A coaching tree continues to branch out
A cluster of former Hawkeyes have entered the coaching ranks and worked themselves up to top jobs
Last year when looking up some detail in some long-ago basketball story someone else wrote, I stumbled upon another story that, surprisingly, I wrote. Not only did I not remember writing it but I didn’t remember that the game actually happened nor that I was there.
So it goes when you have covered so many games and written so many stories. What really stood out to me, though, wasn’t any word that I wrote but the information that accompanied it: the starting lineup, which traditionally ran with game previews years ago.
It was Iowa vs. Kansas in a 1998 NCAA second-round women’s basketball game. And what struck me was not that it was such a world-beating starting lineup but the paths those players have taken in the years since.
Four of the five starters in that game are now college coaches. That includes Shannon Perry LeBeauf, who will be part of the UCLA staff as associate head coach when the Bruins make their first Big Ten trip to Iowa on Sunday.
LeBeauf was joined in that 1998 starting lineup by Nadine Domond, who has been head coach at Virginia State since 2022; Tangela Smith, associate head coach at Northwestern; and Cara Consuegra, who is in her first season as Marquette’s head coach after 13 seasons as Charlotte’s coach. (The fifth starter, Amy Herrig, got a real job; she’s now a vice president at Holmes Murphy.)
“The biggest thing you can say is, ‘Wow, look at them carrying on,’” said Angie Lee, who was Iowa’s head coach in 1995-2000. “They’re out there making a difference.”
Another big wow is how that foursome just scratches the surface of former Iowa players from that era who are college coaches now, bookended by a couple before and after them. The list also includes:
· Jolette Law (1987-90), assistant coach at South Carolina.
· Katie Abrahamson-Henderson (1988-90), head coach at Georgia.
· Tia Jackson (1992-97), associate head coach at Duke.
· Karen (Clayton) Lange (1992-96), assistant coach at Duke.
· Malikah Willis (1994-98), head coach at University of Maryland Eastern Shore.
· Randi (Peterson) Henderson (1997-2001), assistant coach at Iowa.
· Jennie (Lillis) Baranczyk (2000-2004), head coach at Oklahoma and former head coach at Drake.
Lee has a connection to all of those players. She was an assistant coach for the Hawkeyes from 1988 until succeeding C. Vivian Stringer as head coach in 1995 when Stringer left for Rutgers. And while Baranczyk did not play for Lee, who was succeeded by Lisa Bluder in 2000, it was Lee who recruited her to Iowa. Baranczyk is the most successful of the bunch so far, with her Sooners ranked No. 16 in the latest AP poll.
It doesn’t surprise Lee that so many of her former players became coaches, not because she can predict the future but because she remembers her own college experience. Lee played for the Hawkeyes and Stringer.
“I was never really going to go into coaching,” Lee said, “but when I had Vivian Stringer as my coach, I said to myself, ‘Oh my gosh, I can teach the game of life through basketball, this lady's taught me the way, I want to do that.’”
Lee saw the makings of a coach in some of the players when they were Hawkeyes. Consuegra and Clayton were point guards who really embraced the Xs and Os and strategy of basketball, Lee said. Domond is someone Lee always knew would be dedicated to helping young people. Perry was a natural born leader, Lee said.
“She was a leader on the court, but she was also that glue that you needed off the court,” Lee said, “kind of like a Kate Martin.”
Clayton and Jackson, who was head coach at Washington in 2007-11, were on Iowa’s 1993 Final Four team. Two other members of that team have been high school basketball coaches. Susan Koering coached Muscatine girls’ basketball and Necole Tunsil has had success as a girls’ basketball coach in her hometown of St. Petersburg, Fla.
Domond, Perry, Smith and Willis were part of a “Sensational Seven” recruiting class Stringer put together with a tip of the hat to Michigan’s famed Fab Five men’s basketball team. The Iowa group was the top-ranked class in the country but beset by injuries throughout their careers. Stringer left for Rutgers after their freshman season.
Lee, who recently retired from a second career in student services at Wisconsin-La Crosse, watches with pride as her former players move their own careers forward.
“With the kinds of people they are,” Lee said, “wow, I know the kids they coach are in great hands.”
Sun sets on a great rivalry
When Drake plays host to Missouri State on Saturday, it will be the regular-season end of one of women’s basketball’s best mid-major rivalries.
After this season, Missouri State will leave the Missouri Valley Conference to join Conference USA.
In 1982, the two schools were charter members of the Gateway Conference, which was founded as a women’s sports-only conference and was absorbed into the Missouri Valley Conference in 1992. The rivalry gained steam in the 1990s when Lisa Bluder’s Bulldogs and Cheryl Burnett’s Lady Bears (who twice made it to the Final Four) duked it out at the top of the league.
The two schools have dominated the conference since then. Missouri State has won 14 regular-season titles and 11 tournament titles. Drake has 10 regular-season titles and nine conference tournament titles. Last season, Drake beat Missouri State, 76-75, on a buzzer-beater by Anna Miller to win the MVC tournament title and secure an NCAA bid.
Missouri State has won 52 of the games between the two teams, Drake 48. Earlier this season, the Lady Bears won in overtime in Springfield, Mo. As befitting the history of the two teams, Missouri State currently leads the MVC with a 13-2 record (21-5 overall) with Drake a game behind at 12-3 (18-8 overall).
It’s a rivalry in which Drake fans got to see Missouri State legend Jackie Stiles come to town for four years. And it’s a rivalry in which the Lady Bears might want to forget the early years, when Lorri Bauman scored 58 points against them in 1984 while Wanda Ford followed that two years later with 54.
Such is the world that college sports fans endure, watching their favorite rivalries disappear as schools move around like they’re trying to avoid creditors. It’s anybody’s guess who might show up next in the MVC, much less leave.
So long Lady Bears, it’s been fun.
Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”
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Wow! An amazing legacy! Also, “got a real job”. 😂