Tom Archdeacon: Wright State coach — ‘this place means everything to me’

Katrina Merriweather has led Raiders to 17-5 mark in first season

Katrina Merriweather knows all about second chances:

She gave one to Wright State.

And Wright State gave one to her.

Back when she was a standout basketball player at the University of Cincinnati, Merriweather said her best friend was Reggen Stewart, a star at Wright State who would end up scoring 1,277 points for the Raiders.

“I came to visit her one time and told her I was never coming back,” Merriweather recalled Sunday afternoon. “I told her, ‘You’re gonna need to come to UC from here on out.’

“This was like 1998 and there was nothing here.”

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The Raiders women would win just six games that 1998-1999 season and the program was mired in what would be 16 straight years of losing records.

But in 2010, Merriweather got a call from Mike Bradbury, then the coach at Morehead State and previously a UC assistant when she played there.

“He calls me and says he may get the Wright State job and wanted to know if I’d be interested in joining his staff,” she smiled. “I said, ‘No, don’t take that job! You can’t win there.’

“But he goes ‘Oh Trina, you gotta come see it. He’s one of the best recruiters in the country and he recruited me the same way he recruits all the kids. And he got me to come to Wright State and…it…was…unbelievable..

“The (Stetzer) Pavilion was unbelievable. The way the campus had grown. Fairfield Commons, the whole area.

I walked away saying. ‘We can win here!’”

She joined Bradbury and over the next six seasons the team won 128 games and advanced to postseason play five times, including the program’s first-ever NCAA Tournament appearance in 2014.

Bradbury left for New Mexico last spring and Merriweather was chosen as his replacement.

With Sunday’s 84-66 victory over Oakland at the Nutter Center, Merriweather now has guided her young, undersized team to a 17-5 record, including 9-1 in the Horizon League.

The Raiders have won 13 of their last 14 games and eight in a row, which sets a record at WSU as the longest winning streak ever by a Raider coach at the NCAA Division I level.

She said there’s a lot of factors for this – players who have bought in to what she says, an exceptional staff and certainly the school itself.

Wright State is the college program that gave her a second chance.

Trouble with NCAA

Eleven years ago Merriweather was a young, promising assistant coach at Purdue. She had been just 23 when she joined the staff two seasons earlier and had just a year of experience at Illinois-Chicago.

With Purdue though she had pedigree.

Her grandfather Willie Merriweather – who had been high school star alongside Oscar Robertson at Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis – was a Boilermaker All American who turned down the NBA to become a Detroit educator, later represented several NBA players and ended up in both the Purdue and Indiana basketball halls of fame.

Her dad played at Purdue and then ran the acclaimed AAU team and community mentoring program called The Family in Indianapolis.

She was successful as a coach, but because she was nearly the same age as her charges she admits she was too close to some of them.

“But none of that is an excuse,” she said firmly. “When you accept that type of position, you accept the responsibility that comes with it. I made mistakes and some errors in judgment. I was trying to help people and be a good person, but it was up to me to protect my job and I didn’t do a good job of it.”

She ran afoul with NCAA rules when she typed and corrected a player’s term paper and made numerous phone calls to two recruits that were not permitted. Purdue turned itself into the NCAA for the infractions and the school eventually got two years of probation and lost three scholarships.

After head coach Kristy Curry – who said she had twice looked into the situation and saw no improprieties – took a job at Texas Tech, Merriweather was terminated in March of 2006.

The NCAA gave her a three year show-cause penalty, which meant before any school could hire her she and that school had to make its case to the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions.

Merriweather was crushed and went home to Indianapolis to be with her family and eventually coach her father’s AAU team.

“When I came home I was not OK,” she said. “ I was just 45 minutes from (Purdue) and I felt like everybody was looking at me and judging me. I felt bad for the other people who had been hurt.”

During her exile some colleges did contact her about an assistant jobs but she turned them down.

“I thought it was important that I respect the NCAA and the show-cause penalty,” she said. “Plus I needed the time with my family. And because my father is so well respected and connected, I had coaches calling all the time to see if I was OK.

“And in the four years I was out, I had an opportunity to really learn to coach. Like I said, except for the people that were hurt, it was probably the best thing that could happen to me.”

‘There’s no place I’d rather be’

Once at Wright State, she learned a lot under Bradbury. When he left, the school interviewed her and fellow Raider assistant Keith Freeman. WSU chose her and now Freeman, a respected coach himself, is her right hand man.

Although the team lost its 6-foot 5 center Richelle van der Keijl, who left with Bradbury and now averages 13 points and 9.4 rebounds a game for the Lobos and the program’s all-time career scorer Kim Demmings graduated and its only senior Antania Hayes is coming back from an ACL tear and surgery and no starter is taller than 5-foot-11, the Raiders are having one of their best seasons ever.

"We may be small and short, but the cupboard was not bare," Merriweather said. "There are some very good players on this team."

The Raiders are led by Chelsea Welch, the Fairmont High School star who transferred in from Pitt. But they also have a pair of under-sized workhorses inside in Lexi Smith and Symone Simmons and two long-range shooters in Emily Vogelpohl and Mackenzie Taylor.

They have Daisa Evans, a standout guard from suburban Chicago sitting out as an academic redshirt and have recruited an impressive class that includes five players, four who are 6-1 or taller.

Sunday evening Merriweather was flying out on a recruiting trip that would take her to California and Florida.

She said the prospects are “exciting,” but what really made her smile was that it was happening at Wright State.

“I’ve told a lot of people this might be the only job in the country where I could be the head coach now,” she said.

“That’s because these people got to know me and it wasn’t through a report or someone else’s opinion of me. They got to know me for me.”

In turn, she got to know Wright State.

“This place means everything to me,” she said. “There’s no place I’d rather be.”

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