Making history? Sarah Gayler now head coach of a Kentucky men’s college hoops team.
Sarah Gayler had already accepted the dual positions of head men’s basketball coach and athletics director at Owensboro’s Brescia University in September when a school official shared information that floored her.
“The dean of students came to me and said, ‘Did you know you are the first NAIA men’s (basketball) coach as a woman?’” Gayler says. “I was like, ‘Really?’ It caught me totally off guard.”
It will be far from the bright lights and big crowds of Rupp Arena, but one of the most-interesting stories in Kentucky men’s college hoops this winter will take place at Brescia, a small, Catholic liberal arts university in Daviess County.
Brescia hired Gayler, 35, a former player at the University of New Orleans, out of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball operations department. When it employed a female to coach men’s hoops, Brescia apparently did something unprecedented in the history of NAIA athletics — which goes back to 1937.
Famously, Rick Pitino employed Bernadette Locke-Mattox as an assistant with the University of Kentucky men’s program from 1990 through 1994. But is Gayler the first woman to be head coach of a college men’s hoops team in the commonwealth?
She’s the first one I recall. In a state with numerous defunct colleges, I am not sure how you really know that for sure.
Over 12 of the past 13 years, Gayler has worked in various capacities in men’s basketball. So, for her, becoming a college men’s hoops head coach seems a natural career progression.
“I am coaching men and I love it,” she says. “It’s where my heart is.”
Gayler grew up in Oklahoma in what she describes as “a rodeo family.” Her mom was a bull rider, her dad rode broncs and her brother “did all sorts of things,” Gayler says.
Barrel racing was Gayler’s specialty.
However, as she approached middle school, she hit a growth spurt.
“I am about 6-foot-1, and everybody always asked me, ‘Do you play basketball?’” Gayler says. “I was like, ‘You know what, I think I am going to try (hoops).’ I fell in love with it — and things have worked out pretty well.”
One’s path into the coaching profession can lead in surprising directions. When asked why he chose to coach women’s basketball, Matthew Mitchell, the former Kentucky Wildcats coach, said that when he began his career as a Mississippi high school teacher, he coached both boys’ and girls’ sports.
Over time, Mitchell realized he was deriving the most enjoyment and felt most comfortable while coaching the girls’ teams.
Gayler had the opposite experience. As a high school sophomore, she was shooting baskets in a park when a stranger approached and advised her that it would enhance her development as a player if she played pickup basketball against males.
So Gayler adopted that idea, and also became an enthusiastic viewer of NBA game telecasts.
Once her playing career was winding down, Gayler says, “I don’t really know if it was actually a (conscious) decision” to pursue a career coaching men.
“I just think it was kind of ingrained in me,” she says. “I just really enjoyed being around (male players). I enjoyed what they did and how they played. ... So, when I finished playing, I was still in that mindset.”
A tie to Owensboro
Over the course of an interesting basketball journey, Gayler has worked with the NBA Developmental League and with the Jr. NBA in both India and China. She spent the past two seasons working for the NBA’s Bucks.
She has a prior connection to Owensboro, having been the assistant head coach of the Kentucky Mavericks, a professional basketball team whose Daviess County run ended in 2017.
This summer, Gayler said she had no plan to leave the reigning NBA champions in Milwaukee, but when she saw Brescia advertising for a head men’s basketball coach on the Internet she felt a strong tug toward becoming an on-the-court coach again.
Having taken the Brescia coaching job in September, Gayler will have no chance to supplement the roster she inherited.
“It’s kind of interesting coming in, I didn’t recruit any of the players,” Gayler says. “In the interview process, they asked me, ‘So what do you plan to run with this team?’ I told them straight up, ‘I need to see my team before I tell you what we are going to run.’”
Brescia competes in the NAIA Division II River States Conference, which also includes Kentucky schools Asbury and Midway. A season ago under former coach Brian Skortz, Brescia went 3-12 against a schedule substantially reduced by COVID-19 cancellations.
Two years ago, the Bearcats were 10-19. Brescia’s most recent winning season came in 2018-19, when it went 15-14.
Male coaches hired to coach women’s college sports teams has long been controversial among those who believe those jobs should go exclusively to females.
My view is that what a school owes its athletes, male and female, is to hire the best coach it can find, period.
However, if male coaches are going to work in women’s college sports, female coaches should have opportunities to work in men’s sports, too.
At Brescia, Sarah Gayler notes, you now have a woman coaching the men’s basketball team and a man coaching the women’s hoops team.
“There’s not a difference. There shouldn’t be a difference,” Gayler says. “It’s really just a person coaching basketball.”
