Connecticut Sun coach Rachid Meziane to miss WNBA game with illness

When the Connecticut Sun play against the Washington Mystics on Friday night, they’ll do so without their head coach.

The Sun said in a statement that Rachid Meziane will miss the game due to an illness. Filling in for him will be Roneeka Hodges, the team’s associate head coach.

Meziane, a native of France, is in his second season as the team’s head coach. He was hired after Stephanie White left the club to become the head coach of the Indiana Fever after she guided the Sun to back-to-back trips to the semifinals of the playoffs.

The Sun have struggled the past two seasons. They’re 3-15 this year after going 11-33 in 2025. This is the team’s final season playing at Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Connecticut. They will move and be rebranded as the Houston Comets in 2027 after being purchased by Texas billionaire Tilman Fertitta.

Hodges, 43, is widely seen as a rising star in the coaching ranks. After a lengthy professional playing career that began with the Comets and ended with a club in Spain, Hodges worked two seasons in college basketball as an assistant at Old Dominion and Colgate, then landed on the New York Liberty’s bench. After the Liberty won the WNBA championship in 2024, she left to join the Sun, where she has an expanded role and more responsibilities.

“She’s comfortable and confident, and she always has been, and that’s what I love about her,” Toronto Tempo coach Sandy Brondello recently said of Hodges in an interview with NBC. “What you see is what you get. It’s no BS to her. She’s real, she reads people well.”

Hodges was also the head coach of Phantom BC in Unrivaled this past season. She was named Coach of the Year of the professional 3x3 women’s basketball league and guided Phantom to an appearance in the championship game.

This is the first season since 2020 that the WNBA has not had a Black woman as a head coach.

Mystics versus Sun tips off at 7:30 p.m. ET on ION.