HARTFORD, Conn. — As she drove to the University of Dayton in late March, Tamika Williams-Jeter still hadn’t fully processed the fact that she was the new head women’s basketball coach for her hometown school.
The wave of emotions finally hit after she introduced herself to the Flyers team over Zoom and told them she was on her way. It was in that moment Williams-Jeter thought back to text messages from her former UConn women’s basketball teammates Sue Bird, Swin Cash and Asjha Jones.
The quartet, who led the Huskies to national titles in 2000 and 2002, still maintain an active group chat. Cash sent a congratulatory message when Williams-Jeter led her Division III program, Wittenberg, to win its conference tournament championship in upset fashion a few weeks prior. Williams-Jeter was a bit taken aback by her friends’ nonchalant tone. It was more “I told you so” than one of amazement.
“They were all like, ‘Did you think you were gonna do something else?’ ” Williams-Jeter recalled to the Hartford Courant earlier this week. “Almost like, ‘We know you’re good, we’re just waiting for you to make the jump.’ ”
The group had a similar response when Cash was named vice president of basketball operations for the New Orleans Pelicans in 2019. They’ve always been honest with each other, not ones to sugarcoat anything. Williams-Jeter always believed in them, but realizing they long thought she was ready for the new role she was about to embark on was different.
“We get put in these situations as coaches to see the best in young people and tell them they can do things that they don’t see they’re going to accomplish,” Williams-Jeter said. “But sometimes you need those people that tell you you don’t see it. … That’s when it really made sense, like, ‘This is right.’ ”
Williams-Jeter had received plenty of calls from Division I schools about head coaching opportunities in recent years, but she turned them all down. The former UConn star knows a lot of people didn’t understand why she went the Division III route, especially after 15 years as a high-major assistant coach and seven seasons in the WNBA. Even UConn coach Geno Auriemma wondered at first.
There were plenty of factors at play, but the most prevalent was that being close to home, more specifically to her mother, Jo Williams, was everything.
Toward the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Williams-Jeter took her mother to the doctors for a checkup and was told she had severe short-term dementia. This was the woman who was the backbone of their family, who had managed properties and paid bills between her two parents growing up, who had taught calculus and algebra for 40 years. By that point she couldn’t manage to pay a simple utility bill or do basic math.
“They literally took her driver’s license right in front of me,” Williams-Jeter said. “That was a lot to see your parent go through.”
Williams-Jeter, then an assistant at Ohio State, vowed not to leave the state for another job. Her father passed away in 2014 and she wanted to focus on her mother with what time she had left.
Close to home
Williams-Jeter was in the middle of conducting end of season meetings with players when Wittenberg athletic director Brian Agler pulled her out to talk.
“I got another call,” he said.
Plenty of schools had reached out about Williams-Jeter after she led the team to its first NCAA Division III tournament appearance since 2015, but she was never interested. Even once he revealed Dayton was the school, she didn’t bite. Becoming a Division I head coach wasn’t something she envisioned for herself, plus the timing caught her off guard.
Agler, who coached Williams-Jeter in her first season in the WNBA, was persistent. He reminded her of why she was at Wittenberg in the first place, of how important it was to be close to her mother and all the opportunities she turned down because of that. This wasn’t like the other inquiries, all from schools out of state, this was home.
“I think you need to interview,” Agler insisted, “because you never interview, you just tell people no. Just do me a favor.”
After their conversation, Williams-Jeter went back to meeting with players. She felt like she’d put together something special. She was proud of changing the program’s culture, of getting DIII kids to buy into a certain standard, and she didn’t want to leave that behind. But Agler continued to nudge, pleading with her again that afternoon to at least hear Dayton out.
Williams-Jeter got a call from Neil Sullivan, Dayton’s vice president and athletic director, less than half an hour afterward. Williams-Jeter didn’t have an agent or anything prepared but quickly made a strong impression. Around 48 hours later, after meetings with numerous other officials from the school, she was offered the job. That Thursday night was filled with a lot of self-reflection.
