Pacers assistant coach Jenny Boucek reflects on making history in NBA Finals

INDIANAPOLIS — At the Indiana Pacers’ team practice ahead of a crucial Game 6 of the NBA Finals, assistant coach Jenny Boucek was doing everything but focusing on the history she’s been making.

She strategized with head coach Rick Carlisle at center court, ran three-point shooting drills with T.J. McConnell, and jumped up to take a high five from 6’9” forward Obi Toppin, just as any assistant coach would.

Watch the full interview on “Hallie Jackson NOW” at 5 p.m. ET on NBC News NOW

But her presence on the floor at one of the highest levels of team leadership has never happened before in the NBA. According to the league, Boucek is the first woman to be a staff assistant coach on an NBA Finals team.

“I don’t think twice about it on a day to day-to-day basis,” Boucek told NBA News after Wednesday’s team practice. “I just want to coach the team, go to war with them, try to help us win a championship.”

While the Pacers are behind 3-2 in the best-of-seven series, this is the closest they’ve been to a championship since losing to Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant’s Lakers in 2000.

And this year’s run is one that few people predicted.

“We’re very aware that this season has been somewhat magical for us,” Boucek said. “There’s been a grace to what we’re doing and a joy and a cohesiveness.”

While Boucek calls herself a “utility player,” Carlisle charged her with focusing on improving the team’s defense and leaned on her now-viral football-style play design during key moments in the season.

“This year, it’s been a lot of focus on just bringing the defense together and working with the players and the staff on creating a system that maximizes our skill set,” Boucek said.

Boucek became the NBA’s third female assistant coach on staff in 2017 when the Sacramento Kings hired her to work on player development, coming to the league with years of experience coaching in the WNBA, where she also played for the Cleveland Rockers in the 1997 inaugural season.

“It was very impactful and made a big impression on my young mind to look up in the stands and see young girls like, almost perplexed, to see women doing something that they’d never seen women do,” she of playing during that season.

“But the thing that really got me was to see the grown women in the stands in tears,” she continued, explaining it was about more than the sport. “This league represents all the no’s that these women have heard their whole lives and assumptions because of their gender, and this represents a massive yes.”

Since that first season, the WNBA and professional women’s sports leagues have seen a surge in enthusiasm and investment. From the kind notes and messages she receives, to the fathers who stop her to tell her what impact she has on their daughters, Boucek says she takes the responsibility seriously.

“I don’t like the spotlight being on me,” she cautioned, “but I do understand ‘big picture purpose’ and I do feel a responsibility to represent women a certain way, to represent mothers, a certain way.”

It’s the title of “mom” that she says she prioritizes.

Boucek always wanted to be a mother and was candid about her willingness to push basketball aside to become one. But teams worked with her to make sure that she didn’t have to make a choice.

Despite her late-term pregnancy that would prevent her from traveling months into the 2018 season, at least three NBA teams worked to recruit her. Boucek had her daughter, Rylie, days after signing with the Dallas Mavericks, who built a nontraveling coaching position for her initial months.

When she followed Carlisle to the Indiana Pacers, the team agreed to travel with her daughter and a caregiver on road trips lasting more than three days. It’s a type of accommodation she wants to see become normal.

“I hope that one of the byproducts of this is that the NBA and the Pacers are setting an example for all corporations,” Boucek said.

As for the future, while Carlisle repeatedly says he sees her becoming the NBA’s first woman head coach one day, Boucek says it’s not a goal, but admits she never wanted to be a head coach and held the position in the WNBA twice.

“If my next assignment, and I feel it’s a purposeful assignment, is to be the head coach in the NBA, I will be very honored to take that honor on and represent women and just show that different types of leaders can be successful.”