Vikings Add Veteran Coach Lanpher to Round Out Staff

Whether it’s been former Cal State Northridge head coach Frozena Jerro or, more recently, longtime Akron boss Melissa Jackson, it’s always seemed clear that Chris Kielsmeier prefers to have at least one person on his staff with experience as a program’s top dog.

Now, he’s going to have three.

Two, of course, are third-year assistant Chenara Wilson and recently-hired Jenna Bolstad, who previously led the teams at Slippery Rock and Miles Community College, respectively. The third is Steve Lanpher, who spent the last six seasons as the head man at NCAA Division III’s Randolph College, before recently accepting a new role on Kielsmeier’s bench.

Randolph announced Lanpher’s departure, and its cause, on Wednesday. With the Vikings, he’ll fill a position that abruptly opened last month, when Bob Dunn ended his second stint at CSU to work for Carolyn Kieger at Penn State.

The WildCats went 72-65 during Lanpher’s tenure, highlighted by a 2022-23 season that stands as the best in program history. That year, Randolph won a record 19 games, and advanced to the Old Dominion Athletic Conference semifinals for the first time ever.

Superficially, those may sound like modest accomplishments, but they’re actually quite impressive in light of the team’s history.

Prior to Lanpher’s arrival, the WildCats had suffered through 37 consecutive non-winning seasons. Only four of those 37 saw a double-digit victory total, and 24 involved five wins or fewer. With that in mind, Lanpher managing a 63-40 mark over his final four years was borderline miraculous.

Not only does he stand alone as a Randolph head coach with a positive overall record, he’s the only WildCats leader to ever win more than 38 percent of their games. Along the way, Kylie Stark, Teniyah Crenshaw-Patterson, and Jessica Jennings were each voted to the ODAC’s all-conference team at various points.

“I am proud of what we were able to accomplish for women’s basketball in terms of success on and off the court,” Lanpher said in Randolph’s announcement. “Being able to set the single season record for wins and reaching the ODAC semifinal round are two of the biggest highlights, and to leave with a winning record overall are proud accomplishments.”  

Of course, Randolph is only the most recent segment in what has been a 30-plus year coaching career.

Lanpher was the head coach at New Jersey Institute of Technology, another difficult job, from 2012-18. Nevertheless, he led the Highlanders to 55 total wins, including 16, along with a Great West Conference tournament championship, in 2012-13. The win total still stands as NJIT’s Division I-era high water mark, while the title was also unprecedented for the program. From 2002-06, he went 92-28 at Division III’s Norwich University, including the 2006 Great Northwest Athletic Conference tournament championship, and an appearance in the second round of that year’s NCAA Tournament.

Between the Norwich and NJIT jobs, he was the associate head coach at both UMass and Vermont. Lanpher’s run with UVM was particularly successful, as it included back-to-back America East tournament titles and NCAA Tournament appearances in 2009 and 2010. He spent 2001-02 as an assistant at Lamar.

Lanpher was the head coach at Kansas’ Pratt Community College from 1999-2001 and at Dean College in Massachusetts, another two-year school, prior to that.

After graduating from the College of St. Joseph in Rutland, VT, with a bachelor’s degree in 1987 and a master’s degree three years later, Lanpher began his coaching career at West Rutland High School. He briefly returned to his alma mater as its head coach in 1993-94, before serving in the United States Army as a Ranger in the First Ranger Battalion in Savannah, GA.