From Carver Park to the WNBA: Henderson's Reneé Brown honored for pioneering career

Reneé Brown stepped into the Las Vegas Aces training facility in Henderson, took a long look around and felt her emotions well up.

The vision for women’s basketball that she had helped craft over nearly two decades as a WNBA executive had become reality. All the amenities — two courts, locker rooms, a film room, training and weight rooms — common in practice facilities for NBA players were now accessible to their WNBA counterparts. The 64,000-square-foot building, which opened in 2023, was the first practice facility built exclusively for a WNBA team.

“I literally started crying at what I saw,” said Brown, a Henderson native and Basic High School graduate whose distinguished basketball career included serving as the WNBA’s senior vice president and chief of basketball operations.

“It was exactly the vision (former NBA commissioner) David Stern had in 1996 when he interviewed me for the job,” she continued. “The vision was a reality right in front of me.”

Brown’s pioneering ways will be honored tonight when she is inducted into the Southern Nevada Sports Hall of Fame at Lee’s Family Forum.

Brown spent more than two decades in leadership with USA Basketball, including serving as an assistant coach on the 1996 Olympic gold medal-winning squad. She was also the chairwoman of the selection committee and a member of the USA Basketball board of directors.

That meant she did a lot of traveling to various countries. In her travels, when she was asked where she was from, Brown always gave the same answer: Henderson.

She proudly says she was raised in Carver Park, a Henderson community built in the 1940s to house Black workers at the Basic Magnesium Inc. plant and Black airmen from Nellis Air Force Base.

“It was a tight-knit community,” she says. “Carver Park is where my foundation came from. It taught me about hard work, honesty and faith.”

Brown fell in love with sports while competing at Basic. She is still close with Mattie Smith, her high school basketball coach and mentor, who will be at the induction ceremony.

Carver Park taught her the importance of community. Smith showed her what being a role model was all about.

“Mrs. Smith was going to fight for everything we needed,” she said.

Brown, after playing for UNLV in college, followed Smith’s lead into coaching.

Her journey to the WNBA and Team USA started with leading the girls’ team at Helen C. Cannon Junior High School. She eventually coached at Chaparral and Clark high schools.

While at Clark, she moved into administration — a better-paying job with a better title, but without a team to be part of. She was miserable.

“I felt purpose through coaching,” she said. “I wanted to give back because of the impact sports had on me.”

She followed her instincts and returned to the gym two years later at Bonanza High School.

Shortly after, she was invited to be a counselor at a basketball camp at Stanford, a perennial women’s basketball juggernaut, telling her bosses at Bonanza that “it would be good for me to go to Stanford, learn at the camp and bring it back to teach my students.”

She made such an impression that legendary Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer asked Brown to join the Cardinal coaching staff. Stanford went on to win the 1990 national championship. VanDerveer eventually tabbed Brown as her assistant coach on the U.S. women’s national team competing in the 1996 Olympics.

That led to her stint in the WNBA, where as director of player personnel she scouted and helped sign players to join the league when the league launched in 1997.

Nearly 30 years later, the league is flourishing in front of record crowds, players are securing endorsements and shoe deals, and the women’s game has attracted a much more diverse fan base.

Brown is reminded of that when she steps into a WNBA arena.

“I am so happy because young girls now have role models,” she said. “But it’s not just them. You’ll see men wearing women’s jerseys, or young boys trying to get an autograph from someone in the WNBA.”

Brown wants little credit for the game’s rise in popularity. She was simply part of a team with a vision to enhance the league and give women players equal opportunity.

“America has embraced women’s sports and the women’s game,” she said. “The idea that women are selling out arenas really shows how far the league has come.”

Other inductees tonight include: Ron Aitken, the Sandpipers of Nevada swimming coach who has developed eight Olympians since 2016; Deryk Engelland, an original member of the Golden Knights who delivered an emotional speech after the Oct. 1, 2017, mass shooting that helped the city fall in love with the franchise; T.J. Lavin, one of the top BMX riders in history; Horrace Smith and Rick Traasdahl, state-champion high school coaches who left an impact in education.