Morley rightfully proud to be Coach of the Year

Featured image: Mark Filpo (@codexdesignstudio)

For the first time in 16 years the NBL1 West Coach of the Year is a female and Jonelle Morley hopes the tide is turning on that front but her immediate focus is on the job at hand at the East Perth Eagles ahead of Friday's home semi-final.

As a championship winning coach from the Warwick Senators back in 2022 and then taking that team to win the National Finals a week later, Morley is no stranger to success in the NBL1 West as she returned to a head coaching role in 2026 at the Eagles.

Morley took on the role at East Perth and did a tremendous job virtually building a team from scratch and being able to recruit superstars like two-time MVP Stacey Barr and two-time All-First Team member Sarah Mortensen.

She was then able to identify players to fit specific roles and brought across Sydney Wright as the point, Jade Williams came in as the centre and then she brought Brooke Malone back to the West to be that ultimately versatile weapon who can play any role, defend any position and do it all.

Throw in providing an opportunity for emerging pair Zaya Black and Jo Odude to take on key roles, and the end result was the Eagles finishing the regular season in third position and that was even without losing gun recruit Jas Fejo after three games and her replacement McKenna Dale lasting just 44 seconds on court.

Now East Perth will turn their attention to a home semi-final this Friday night against the Goldfields Giants at Morley Sport and Recreation Centre and should they win that, it's the ultimate challenge against the reigning champion Cockburn Cougars at Wally Hagan Stadium on Sunday.

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Going back to the previous Saturday night and Morley was named the NBL1 West Coach of the Year for the first time on the back of both what she's done building this East Perth, and then coaching them throughout the season to third position while never once being at full strength.

She didn’t enter the awards night letting herself think she was a chance to win, but was rightfully proud when announced the winner and becoming the first female winner of the award in 16 years.

"I absolutely did not want to go there thinking I was a chance before hand because there's been previous years where I thought I might be in with a shot and wasn’t," Morley said.

"So for me I was just concentrating to be honest on the girls and where they were at on the night and those sort of things, but I was stoked and really happy.

"Especially when it's the coaches and the captains that are voting for that award, it means the world to me to have the respects of them across the league. It's a great honour to be given that award by those people in particular.

"I think anyone in that top five group could have won it and in fact I think Vlad Alava was rough to miss out and it could have been a top six. I think any of us top six could have won it on the night, but I'm ecstatic it was me and I feel pretty good about it."

First winner since another Eagles coach

Not only is Morley the first female winner of the Coach of the Year award, but the last winner in 2010 was Narelle Henry who was at the Perth Redbacks at the time, but also would go on to coach at the Eagles.

Morley is also a former teammate of Henry's and is proud to be the first female Coach of the Year since her as they join Robyn Winter, Brooke Ryan and Kim Poore as the women to have won the award since the establishment of the SBL back in 1989.

"Obviously Narelle is someone that I consider as a mentor of mine and I played with her, and I invited her down at the start of the season to talk to the girls as well," Morley said.

"I feel really privileged that I'm the next person to come in after her to receive this award."

Importance of promoting female coaches

Morley is one of four female coaches this season in the NBL1 West women's competition alongside Jaymi Worthington (Goldfields Giants) and Sue Williams (Willetton Tigers).

In the big picture, Morley thinks the tide might be turning a little slowly towards opportunities opening up for female coaches and indeed for those women to be willing to put themselves forward for the roles and get themselves ready with the thought that they won't be wasting their time.

Across the country Renae Garlepp at the Norths Bears was also named NBL1 East Coach of the Year while the NBL1 South hasn’t been afraid to have women's head coaches for men's teams including Sam Woosnam at the Dandenong Rangers.

"When I was in this role previously in this league there was even less female coaches so I'm excited to see that there's quite a few starting to come through now," Morley said.

"But not only in the women's league, I'd like to see more female coaches in the men's league and at the moment I look at announcements from the NBL and you look at the coaching stocks, and they are an unbelievable group of men that are coaching who do an amazing job, but that's exactly what it is – men.

"For me, I'd love to see some female coaches that are pushing into various roles in the NBL and WNBL in a stronger way but if you look across the NBL1 there are a lot of female coaches across Australia.

"And a lot of them have won this award and some coaching men's teams in other states so it's definitely on the rise. There's a lot of advantages to having females in these roles and they bring different aspects to the game and to the relationships that they build.

"And each individual, should be assessed on their own merit, but we're only going to see more females if they are given the opportunity to develop through the ranks and definitely even at a WABL level I'm seeing significantly more females put their hand up to take on the roles.

"We have to give them the opportunity to continue to develop and I'm seeing that at East Perth too which is super exciting as well."

The different parts of coaching a team

In terms reflecting on the bigger picture about being a head coach at NBL1 level and there's two distinct parts of it that Morley feels hold just as much importance as one another.

The first one is building and recruiting a team, and Morley has done an outstanding job doing that on this East Perth team.

She wanted a team that could play at pace, that could shoot the three and that would have multiple ball handlers and playmakers, and that could crash the glass to give them the best chance to win the possession game more often than not.

Then just as importantly, the character had to be right on anyone she recruited because having the chemistry right in the team, and having their personalities all mesh is every bit as crucial as any physical abilities.

Then there's the actual training on court at practice and during games which Morley has always been elite at.

"I think it's vital to build a team that will be able to play together the right way and everyone's seen teams with brilliant players that you can see the chemistry is off or they're not clicking and something's going wrong," Morley said.

"I think for me it's important to have a team that has good chemistry and there's a couple of these girls who I didn’t know that well before this season but I tried to do a bit of background on them to find out who they were and what they wanted.

"It's important to set expectations early on what people's roles are and what you want them to bring to the team because if you don't have that, it can cause rifts within the team.

"So you have to set that expectation with the players at the very beginning. Those roles can change and we've had so many injuries this year that girls' roles have absolutely changed, and we've had to have those conversations all the way through.

"We've got lots of clarity with that in this group and everyone knows what they're out there to do. If they do their job and we do that as a team collectively, we're going to win basketball games."