent astatine camps successful assemblage she's ever enjoyed moving with younger kids.

"When the accidental presented itself, it honestly worked retired perfectly with timing and everything," Taylor said. "Once I had explained to [Gandy] what the concern is, of wanting to get steadfast but besides wanting to travel successful this way of being a manager and having the accidental of giving backmost to younger kids and being successful that enactment relation and conscionable continuing to determination into student-athletes and springiness them the champion experience, it's a no-brainer to instrumentality it."

Grand Canyon boasted a national-best 30-game triumph streak past play nether then-head manager Molly Miller and made its archetypal NCAA DI tourney quality successful programme history. Miller past left to instrumentality implicit astatine Arizona State, and Gandy was hired from South Carolina.

"This is his archetypal clip arsenic a caput manager and it's astatine a programme similar GCU that's decidedly up-and-coming and increasing and a beauteous university, but I'm decidedly grateful for him giving maine the opportunity," Taylor said. "He wants to enactment the champion radical astir him, truthful for him to look to maine and judge successful me, to beryllium capable to assistance him is simply a blessing."

Before ending the play with Phoenix past year, Taylor bounced astir the league and made headlines by playing for 2 antithetic franchises -- Phoenix and Connecticut -- connected back-to-back days successful August portion connected consecutive seven-day contracts.

Pivoting to coaching is conscionable different illustration of that adaptability.

"The travel that I've been on, it's ne'er linear," Taylor said. "There's a batch of up-and-down, truthful conscionable being acceptable for everything, but astatine the aforesaid time, I consciousness similar it has grown maine into the idiosyncratic that I americium today. I'm honestly conscionable grateful for everything that I've been through."