Carolyn Peck

Carolyn Arlene Peck (born January 22, 1966)[1] is an American television sportscaster and former college basketball coach.

She passed up an opportunity to play professionally in Spain to work as a marketing consultant at a Nashville television station, as well as sell pharmaceutical products for a Fortune 500 company for two years.

Peck returned to basketball in 1991, quitting her job to play professionally in Italy for three weeks, then for Japan’s Nippondenso Corporation for two years.

After this season, she received another assistant coaching job, this time at Purdue University under Nell Fortner, who had just replaced the fired Lin Dunn.

At the end of this season, Fortner was offered the position of head coach of the USA Women's basketball team for the 2000 Summer Olympics and was leaving Purdue.

Meanwhile, in April 1998 the young WNBA announced that it was expanding from ten teams to twelve, with one of the new franchises to be based in Orlando, Florida.

Pat Williams, senior executive vice president of the Orlando team-to-be, began his search to find a head coach–general manager.

The original list of prospects had six candidates, including Summitt, Duke's Gail Goestenkors and Florida's Carol Ross— but not Peck.

Despite accepting this new role, Peck was faced with a dilemma: having to return to Purdue to tell her team that they would once again have to play under a new coach.

Led by Katie Douglas, Stephanie White and Ukari Figgs, the Boilermakers posted a 28–1 record during the regular season, the lone loss coming by one point against Stanford.

[6][7][8][9] To date, Peck, at 33 years old, is the youngest person to coach a women's Division I basketball national championship team.

During Peck's three seasons as WNBA coach, the Miracle, which featured Shannon Johnson, Taj McWilliams-Franklin, Nykesha Sales and fellow Vanderbilt graduate Sheri Sam, posted a 44–52 record, narrowly missing out on the playoffs in 1999 and qualifying for them in 2000, where they lost to the Cleveland Rockers 2 games to 1.

After 9 years of working for ESPN, Peck was hired by her alma mater (Vanderbilt) to be an assistant coach in June 2016.