Kiefer Haffey is a Southeast Michigan lifer who understands how fortunate he is to be the new head coach at Detroit Mercy.
“There are not a lot of opportunities where you get to be a Division I head coach,” he said. “I grew up 15 minutes away from our campus. My wife has a job 40 minutes from our campus. My family is from Novi, which is again, 15 or 20 minutes from the campus.”
“It’s my dream job in a city that I’ve always been super prideful of. [It’s] by family, my wife gets to keep her job, those moons don’t align all the time.”
Haffey is, suffice it to say, an anomaly in coaching, a profession with a finite number of available jobs and a lot of people who want them. Those simple realities of supply and demand reward those willing to relocate anywhere at a moment’s notice, and those who aren’t at least a little flexible about location often end up in another line of work.
Not so with the 2017 Wayne State graduate. He began his career at the local high school level, before joining the staff at nearby Concordia Ann Arbor and eventually becoming the Cardinals’ head coach for four seasons. Then, in 2022, he headed back into the city as an assistant coach at UDM.
Of course, if Haffey’s story was simply one of a guy who has managed to coach close to home, it would be notable, but hardly unique. What makes his case exceptional is the way the 2025-26 Titans have defied almost every modern trend, even prior to the season’s opening tip.
Anyone who has followed college basketball over the last five seasons has seen a certain narrative play out countless times. First, a team’s coach departs, for any reason. Then, just about all of the roster and staff follows closely behind, scattering to various hoops outposts across the nation.
One needn’t look any further than one of the Horizon League’s two offseason coaching changes, Oakland, for an illustration.
Following Jeff Tungate’s abrupt retirement last December, the Golden Grizzlies introduced new boss Keisha Newell on March 28th. Five days later, the first batch of OU players entered the transfer portal, headlined by all-conference guard Maddy Skorupski. Eventually, the outbound list would reach ten names, feeding both HL rivals like Green Bay (Skorupski) and Cleveland State (Madison Royal-Davis), as well as far-flung locales like Charleston Southern (Naz Damon) and SMU (Miriam Ibezim).
The other coaching change involved Detroit Mercy, Oakland’s Metro Series rival. The Titans, of course, were run to great effect by Kate Achter for the last three seasons, with Haffey on board as the associate head coach.
Achter did nothing short of drag UDM out of an abyss. The team averaged two wins per year over the five prior to her arrival – and were further battered by abuse allegations against former coach AnnMarie Gilbert that truncated the team’s 2020-21 season, and subsequently emptied out the roster – but Achter transformed the program into a highly-competitive outfit on the cusp of title contention by her second season.
In any sense, her departure for Western Michigan in the spring was a massive blow to any continued growth.
However, a funny thing happened at that point. The rest of the oft-repeated story, the part where most of the team follows Achter out the door, simply didn’t materialize.
It certainly looked like it would for a little bit. Upon Achter’s exit, Detroit Mercy offered up a press release saying that it would conduct a “national search,” a mission helped along by “a search advisory committee of alumni, former Titan student-athletes, donors and supporters, faculty, staff, and University leaders,” alongside headhunting firm Collegiate Sports Associates.
However, it was a different group, the team’s present roster, that ended up playing a decisive role. With the program, and the progress it had made over the last three years, on the verge of disintegration like so many others each spring, UDM athletic director Robert Vowels acted quickly to engage the remaining players.
“We were heavily involved in it a lot,” starting guard Makayla Jackson said. “We did a lot of interviews and stuff, and [Vowels] came and talked to us. So it was more of a decision for us to make.”
Haffey, meanwhile, applied for the job without any expectations at the outset. He did, however, have an important ally in his corner: Achter.
“She was super supportive from the onset,” he said. “When I told her ‘hey, I think I want to try to take over for you,’ lot of coaches might not support that. But she was great. She said ‘go through the process, you have my support, I hope you get it.’”
There was certainly a possibility of Haffey moving across the state to join the WMU staff, had things not worked out as intended. But, as Vowels’ process continued, it became clear that he was the right choice to become the Titans’ next leader.
“I felt like we had a really good relationship with Coach Kiefer and we knew what he was capable of,” Myonna Hooper, who is entering her fourth year as a Titan, said. “He brought a lot of energy, brought a lot of faith into our team, especially bringing back a whole bunch of people that we had from last year.”
Just 17 days after Achter’s departure became public, Haffey was introduced as the Titans’ 15th head coach.
The move quickly paid off when Jackson, who intended to transfer at one point, brought her 8.5 points per game back to UDM. Reserve forward Chanteese Craig also returned after entering the portal, though she will serve as a student assistant coach this season. Nearly everyone else stayed put, including Hooper, All-Horizon League selection Aaliyah McQueen, Jasmine Edwards, and Anna Lassan. The new-yet-old administration received further endorsement from the McQueen family when Rayven McQueen, Aaliyah’s younger sister, joined the team a week after Haffey was hired.
Ultimately, the Titans only saw one transfer exit by a player who earned significant minutes last season. That was Kailey Starks, a member of the HL’s All-Freshman Team, who made the hard-to-criticize decision to join Achter at WMU. However, a robust incoming portal class featuring the likes of Nisea Burrell, Kailee Davis, and Allison Basye should be more than enough to compensate for that.
The standard new coach rebuild? Not at Detroit Mercy, at least not this year.
Of course from this point, Haffey and his veteran squad will try to buck one more trend, as it continues its ascendancy towards the top of the conference. For as much as has been accomplished recently, it’s not lost on anyone inside the program that the Titans have faded during the stretch run of each of the last two seasons. This past New Year’s Day saw a win over IU Indianapolis that moved UDM to 4-0 in the HL and 10-2 overall. They then went 5-13 the rest of the way to slide from contention to the middle of the pack.
“We have to learn how to respond to failure better,” Haffey said. “I thought it took our team last year maybe a month to figure out how to respond to adversity. We did better at the very end of our season, but that middle chunk, January, early February, we weren’t responding to failure and adversity well. So, for us, that’s our conversation, that we need to win every day.”
“I feel like we do have a lot of pieces that are willing to buy in as long as we continue to practice hard every day and work on our craft and just getting better, striving to be better and just setting goals, going one step at a time, playing each team,” Hooper added. “I feel like that’s what’s going to get us there.”
