French basketball is always a big story at the FIBA U18 EuroBasket - just as at any youth tournament. France have been producing a seemingly endless stretch of young talent and any of the youth competitions are another opportunity to see who else the country has brought through the pipeline.
But the FIBA U18 EuroBasket 2025 will be significant for France for another reason. And it’s because of the person coaching those talents.
For the past eight months, Elise Prodhomme has working on plans how the U18 France team will look like and how it will play. The 36-year-old has been keeping track with the top talents from the 2007 and 2008 generations - such as Adam Atamna, Hugo Yimga, Cameron Houindo, Jahel Trefle, Jonas Boulefaa and Maxence Lemoine.
Okay, but what is so odd about that, you may ask. Well, Prodhomme is a female coach. In fact, she is the first woman to lead a French men’s youth national team in history.
“I'm so proud to be the first woman to coach a young men’s team. And I'm proud of being the head coach at a big competition like the U18 EuroBasket,” said Prodhomme, who was named to the position in November 2024. “It's a big experience for me and for my staff, and we have worked a lot to be ready for this competition.”
This is not Prodhomme’s first experience as the head coach of a French youth national team. She guided the country to the title at the FIBA U20 Women’s EuroBasket 2023 - France’s first championship in that age group since 2014.
Prodhomme also was assist coach for France’s U15 women’s team in 2019 and at the FIBA U16 Women’s European Challengers 2021.
And she actually has more coaching experience with youth men’s basketball. She retired from the game in 2021 - having played 16 years in France’s top two flights. And in 2022, she was named head coach of JDA Dijon’s U21 men’s team.
Before taking over at Dijon, Prodhomme served as an assistant coach for France at the FIBA U16 EuroBasket 2022, where the country finished third with players such as Nolan Traore, Noa Essengue, Talis Soulhac, Mohamed Diakite, Yannis Allard, Leon Sifferlin and Jonas Boulefaa, who will be on the team in Belgrade.
And this will actually be Prodhomme’s second time with the French U18 team as she was assistant coach for Regis Boissie last summer. Once again, she was helping coach the likes of NBA first round draft picks Traore, Essenge and Joan Beringer as well as Diakite and Sifferlin.
In addition to that experience with the French federation, Prodhomme helped Dijon to the U21 Semi-Finals this season and the club announced that she will be promoted to asssistant coach with the professional side starting next season.
Those qualifications made it a no-brainer for the French federation to appoint Prodhomme the U18 men’s head coach.
“Elise's presence with the U18s is not gender-related. Throughout her career, both within the Federation and at club level, she has demonstrated that she has the skills to lead this type of team,” said Jacques Commères, the federation’s Head of performance and National Teams.”
Commères said the Prodhomme asssignment also fits in with the federation’s latest goals.
“In the roadmap for the last Olympics, which we are continuing to pursue today, we had two major strategic objectives: to integrate all members of the French basketball family, both within the Federation and coaches from professional clubs, and ultimately to achieve gender parity in the technical and medical staff,” Commères said.
“This remains a challenge, particularly in the coaching position. It's a vast subject since the number of women in training to become coaches is relatively low, and in the women's divisions of the top three divisions, the percentage of women doesn't exceed 15 to 20%. It's therefore a recruitment issue.”
He continued: “We're trying to observe what's happening in the regions to offer high-level female players the opportunity to get into coaching, if they have the aspiration to do so. It's more difficult than for the boys. The role model Elise represents is therefore very important.”
Commères said he is impressed with Prodhomme both on and off the court.
“Elise is an extremely determined young woman. We shouldn't generalize, but the ability to be a leader, to lead a group, to manage, to assert oneself, to oppose—these are roles that boys tend to aspire to. It's probably cultural. Women need to be reassured even though they're perfectly capable. When Elise walks into a coaching seminar, she feels perfectly at home. She's simply a coach. Like Aurélie Bonnan, Julie Barennes, or Valérie Garnier. They are coaches above all.”
Prodhomme herself knows she will be seen as a role model or inspiration to young women wanting to rise up in the game.
“For me, it's important to be an inspiration. I really just think about me and what I want. And if a woman wants to be the same thing like me, it would be good. But I just want to show that I'm a woman and it's possible,” said Prodomme.
The Le Mans native admits she doesn’t really have one coaching role model and really just tries to pick things from various coaches with whom she has come into contact in the more than two decades in the game.
In terms of coaching philosophy though, the collective is the most important concept.
“On offense, I want games with a lot of sharing the ball and a lot of pleasure on the court. For me, it's very important. But the defense is the most important for me. Still if we have just a defense and nothing on offense, it's not good,” she said.
“If we exert a lot of intensity on defense collectively and individually, we can have a lot of fast break or we will try to have a lot of fast breaks. And we work a lot on moving the ball all the time. I don't like when one player has the ball for 20 seconds and then tries to make a play. That's not my philosophy.”
Having coached at the youth level for both men and women, Prodhomme said there are differences to leading a team for each gender.
“Maybe the biggest difference between women and men teams is the management. It's how do you talk and how do you tell something to a woman or to a man,” she said.
And her players can see a difference between Prodhomme and male coaches they’ve had before.
“I really like the way Elise coaches our team. She gives us freedom to play our game. But she also has authority and everybody respects her for what she’s doing,” said Adam Atamna, who is playing for France for the first time since taking third place at the FIBA U16 EuroBasket 2023.
“I think it’s very inspirational for all the women who want to coach in the men’s game. The culture is different and she sees the game differently than I can see with my men’s coaches. She does everything to put us in the best situation possible, on and off the court. She’s a winner and a good coach.”
Cameron Houindo meanwhile has really been impressed with the coach.
“She's more human and more into a player than any coach that I had before. She wants to know what we think, what we feel, if we are good with what she says or if we are not. And that's what I think is the best thing about her because that's what makes us feel really great on the court and off the court. We can be ourselves,” said Houindo, who played at the FIBA U17 World Cup and FIBA U16 EuroBasket last summer.
The major France prospect also commends Prodhomme for what she is accomplishing.
“The fact that she's a woman coaching a U18 men's team is incredible for our country and for the other countries,” he said. “She's an example for women’s basketball and women in basketball. She's an example because she takes her role really seriously and she does it really well. I think people should look at her and say, she's really strong and we should do the same.”
Again, while watching the next France stars like Houindo and Atamna and Yimga, don’t forget to take a look at the individual leading the team. And remember that Elise Prodhomme is making history with one of the greatest basketball nations on the globe.
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