Cleveland State assistant coach Melissa Jackson has been hired as the head coach of Horizon League rival Youngstown State, YSU announced on Thursday.
“I want to thank Youngstown State University President Bill Johnson and Executive Director of Intercollegiate Athletics Ron Strollo for trusting me with this amazing opportunity,” Jackson said, through the university’s release. “From the start of this process, Ron and I have been perfectly aligned in the vision for Youngstown State women’s basketball.”
That vision begins with a Penguins program that went 14-18 overall in their recently-completed 2023-24 season. Though the Guins closed the year well, winning five of six games during one February stretch to creep into seventh place in the standings, it was mostly a trying season for the HL’s Mahoning Valley outpost. Ten-year head coach John Barnes took a leave of absence for personal reasons just prior to the start of the schedule, leaving his long-time lieutentant, John Nicolais, as the acting head coach. Barnes ultimately resigned in January.
Nicolais guided the team admirably through a tough situation, though he was also heavily reliant on a veteran group of fifth-years who are now out of eligibility, including Dena Jarrells, Emily Saunders, Shay-Lee Kirby, Paige Shy and Mady Aulbach (a sixth such player, Jen Wendler, missed the season due to injury). The new coach’s first tasks at YSU will undoubtedly involve retaining as much of the team’s returning roster while also hanging on to as much of a large 2024 incoming class as possible.
It’s a challenge that Jackson plans to attack relentlessly.
“YSU is a program that I am very familiar with and have always had a tremendous amount of respect for,” she said. “There is an immense amount of support and pride in the Penguin family! My staff and I will work tirelessly, approaching everything we do with a championship mindset. My family and I are so excited to become a part of the Youngstown and YSU community! I cannot wait to meet our phenomenal young women and get to work!”
Jackson joined the Vikings last August after her contract was surprisingly not renewed by the University of Akron, where she had spent the previous 15 years, including the final five as the Zips’ head coach. Her experienced hand turned out to be a major asset to a CSU staff that had just lost a pair of assistant coaches – Desma Thomas Bateast and Bob Dunn – to high-major programs, and she helped lead a reconstructed roster to the first Horizon League regular season title in program history alongside a 29-5 overall record.
Cleveland State, of course, fell short of repeating as conference tournament champs thanks to a loss to Green Bay in the Horizon League championship game on Tuesday, though the Vikings are assured of placement in a postseason tournament.
While in charge of the Zips, Jackson went 72-69 overall and made a pair of postseason appearances, including the 2019 Women’s Basketball Invitational (WBI) and the 2021 Women’s National Invitation Tournament (WNIT).
She was initially brought to UA as an assistant on Jodi Kest’s staff and became a key piece of one of the most successful runs in school history. Akron won the 2014 MAC championship and qualified for the NCAA Tournament as a result of that title, and the Zips also made four additional postseason trips during Jackson’s time as an assistant coach, including three more WNIT bids and a visit to the WBI. Between 2012-13 and 2015-16, Akron averaged nearly 22 wins per season and made four consecutive trips to the top two postseason championships in women’s basketball.
Prior to her time at Akron, the Hazleton, PA native and 2004 Richmond graduate was on the staff at Delaware from 2004 through 2008. She helped the Blue Hens to the 2007 NCAA Tournament while one of the guards she coached, Tyresa Smith, was drafted by the WNBA’s Detroit Shock that year.
As for the Vikings, head coach Chris Kielsmeier will now have to hire an assistant coach for the third time in the last two offseasons, though he wouldn’t mind adding one more job posting to the list. At the end of his press conference following Tuesday’s HL championship game, Kielsmeier did what he could to sell programs on hiring away another of his assistants, Frozena Jerro, who came to Cleveland alongside him in 2018.
“Coach Fro deserves some head coaching interviews,” Kielsmeier said. “Coach Fro is ready to be a head coach, and I want to put that out there very loud and very clear.”
For the time being though, Jerro and Shelby Zoeckler remain on the Vikings’ staff to fill two of the three assistant coach slots, as does Director of Basketball Operations Hanna Zerr and Special Assistant to the Head Coach Chenara Wilson. When Dunn and Thomas Bateast departed last summer, hiring Jackson and promoting Zoeckler (who had previously been in Zerr’s role) was the solution.
If another internal fix is in the cards, Wilson is an intriguing candidate whose career history offers an appropriate parallel to the situation that created the CSU opening in the first place. The former Vikings player, a 2007 graduate, returned to her alma mater this season with 16 years of coaching experience, most recently with Slippery Rock. At the western Pennsylvania Division II school, Wilson was an assistant coach for seven years before taking over as acting head coach in 2022-23, following the unexpected passing of former head coach Bobby McGraw. Through that trying campaign, she led The Rock to its first winning record in more than two decades.
