Nikki McCray-Penson, basketball star and coach, dies at age 51

Nikki McCray-Penson, an all-American point guard for the powerful University of Tennessee women’s basketball team, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and a three-time All-Star in the WNBA, passed away Friday. She was 51.

Her death was announced by Rutgers University, where she was about to enter her second season as an assistant coach of the women’s basketball team. The school has not said where she died or named a cause. McCray-Penson was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013.

“Thanks my little sister, my boyfriend, my foxhole partner, my teammate, my fast food snacker, my basketball junkie, my fellow Olympian, my gold medalist and now my angel,” Dawn Staley, the women’s basketball coach at the University of South Carolina, where McCray-Penson was an assistant coach for nine years, wrote on Twitter.

At Tennessee, McCray-Penson was a two-time all-American and three-time all-Southeastern Conference player. She helped lead the Lady Vols to three consecutive regular-season conference titles and two conference tournament championships.

She started as a defensive specialist but evolved into an offensive force.

“It bothered her that she was such a defensive player,” her Basketball Hall of Fame coach, Pat Summitt, told The Tennessean of Nashville in 1994, late in McCray-Penson’s breakaway season, when she averaged 16.3 points. achieved per match. a junior. “She wanted to develop the total game, and she did.”

In the same article, McCray-Penson said, “I had to learn to react when criticized and learn from mistakes. Pat won’t motivate you. She added, “You have to come out with an attitude about yourself, and that comes from maturity.”

Sally Jenkins, a sports columnist who collaborated with Summitt on three books, said in a telephone interview that there was a special bond between the coach and McCray-Penson. “Pat was beaming when Nikki came to visit,” she said.

She added, “There were a lot of players who came to Tennessee that were like 15-story buildings, but the elevators only went to the 10th floor. Some kids have found a way to get to the top and keep all their promises. Nikki was one of those.”

After graduating from Tennessee in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in education, McCray-Penson became part of the U.S. team that would win the gold medal at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. After an early win over South Korea in which McCray-Penson led the team with 16 points and nine rebounds, she said, “We want to be the best basketball team in history.”

Overall, she averaged 9.4 points per game in the tournament and provided some of the stifling defense that limited opposing players’ scoring. Four years later, when the US team won the gold medal in Sydney, Australia, McCray-Penson averaged 5.1 points.

By then she had turned professional. With the Columbus Quest of the short-lived American Basketball League, which preceded the WNBA as a women’s league, averaged 19.9 points per gameled the team to the national championship in 1997 and was named most valuable player.

She did not stay at the ABL for long. She jumped after one season to the Washington Mystics of the WNBA, which was founded by the National Basketball Association.

“I saw what the NBA can do to promote women’s basketball,” she told The Associated Press in 1997.

From 1998, she spent four seasons with the Mystics, averaged 15.4 points per game and was selected to three All-Star games. She had less success over the next five years, playing in Indianapolis, Phoenix, San Antonio and Chicago. She retired in 2006.

She quickly moved into coaching: she was an assistant women’s coach at Western Kentucky University for two years before moving to South Carolina in 2008, where she joined Staley, her teammate on the 1996 and 2000 Olympic teams.

After leading South Carolina to its first NCAA women’s basketball title in 2017, McCray-Penson was hired for her first head coaching job, at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. She coached the team to a 53–40 record over three seasons; in the 2019–20 season, she led the Monarchs to a 24–6 record and was named Conference USA Coach of the Year.

In 2020, she was named head coach at Mississippi State University, but she resigned for health reasons after a 10-9 record in her only season there.

In 2022, Rutgers hired her as an assistant.

“Simply put, Nikki is a winner,” Coquese Washington, the Rutgers coach, who was a teammate of McCray-Penson’s with the WNBA’s Indiana Fever, told The Associated Press. “She excelled at the highest level of our game.”

McCray-Penson was initiated into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, in Knoxville, Tenn., in 2012.

Nikki Kesangane McCray was born on December 17, 1971 in Collierville, Tennessee. Her survivors are her husband, Thomas Penson, and her son, also named Thomas. Her mother, Sally Coleman, died of breast cancer in 2018.

“We know there is no cure,” McCray-Penson told The Clarion Ledger of Jackson, Miss., in 2020. “We live with it. Every day you don’t let that define you. You live life. You make every day count. That’s what I saw my mother do.”