Wiggins now focused on teaching the next generation

Sports Odds and Ends

The MSR is the only local media member that has covered the Minnesota Lynx from the start of its 25-year existence as the team became the Twin Cities’ most successful pro franchise. Before this season, the team chose its top-25 players in Lynx history and held their 25th-anniversary celebration the weekend of June 9-11, where the MSR spoke to several of the honored players. This week: Candice Wiggins (2008-12)

We first met Candice Wiggins a few days after she and her Stanford team lost to Tennessee in the 2008 NCAA championship and she became the third overall pick in that year’s WNBA draft by Minnesota. The 5’11” guard spent five of her eight-year pro career as a Lynx.

“Right now, I’m the women’s basketball director and head coach at SPIRE Academy in Geneva, Ohio,” Wiggins told this reporter during a break from last month’s 25-year celebration weekend. She was on the team’s first WNBA championship club.

The SPIRE women’s basketball program is new and Wiggins is their first coach. Hired in 2022, Wiggins coaches at the international boarding high school and postsecondary program for grades 9-12 located about 44 miles from Cleveland. It provides both education and sports training in several sports for around 80 students.

“I get to teach them every day,” boasted Wiggins. “I get to encourage them and I get to teach them what it takes step-by-step at the grassroots level, which is really where I feel like I serve best.”

Wiggins was born in Baltimore. Her late father Alan Wiggins was a pro baseball player and played in the 1984 World Series for the San Diego Padres. He moved his family to the San Diego area and sadly died of complications from AIDS when Candice was four years old. Later, as an adult, she would help raise awareness about HIV/AIDS through many causes.

Candice was a two-sport star in high school, a captain in both volleyball and basketball. Her senior year she was listed as the nation’s best shooting guard in the Class of 2004. She earned a scholarship in both sports from Stanford, where she starred and lettered in both volleyball and basketball, and where she earned a communications degree, graduating in 2008.

As a WNBA player, Wiggins’ career wasn’t as stellar, but had its share of highlights. She made Rookie of the Month for June in her first season (2008), won the league’s Sixth Woman award, and made the All-Rookie team. She also got injured during the season, but returned to finish the campaign.

In her second season, Wiggins became a starter and was a one-time Player of the Week winner. Her third season, Lindsay Whalen’s first as a Lynx, Wiggins resumed coming off the bench, but ruptured her Achilles in a game and was lost for the remainder of the season.

The guard returned in 2011, but never got back to her pre-injury form as an aggressive scorer and defender. But she served as a key reserve on Minnesota’s first championship run, which earned Wiggins a spot among the franchise’s top 25 players that wore a Lynx uniform.

Wiggins was part of a five-team trade in 2013, when she was sent to Tulsa. Los Angeles and New York were her final W clubs before retiring in 2015.

“I’m speechless. I’m overwhelmed. I’m so full of gratitude,” said Wiggins of the warm reception she got from the Lynx faithful. “When I first got to Minnesota, there was a time when I was feeling a little hopeless about the possibility this could happen,” she said as she looked up to the rafters where four WNBA-title banners hang. She smiled when reminded that she was at the beginning of the league’s second dynasty.

“When you return and see what you left [has become] so much greater, that’s the reward for me,” said Wiggins.

Now a high school coach, Wiggins is proud of her new responsibilities training and influencing the next generation of female hoopsters and future leaders.

“I’m dealing with girls,” she said. “They’re not girls, they’re not women. They’re girls becoming women. You have to foster a foundation of character, and those are the things that I’m instilling.”

 Next week’s Lynx great: Taj McWillams-Franklin