Central State University Athletics

For Lady Marauders Basketball Coach Sheba Harris, the view from the coach’s bench is always good – and even better during the games the Lady Marauders win.

In this year of re-building for the team, of course, the view isn’t always everything a coach could ask. But few things that happen on the hardwood this season are likely to surprise a veteran like Coach Harris – even if this is her first year as head coach of the team. After six seasons as an assistant coach and four years as a standout player (she graduated in 2002), she’s hardly a stranger to the ebb and flow of life with the Lady Marauders.

Six talented, top-scoring Lady Marauder seniors graduated last spring, shortly before Coach Harris took over. This season’s Lady Marauders are working hard to build skill and experience – at home, on the road -- and during the demanding 5:00 a.m. practices Coach Harris conducts.

Recruiting, training, replacing graduating players – it’s all part of the game. Coach Harris should know. After all, she was once a Lady Marauders recruit herself, riding a bus from her home in Cleveland – and getting off to look for the Central State University campus in what certainly must have seemed like a logical place – Central Ohio.

“I got off the bus in Columbus and started looking for the campus,” Coach Harris said. The soon-to-be CSU freshman soon discovered she had a few miles to travel yet. But when she arrived in Wilberforce, she knew she had found the right place.

“I felt comfortable right away,’ Harris said.

Harris had been a talented player on the women’s basketball team at John F. Kennedy High School on the east side of Cleveland, from a family that has always loved sports.
As long as she can remember, family gatherings of brothers, cousins and uncles always turned into games – around the yard, the ball diamond and the basketball court.

Though her first love was softball, Harris found inspiration from an early age to play the game she coaches today.

“My big brother, who is nine years older than me, was on the basketball team,” Harris said. When she entered JFK High, she took her place on the girls’ basketball team, where she played varsity for four years.

Coach Harris’ experience as a student-athlete came in handy a few years later. After a short detour (as a construction inspector for a civil engineering firm in Chicago), Harris answered the call and signed on as an assistant under legendary Lady Marauders head coach Patricia Tramble.

“As an assistant coach, you’re working with players one-on-one. It’s challenging. You need to be a teacher, counselor, friend, mom, big sis – because the players always take their concerns to the assistant coaches first,” Harris said.

In addition to the questions about skills on the basketball court, Harris said, the young players turn to assistant coaches with questions about schoolwork, personal concerns -- and for help with the inevitable disputes that arise among team members. Frequently, she said, the coaches deal with the strong “attitudes” female players bring to the basketball court and the locker room.

Some young players struggle with their identities and the judgments others make of female athletes (some resist weight-training to avoid looking like men, Harris said). Others become easily irritated with their teammates when they’re stressed. It’s the job of the assistant coach to help smooth the waters when the young women, some relatively new at team sports, find it hard to get along.

“It feels good when you can help somebody,” Harris said. “It’s like a breath of fresh air for me. I always thought, ‘I’m glad I was here to help you out’.”

This counseling and teaching experience is invaluable for an assistant coach who becomes a head coach – but, as Coach Harris has learned, the head coach job is a different animal. With assistant coaches of her own, Coach Harris is not spending time in the “Big Sis” role so much these days.

“It’s all about decisions,” Harris said of her current job, “decisions about training, strategy and competition.” While the assistant coaches always make great suggestions, she said, “It’s up to the head coach to make the final call.”

“I love making decisions,” Harris said. “Even if I’m wrong, I’m right.” With the final decision goes something else Harris loves -- the accountability that goes with the job. Each season brings a record of wins and losses that follows the head coach.

That includes, of course, the win-loss record during a re-building year for the team.

This year, five more Lady Marauders graduate with the class of 2010. When the time comes, Coach Harris will be ready, continuing the process of building and re-building the Lady Marauders team – taking the pitch to talented high school seniors facing the same decision she faced the year she rode the bus from Cleveland to Central State University.
The future of the team depends on it.

“Recruiting is really important,” Harris said. “Your recruits have got to believe in your program, believe in what you’re trying to do. You’ve got to stand out. You’ve got to get those talented young athletes to work for you.”