“I kind of put myself in a space of like, what if I was,” Williams-Jeter said. “You’re looking at a team of I think five or six with no one with any playing experience … I didn’t think about that much because I felt like I knew how to get that back together. But the biggest thing is it’s a huge responsibility. What I loved about this is it was a winning space, so I liked the pressure of carrying that on, that was fun.
“I knew I had people to my left and right in our administration who believed in women’s basketball, believed that I could get it done and believed in the young women who were still going to be around that they could get it done. So that was a big piece for me making the decision.”
Auriemma’s influence
The news that Williams-Jeter was hired by Dayton broke during the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament. Morgan Valley, one of her college teammates who is now an assistant at UConn, sent the announcement in the coaches’ group chat between herself, Jamelle Elliott, Chris Dailey and Auriemma. Williams-Jeter made a point not to tell people, so nobody had any clue it was coming.
“I can’t say exactly what [Auriemma] screamed out,” Williams-Jeter recalled, “but [Valley] was like, ‘He screamed from the other room because he couldn’t believe it.’ ”
Auriemma has a big influence on the way Williams-Jeter coaches. There are some aspects she saw coming, like the ability to push people to get the best out of them, but others not so much. She always figured she would have a much calmer demeanor on the sideline than Auriemma did in his early days of coaching.
“I don’t know why I thought that,” Williams-Jeter said with a laugh, “because I was crazy.”
Wittenberg was up 40 points in one game this past season when Williams-Jeter noticed her team hit a lull. Next thing she knew, she was at half court calling for a timeout. She then gave an impassioned speech to her players that felt very reminiscent of her UConn days. “We never play at the level of the competition — I don’t care what the score is, I don’t care how much I sub.”
As she walked back from the huddle, Williams-Jeter couldn’t help but laugh. Every time she got upset when her team played a close game against a lesser opponent throughout the season she thought the same thing: Oh my gosh, I am Coach. But her players didn’t respond the same way when she sat calmly on the bench.
Another thing Williams-Jeter picked up from Auriemma and Jim Foster, who she coached under at Ohio State from 2002-08, was the importance of having the right staff in place. That was always what scared her most about coaching at the DI level. If she didn’t assemble her staff with the right people, nothing else would work. That’s even more true in today’s age of college basketball with the transfer portal and NIL.
For the first few weeks of her tenure at Dayton, Williams-Jeter was trying to build a roster on her own accord. Because she wasn’t planning on taking another job, she didn’t have a group of assistants in the works.
“Getting that part right so we can best fuel and create an environment where young people can thrive was most important to me,” Williams-Jeter said. “Because they’ll run through a wall for you if you get that right.”
Life comes full circle
Everywhere Williams-Jeter turns, there’s something that connects her back to a different part of her life.
She was first introduced to college basketball at UD Arena, where her older brother and sister played throughout their respective careers at Miami (Ohio) and Bowling Green. The Catholic high school she and her siblings attended, Chaminade Julianne, is only about a mile away. Most of the people she graduated with went to Dayton, and many work there now.
She’s surrounded by family, back in the same town as her mother and older sister, with her younger sister set to move home, too. Her mother is elated about having Williams-Jeter’s two sons and all five grandchildren close by. Williams-Jeter hopes being around that energy will buy her a couple more years. On days that are especially challenging, she goes to visit her father who is buried at a cemetery five minutes away from campus and shares a moment with him.
“[This position] gives me everything,” Williams-Jeter said. “The people I love the most are here to support me, and the people who pushed me into it are the people I trust the most, that I’ve had the most success with.”
All of that set in for Williams-Jeter as she made the drive to campus on that day in late March. As much as they saw this coming for her, the teammates on the other end of that group chat were just as thrilled.
“I was very excited for her … to get a DI opportunity after proving herself and winning a championship, but more so because she’s going home,” Bird said. “I think this is so tremendous to bring somebody who now has all of this experience both as a player, as an assistant on the DI level, as a head coach on a lower level, but now she can put all that together and take it home to Dayton and lead them.”
