The Dalila Eshe era has begun in New Haven.
Yale Athletics named Eshe head coach of Yale women’s basketball Monday, 17 days after Loyola Chicago announced that Allison Guth was leaving Yale to take over there.
Eshe comes from Princeton, where she was an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator for three seasons under Carla Berube.
Eshe will be introduced at a press conference Wednesday at 11:30 a.m., inside John J. Lee Amphitheater, Yale Athletics announced.
Guth had won 99 games in six seasons, during which the Bulldogs set the single-season program win record twice during her tenure at Yale.
Now it’s up to Eshe, a former WNBA Draft pick, to build on that success.
“We are absolutely thrilled to have Dalila lead our women’s basketball program,” Yale athletic director Vicky Chun said in a statement released by Yale Athletics Monday. “She comes to us with a wealth of experience as a former student-athlete, professional athlete and coach from the highest levels of basketball. Dalila is a proven winner and her commitment to the student-athlete experience, and development of young women was clear in the interview process.”
The Tallahassee, Fla. native was an all-SEC first-teamer in 2005-06 for Florida and was selected 25th overall in the WNBA Draft by the Seattle Storm in 2006. Eshe later played for the Washington Mystics and Atlanta Dream in 2007 and 2008, respectively, also playing overseas from 2006 to 2014 in Romania, Turkey, Russia, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, Taiwan and Portugal.
Eshe was assistant tournament director and assistant coach in the Essence Nike National Elite Youth Basketball League (EYBL) from 2008 to 2013, when she became Loyola Maryland’s director of basketball operations.
After two seasons as an assistant at East Carolina, Eshe became assistant and recruiting coordinator at La Salle.
Then in 2019, Eshe came on board at Princeton when Berube succeeded Courtney Banghart, becoming three-time Ivy Player of the Year and future WNBA No. 5 overall pick Bella Alarie’s position coach for her senior campaign.
Yale’s hire of Eshe comes just 20 days after archrival Harvard named another former Princeton assistant, Carrie Moore, its new head coach to follow Kathy Delaney-Smith after the latter concluded her 40-year run at the helm. Moore and Eshe never overlapped at Princeton, as the former joined Banghart as an assistant North Carolina after the 2018-19 season.
Both former Princeton assistants take over after a third, Megan Griffith, has built one of the NCAA’s dynamic programs at Columbia, which last month advanced to the Elite Eight round of the WNIT – the program’s first postseason wins since it joined Division I in 1986. Griffith was an assistant at Princeton under Banghart from 2010 to 2016.