It seemed like destiny that Eric Thibault and Carly Thibault-DuDonis would have basketball-related careers.
As a rising basketball coach, Old Town Alexandria’s Mike Thibault shuttled his kids — son Eric and daughter Carly — from gym to gym as they dutifully shagged errant shots and pushed racks of practice balls across courts around the country. As they grew older, the young Thibaults watched their dad lead teams in the NBA and the WNBA, as well as work as an assistant on the 2008 USA Women’s Olympics squad, bringing home a gold medal from China.
With that exposure to success, what chance did they have at going into any other business?
“You know what’s funny? I never pushed them,” Mike Thibault says. “In fact, at times early on with Eric, I sort of tried to dissuade him from [coaching] because the business is not the most secure.” He laughs before adding, “They grew up around it, in the NBA and WNBA, and they got to hang out and shoot on the [arena] court, and they both played, but they had other things they were good at. They just fell in love with the game.
“But we always had a rule: If they wanted to go to the gym, they had to ask me. I never asked them to go to the gym, and I never pushed them as players.”
Mike, 72, retired last year as the winningest coach in WNBA history — 379-289 — a three-time Coach of the Year, and with a WNBA championship title in 2019 for the Washington Mystics to match that Olympic gold medal. He’s now the team’s general manager and head of basketball operations, responsible for hiring those in the front office.
This year, the Mystics are breaking in a new head coach: Eric Thibault, 35, who had been an assistant coach for 10 years. And Eric is breathing easier these days now that his wife, Andreya, has given birth to baby Dean. The pair made their best effort to arrange their first child’s arrival ahead of the regular season — the 40-game schedule starts May 19.
Eric’s life has been a bit of a whirlwind recently. The free agency period in late winter was particularly hectic as the Mystics added fresh names to the roster — and then the family got Bono, their new 2-year-old rescued black Lab mix.
Add to that a recent move from Ballston to Lincolnia, and you have one busy coach. But surely, there is downtime to be enjoyed in Northern Virginia.
“We go find dog parks,” Eric says from his office in Southeast Washington. “Here, there, and everywhere, so we probably do that more than anything — go places with him. But my parents are in Old Town, and we kind of shuttle back and forth a lot to there.”
The Thibaults like to do things on the edge. Eric and Andreya’s wedding, for example, came just nine days after the WNBA championship game in October 2019.
“There was a lot of pressure on that game,” Eric says with a boyish grin. But from that experience also came a lifetime highlight: The championship trophy was displayed at the wedding. “So that was cool,” he says.
As the Mystics begin their 26th year with their 14th head coach — and the team’s first new one since Mike took the helm in December 2012 — Eric looks to improve on last year’s 22-14 campaign that saw the Mystics as the fifth seed, bounced out of the playoffs by fourth-seeded Seattle Storm.
The team is centered around top-scoring returning players and fan favorites Elena Delle Donne, Ariel Atkins, Natasha Cloud, Myisha Hines-Allen, and Shakira Austin. Smart new signings from free agency, trades, and draft picks — by Mike, no less — will be essential in adding support.
“We have a good chance” at the WNBA championship, Eric says confidently. “A couple of teams in the league are loading up [with players], but I think we have as good a shot as any. I know we have a team that likes to enjoy the season together, and that’s been a big part of our thing — having joy in the journey. So we’re just going to try to enjoy it, and we know we’re going to be pretty good. Hopefully at the end of the year, we’re where we want to be.”
To the naked eye, it may seem a little, uh, convenient for a father to hand off a team to his son. Eric has heard it before.
“I’m pretty aware of the reaction some people have,” he says of inheriting the job from his dad. “I’ll just say, I’ve been an assistant coach here for 10 years, and I probably had an advantage since I was a little kid because there were not a lot of 5-year-olds who got to go behind the scenes of practices and be on road trips. I’ve had the ability to be around it since I was really young, both my sister and I.”
That childhood of shagging shots and pushing racks gave Eric “a pretty good idea of how a coaching staff operated and what it meant to do the job.”
There’s no doubt that managing professional basketball players involves more depth than a whiteboard of X’s and O’s. Understanding what’s going on in their heads, knowing who is working through a nagging injury, and reading the temperature of the locker room are vital to keeping a season coherent, not to mention victorious. Eric seems to have that empathy.
Case in point: Following the May 2022 elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which left 19 children and two adults dead, Eric, covering as temporary head coach while his father was isolated with COVID-19, collaborated with Mystics star and gun safety activist Natasha Cloud to see how the players wanted to respond after their home game with the Atlanta Dream. Instead of the typical press conference recounting the game to reporters, Cloud refused to talk basketball — they called it a media blackout — and discussed sensible gun reform instead.
Reminded of this dramatic gesture, Eric points out it wasn’t the first time the Mystics had engaged in a media blackout. In 2020, following the police shooting of Jacob S. Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin — an officer shot him seven times in the back — they boycotted their scheduled game and wore T-shirts with seven bullet holes painted on them.
This activism spills over into the community. The team is involved with charities and activities in Southeast DC’s Ward 8, where its home court, Entertainment and Sports Arena, is located. Most notable is the District of Change initiative that tackles issues such as DC statehood, LGBTQ+ equality, racial and gender equity, gun safety, voting rights, supporting local art, and mentoring young people.
As for Eric’s sister, she also inherited a love of the sound of a ball bouncing on a hardwood court. Last April, Carly Thibault-DuDonis, 31, was named the head women’s basketball coach of the Fairfield University Stags in Connecticut.
“I loved going to the gym with him,” Carly says of her early days with dad, who continues to be an assistant with the USA Basketball women’s national team. Carly says she especially liked being with her dad when Mike became head coach of the WNBA Connecticut Suns in 2003. “I kind of grew up working for the team and helping however I could as a ball kid. And then, I worked my way up to be the equipment manager,” she says.
A high-performing player at New Jersey’s Monmouth University, she combined her studies to reflect her interests in psychology and sports, “because I figured I would want to coach.” She was also Class of 2013 valedictorian, with a 4.0 GPA in psych, Spanish, and health studies. (Eric graduated magna cum laude from the University of Missouri. “I told you they had other interests and things they were good at,” Mike says. Additionally, their mother, Nanci, was high school valedictorian “and played every high school sport. I was 3-point-something [GPA]. They were all smarter than me,” Mike jokes.)
Once Carly went on the coaching path, she never looked back. “I really enjoy mentoring, empowering, and helping [student athletes] to mature into young women,” she says.
For both Carly and Eric, the values Mike and Nanci instilled in them on and off the court are now the ones helping them shape the women leaders of the future.
Feature photo courtesy the Mystics
This story originally ran in our April issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to Northern Virginia Magazine.
