Lin Dunn took the Indiana Fever job in October of 2007, at sixty years old, after thirty-seven years of coaching college basketball and a half-decade at the pro level. She inherited a franchise that had a generational forward in her prime and no ring to show for it. Six years later she walked out with the only banner the building has ever hung.
She came from Dresden, Tennessee, a town of three thousand people in the western part of the state. She coached at Austin Peay, at Ole Miss, at Miami, and for nine seasons at Purdue, where she went 206 and 68 and built the program that Stephanie White would later win a national championship for. She spent two seasons with the Portland Power of the ABL and three as the first head coach of the Seattle Storm. When the Fever called in 2008, she had been coaching since Richard Nixon was president.
She succeeded Anne Donovan in Indianapolis. The roster she walked into had Tamika Catchings, Katie Douglas, Briann January, Tully Bevilaqua, and Erlana Larkins, and the identity she built around them was non-negotiable. Defense first. Communicate every possession. Out-tough the team across the floor. She had been a defense-first coach for forty years and she was not going to negotiate it for the WNBA.
The 2012 Fever finished the regular season 22 and 12, three games behind Connecticut in the East. They were not the favorite. The Minnesota Lynx had won the title the year before and were trying to become the third franchise in league history to repeat. Indiana took the series in four games. Catchings, who had been waiting eleven years for it, scored twenty-five in the clincher and was named Finals MVP. The decisive 87-78 win came on October 21st in Indianapolis. It is, as of this writing, the only WNBA championship the Indiana Fever have ever won.
She was named WNBA Coach of the Year that season. She kept coaching the Fever through 2014, retiring at sixty-seven with a 113-101 regular-season record in Indianapolis and four playoff appearances in seven years. She handed the bench to Stephanie White, who had been her assistant for the championship run. In June of 2014 she was inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville.
She came back to the franchise as General Manager in 2022 at age seventy-five and drafted Aliyah Boston number one overall, then Caitlin Clark number one overall the year after that. She is now a senior advisor to the team. The Vault keeps her here at the front of the era she built, because the building has exactly one banner and it has her name on the wall behind it.