2 weeks Ago
Jinks Coleman, the first LSU women's basketball coach, smiles in a photograph published in the Feb. 8, 1978, edition of the Tensas Gazette newspaper. Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save Technically, the caller was offering something that didn’t even exist.
But the small-town Louisiana parents who gifted one of their five children a basketball for Christmas and nailed a hoop to the roof of their carport decided to answer the phone and listen anyway, connecting with someone who wanted to drive 150 miles north, visit their house and meet their oldest daughter. It was 1974. That was when the parents of Lenette Caldwell Romero — then a crafty 5-foot-4 point guard — decided to invite an LSU physical education teacher named Jinks Coleman to their home in Winnsboro.
“She met my parents and sat down and said, ‘This is what I'm trying to do,’ ” Caldwell Romero said. “ 'And I'm looking for a good nucleus of players to start this thing, get this thing off the ground.’ ” That thing Coleman was referring to is the LSU women’s basketball team , which is unbeaten ahead of its Thursday clash with Stanford (8 p.
m., ESPN2). That game is the marquee nonconference home contest of LSU’s 50th season as a program.
Over those five decades, only seven women’s college basketball programs have reached at least six Final Fours. Stanford and LSU are two of them. The Cardinal also got its start in 1974, around the same time Coleman threw together a team down in Baton Rouge, built it into a national power, then abruptly left it all behind five years later amid disagreements with LSU administrators.
Over the three-and-a-half seasons she was in charge, Coleman led LSU to 91 wins and an appearance in a national title game. Only three coaches — Sue Gunter, Nikki Fargas and Kim Mulkey — have steered the Tigers to more victories, and just one — Mulkey — has brought the Tigers further into the postseason than Coleman could. Former LSU athletic director Joe Dean called her “ the mother ” of the LSU women’s basketball program.
Before Gunter started coaching the team in 1982, she sought advice from Coleman, who encouraged her to take the job. Yet Coleman resigned halfway through her fourth season in charge of the program. At the time, LSU cited “personal reasons” for her decision.
But Coleman told reporters that she stepped down over frustration that LSU’s athletic department wasn’t giving her requisite support and suspicion that an assistant was working behind the scenes to unseat her as head coach. Coleman’s resignation capped an uneven five years, each of which set the foundation for what the program has become today. The program had humble beginnings but early success — all on the whim of one largely forgotten coach with a wide, bright smile and thick, dark hair cut in a bob trimmed neatly above her shoulders.
“I have nothing bad to say about coach Coleman,” Caldwell Romero said. “She was a P.E.
teacher that got paid peanuts to coach the basketball team. I thought she did an unbelievable job with what resources that she had at the time.” Former LSU women's basketball forward Maree Jackson takes a shot in a photo published in a 1978 edition of Coaching Women's Basketball magazine.
'A fiery coach’ Maree Jackson needed either a tooth extraction or a root canal. That’s the news the 6-foot-2 Australian received from the dentist she visited in 1977 with an assist from Coleman, the coach she had called earlier to complain about a severe toothache. Jackson eventually opted for the extraction, then developed a dry socket.
So, Coleman drove her back and forth to the dentist’s office every day for a week. The LSU coach told that story in an article she penned in a 1978 edition of a women’s athletics coaching magazine. Sometimes, Coleman wrote, she had to be “more than a coach,” especially for the two players she had recruited from Australia — Jackson and a forward named Julie Gross.
That duo led LSU to a 29-9 record and an appearance in the 1977 AIAW national championship, a game the Tigers lost to Delta State. LSU finished the year prior, its first season competing at that level, with a 17-14 record. “She was a fiery coach,” Gross said.
“She had her ways. She was very superstitious. She didn't really let us do what we want, but we had our plays.
We had to run them. Our practices were intense.” Jackson and Gross met Coleman at the airport, then got acquainted over a stack of the first pancakes the two players ever tried, which they ordered from a local IHOP.
Gross still has the third-most career points and second-most career rebounds in program history. Jackson ranks seventh in points and third in rebounds. Back then, they had to piece everything together.
The players taped their own ankles, washed their own uniforms and crammed into a small bus for trips to road games. Coleman, as she told The Associated Press in 1979, earned $11,000 per year and used $3,000-$5,000 of that salary to create a recruiting budget. But money wasn’t a factor behind Coleman’s decision to resign, she said in 1979 amid an 8-7 start to the season.
Then-LSU athletic director Paul Dietzel suggested that she was struggling to handle the increased pressure tied to her goal of bringing LSU back to a national title game, a viewpoint that conflicted with the explanation Coleman offered for her decision. “I don’t know whether you call it a power struggle or what,” she told the AP, “but they wanted me to change my theory of coaching and handling people, and I said, 'I’m sorry, I won’t do it.'" A clipping from the Feb.
9, 1979 edition of The Daily Advertiser featuring an Associated Press story on the resignation of Jinks Coleman, LSU's first head women's basketball coach. Coleman also said that players and assistant coach Barbara Swanner brought problems to athletic department higher-ups before they mentioned them to her. Swanner was named interim coach after Coleman resigned, then given the full-time job for the next three seasons before LSU hired Gunter.
Over Swanner’s tenure, the Tigers went 57-50. Gunter then brought LSU to five Final Fours, but the program never reached another national title game until 2023 — more than 40 years after Coleman took the program there in 1977. “She was certainly one of the pioneers in women's basketball back then,” former LSU guard Nancy French said, “starting programs from scratch and pulling in people from all over because eventually she recruited people from Massachusetts and Ohio that came and joined us the following year.
“So, I think she deserves accolades for getting things started.” The LSU women's basketball team poses for a photo during the season it reached the 1977 AIAW national championship game. The Tigers were coached by Jinks Coleman (far right).
'Run through a brick wall’ Caldwell Romero eventually moved down from Winnsboro to Baton Rouge with a scholarship from Coleman. At LSU, she wore her hair in the same style as her coach — parted in the middle, cut to the base of her neck. A self-described aggressive, scrappy point guard, Caldwell Romero helped initiate LSU’s uptempo offense, designed to funnel paint touches to Jackson and Gross.
Once she ran out of eligibility, she worked as a teacher and a high school basketball coach for 33 years. Then she eulogized Coleman, who died in October 2000 after a battle with cancer. She was 56.
“I didn't appreciate her as a coach when I was a player until I became a coach,” Caldwell Romero said. “It makes you look at things a little differently. But I remember speaking at her eulogy, how I thought I'll never do this, this or this as a coach because that's what she did, and then I came back and did some of the same things.
” Caldwell Romero called Coleman a “tough” coach who “didn’t baby anybody.” She first recognized those traits when Coleman visited her modest Winnsboro house in 1974. They then helped LSU win 91 games and reach a national title game — short-lived success that laid out a vision for what a program could one day become.
“If she told me to run through a brick wall,” Caldwell Romero said, “I'd run through a brick wall — no questions asked. We were all that way. We were just happy.
Happy to play.”.
