And the thing is, Nicole Stephens, the Dayton Flyers’ point guard, hasn’t really changed that much.
The person making those assessments of her was Tamika Williams-Jeter, now the head coach of the resurgent 10-6 UD women’s basketball team, but previously — before stops at Wittenberg and Ohio State — she was an assistant coach at Penn State and already had known Stephens for several years.
“I’ve known her since she was 12 or 13 years old,” Williams-Jeter said after the Flyers’ 79-61 victory over LaSalle on Saturday at UD Arena. “I know her family; she knows mine. She has pictures of me back when I was pregnant.”
She said their long connection is “pretty cool.”
Stephens played at Pickerington Central High School and Williams-Jeter recruited Ohio for the Nittany Lions and before that for Kentucky when she was an assistant there.
“(Tamika) recruited me at Penn State when I was a freshman,” the 5-foot-7 Stephens said. “And when she moved back to Ohio, I trained with her husband. I know her and her family pretty well.”
Although she visited Penn State during the recruiting process, she said the Lions never offered her a scholarship. She entertained the thought of joining them as a walk-on player, but that never quite materialized either.
Williams-Jeter liked her hoops skills and her basketball IQ — Pickerington Central won one state title and was runner up another season when Stephens was there, the last season as the team captain — but couldn’t convince the powers that be to add her to the roster.
“She was just so small, probably 100 pounds wet then,” Williams-Jeter said. “We wanted to squeeze her in, but she was just too small for the Big Ten.”
After fielding offers from some Mid-American Conference schools and other Ivy League programs, Stephens chose Columbia and in her four years at the storiedschool, she got a degree in sociology and rode a roller coaster of fortune on the basketball court.,
Her first season — 2020-21 — the Ivy League cancelled basketball because of the COVID pandemic. Sophomore year she came off the bench for the Lions in 24 games and had some highlight moments, including scoring 12 points in 13 minutes against Harvard.
Her next season lasted just seven games due to an ankle injury that required surgery and went down as a medical redshirt year.
Last season — although she severely strained all the ligaments in her other ankle and missed the preseason — she played in 30 games and averaged 19 minutes and 4.4 points per contest.
She graduated last May and said the Ivy League doesn’t allow graduates to play, so she went looking for another school and drew interest from several programs, especially the Flyers who were coached by her old friend.
She’s now a big reason the team is off to its best start in Williams-Jeter’s three seasons at the helm.
The Flyers are on a four-game winning streak — also a first in the Willams-Jeter reign — and are 4-1 in Atlantic 10 play.
Over the past two seasons — which were an undermanned, overwhelmed 19-40 struggle — the Flyers won just five conference games in each season.
‘A coach on the floor’
Although Stephens was new to the program, Williams-Jeter made her a team captain this season.
“Nicole is a coach on the floor,” Williams-Jeter said as she stood outside the team’s dressing room. “She’s heady and she’s competitive. And she’s a phenomenal defender for being so small. She’s going to fight you to the end.
“Now that she’s here, she’s definitely an offensive machine, too. She can shoot the three and she’s gotten some big pull-up jumpers just to settle us down a bit.”
Credit: Erik Schelkun
Credit: Erik Schelkun
In her UD debut, Stephens scored a team-high 15 points and added three steals, a blocked shot and two assists to lead the Flyers to a come from behind victory over Southeast Missouri State. She scored 15 against South Dakota in the Music City Classic in Nashville and Saturday she had a career-high seven assists to go with five points.
“She’s a great leader,” Williams-Jeter said. “She’s a kid that the young kids really defer to.”
UD added eight new players this season — four transfers and four freshmen — and Williams-Jeter thought Stephens could be key in getting them to mesh quickly. That’s why she named her a captain:
“It’s the little stuff, how she brings them all together. It’s going to have coffee with the kids; doing workouts with them; bringing them to her house. It’s the things outside of the basketball court.
“She’s also our biggest voice, even though she’s really quiet and unassuming off the floor.
“On the floor she calls out all the action. She’s the leader of that space. She’s just a tough kid.”
And no one has benefited more from her this season than senior guard Ivy Wolf.
She’s the A-10′s third leading scorer — averaging 18 points per game – and has been an offensive powerhouse the past week. With 22 points Saturday, she’s scored 81 in the last three games.
Last season Wolf often was forced to play point guard and that’s not her strong suit.
She’s a shooting guard — she’s now scored 1,523 points in a career that began with the Miami RedHawks — and with Stephens out front, that’s what she can be this year.
“Ivy’s having a phenomenal season,” Williams-Jeter said.
Senior forward Arianna “Nany” Smith is back in sync again, too.
Saturday she posted her fifth double-double of the season – 21 points and 15 rebounds—and that came on the heels of 17 points and 16 boards three days earlier against Massachusetts.
‘They wanted to change the program’
Stephens said she chose UD for several reasons.
She’d finally get to play full time — she’s started 12 of 16 games and is third in minutes played — and she felt her experience with the UD staff would help her with her future.
She wants to be a coach.
What especially convinced her to trade New York City (which she loved) for Dayton was the fact that she could “see how they wanted to change the program around and how bought in everyone was.”
No one was more committed than the four players on the roster – Smith, Shannon Wheeler, Nayo Lear and Eleanor Monyek – who had been here for Williams-Jeters’ first two seasons.
Wheeler, in fact, is the lone holdover from coach Shauna Green’s 2021-22 Flyers’ team.
After Green left for Illinois, several players transferred, five graduated and one incoming freshman decommitted, all of which left the cupboard bare.
Williams-Jeter took over late and had to piecemeal a team together that, at times, had just seven players in uniform. That first year they lost their first 10 games and finished 7-21. Last season they were 12-19.
“Shannon, Nany, Eleanor and Nayo — they’ve all been through it,” Stephens said “I could see that hunger from them this summer. Everyone was bought in. They wanted to change the program.”
That’s starting to happen now.
At 4-1 in conference play, the Flyers now are tied for second in the standings going into Wednesday’s game at Duquesne.
With all the success she’s been used to in her career — as a celebrated high school, college and WNBA player and then a coach — Williams-Jeter was asked if this didn’t “just finally feel good again.”
“It does,” she said as she turned to go back to the locker room. “But you know me.
“I want more.”
As she walked off, she passed Stephens, the one player who is key to making that happen.
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