By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
Just the way it should have ended – or maybe begun. With Jeff Hans as the new women’s basketball coach at NKU.
As he should be. And as Northern Kentucky – the community and the university – deserve.
NKU from Day 1 was out front in women’s sports – basketball first of all.
With the hiring of a Northern Kentucky original – OK, an adopted son of Northern Kentucky from southern Ohio – the Lady Norse have a chance to make their mark in women’s basketball now that we’re all paying attention.
“Very lucky,” NKU’s Vice-President and Director of Athletics Christina Roybal said of her good fortune. From California by way of Iowa, Roybal’s first big hire was just 10 minutes away.
Her good luck . . . and NKU’s. “It is . . . and we are,” she said with a smile. “We had a lot of good candidates, a number who came in for interviews,” Roybal said. Just a guess here. They all had the bad luck to be compared against Hans.
And as the press conference at NKU’s Truist Arena made clear, where else were they going to find the NCAA’s winningest women’s basketball coach with numbers at the 90 percent mark not to mention three national titles (two NCAA Division III, one NAIA) two national players of the year, three coaches of the year with two national runners-up finishes. And that’s just for starters. Just the quantitative aspect. Then there’s the qualitative part.
But one thing we did learn was why Jeff had no idea he was the nation’s winningest NCAA women’s basketball coach. “I don’t know about wins,” he said.
“But I can tell you the number 42 . . . that’s the number of losses,” in his 13 mostly sensational seasons at Thomas More where he won national titles in both the NCAA Division III and the NAIA and was in his first year working his way up in the NCAA’s Division II.
TMU VP/Athletics Terry Connor was thrilled for Hans, as much as his loss hurts the Saints. “They could not have made a better choice,” Connor said of NKU, with a promise in the TMU goodbye statement that “we will follow his coaching career at NKU with great interest. He will forever be a Saint.”
With a chance to do the same now that he’s back in Norse Country again, where Jeff, as NKU’s first-ever women’s basketball grad assistant and the assistant to national championship coaching legend Nancy Winstel, had a chance to flip the script a bit. As he did.
In much of Division I athletics, the person doing the hiring here would be a male. And the new coach for the women’s team, often a female, would thank her male mentors for giving her the chance a couple of decades back. Which is exactly what Jeff did.
But his mentors were retired NKU AD Jane Meier and Winstel. “My foundation,” Jeff called them. “They mentored me so I could run my own program.” And his hiring was simply an exercise in finding the best person for the job. No category-filling process this.
The NKU women’s team, sitting in the front row after coming off a tough year and parting with a long-time coach, deserves nothing less. They’d already had a quick meeting with Hans where he went over details like how they’ll huddle – and break the huddle.
But after all the thanks and recognitions, even a joke or two from an underrated deadpan dry humor guy, it was time to do “what we’re here for – talking hoops” said the man who promised he would “not be a one-man show.” That it would be “about family” – his own and the NKU family, just as it was about the TMU family that “took a chance on a young guy 13 years ago.”
And now it was time to leave a place and people who mattered so much to him, and a program that he’s molded in his image of how the game should be played.
“When the opportunity came,” he said of the NKU offer, “this opportunity I could not pass up.”
Now he’s a guy NKU doesn’t have to take a chance on. “I’m big on relationships,” Hans said with an invite for every NKU women’s hoops player from the last half-century to stop by and watch practice, hang out in his office and just chat.
“The No. 1 value in NKU Athletics is integrity – we will have it in everything we do.” And “camaraderie,” said the man who led the parking lot crew for TMU football games as he saw other NKU coaches in the crowd. “We’ll be at your games,” he promised.
And out in the community. “We are role models.” People want to see you and get to know you. And get to know how his teams will play.
He’d like to “play fast . . .and uptempo,” Hans says but he’s “not going to say that.” He’ll wait and see what this team can do.
Here’s what he wants them to do: “We want to make winning basketball plays,” he says simply. “How do we do that?”
Simple, Hans says. “By creating good habits” – on and off the court. “We want to be connected on both offense and defense.” Which happens only as a team. “No one player wins championships.”
And then there’s this quality he talked to his team about: “We want to be tough, tough to score on, tough to defend . . . and we want to be great every day, every single day.”
As far as X’s and O’s, it’s “pace and space,” Hans says. “Those are concepts we can teach,” but “you have to be a team, a unit,” to accomplish that. And “to control the tempo as much as possible.”
But ultimately, Hans wants “to make this the best mid-major program in the country,” he said of an NKU team that has yet to make it to the NCAA Tournament’s “big dance.”
And yes, in this age of the transfer portal where the players’ skills have so improved and everybody can transfer every year and you have to spend every day recruiting your own players, it won’t be easy.
“We have to crawl before we can walk,” Hans said as he walked over to the TV cameras to talk more hoops.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.