Every season Grambling grinds through one of the toughest road gauntlets in college basketball to fill the athletic department’s coffers through buy-in games. The Tigers crisscross the country as opponents for big-name programs that are looking to pad their home schedules with games they’re almost certain they’ll win.
“They look at teams like us as cupcakes on their schedule,” Jackson said.
But since he took over the Grambling program in 2017, the Tigers — who were mired in a streak of 10 straight losing seasons including an 0-28 campaign a few years earlier — have taken themselves off the dessert menu and become a hearty meal that’s been tough for some hosts to finish off.
That’s what happened that night they played the Iowa Hawkeyes in front of a partisan crowd of 10,540. The Tigers came back from a nine-point deficit early in the second half and took the lead, 59-56, on a three pointer with 10:58 left.
“It was my first-year coaching Grambling and I guess people were used to us being bad,” Jackson said. “And there’s this lady sitting directly behind our bench and she’s just going crazy, yelling at me that I’m ‘coaching too hard!’
“And I’m thinking, ‘Whaaaat?’ but she just keeps yelling at me to stop it.”
Iowa eventually retook the lead and won, 85-74, but that didn’t satisfy the woman who was incensed that Grambling tried to rewrite the script.
“She followed me to the tunnel, yellin’ the whole way and the police had to stop her,” Jackson laughed.
Although he knows UD Arena will have a sellout crowd of some 13,400 for the 2 p.m. tip, he figures he knows the people and the place better than most opposing coaches who come to town.
“I was born and raised in Milwaukee, but I feel like Dayton is where I grew up and became a man,” the 44-year-old Jackson said.
He spent 14 years at Central State, first as a player and then as an assistant coach and a successful head coach.
To supplement his first season as a coach, he also worked at Lowes in Beavercreek. “The lawn and garden department, slinging bags of mulch and bricks,” he said.
While he was here, he lived in Fairborn, Xenia, and Beavercreek.
His wife Shelithia is a Wright State graduate.
Although his daughter was born in Toledo, his two sons were born at Miami Valley Hospital.
“Dayton,” he said, “is a second home to me.”
Coaching start at Central State
After playing a season at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Jackson transferred to Central State in 1999, joining Doug Lewis, the coach who’d recruited him to Milwaukee and now was an assistant on Michael Grant’s staff.
As the starting point guard that first season, Jackson led the Marauders to the NAIA Sweet Sixteen and a 24-8 record.
When he finished his three seasons of eligibility at CSU, he said he talked about going overseas to play until he sat down with Grant:
“He was like, ‘Man, you could be a hell of a coach.’
“It was something I’d never considered, but then he suggested I could be a student coach if I stayed here and finished up getting my degree. So that first year I went to classes, helped out with the basketball team every day and worked at Lowes, too.
“I learned a lot that year. Lowes gave me a foundation for working hard. In fact, they asked me to be part of their manager in training program.”
Instead, Lewis, who’d taken over the CSU job after Grant went to Southern University, hired him as an assistant coach.
Those first years at CSU he was influenced by Grant, Lewis and the late and legendary coach, Ben Waterman.
“Philosophy-wise, that’s where a lot of my coaching career started,” he said. “And Coach Waterman influenced me as a young man. He showed me everyday living and how he approached it. Even to this day I still call people ‘Big Guy!’ like he did.”
After seven years as a Marauder assistant, Jackson — who got his master’s at CSU, too — was elevated to head coach when Lewis took another job.
He had four straight winning seasons and then left for Stillman College, where his teams had impressive records in each of his three years there. In 2015-16, his team went 27-6, made the NCAA Division II Tournament and he was named the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SIAC) Coach of the Year.
It was while he was at Stillman, an HBCU in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that he became acquainted with Dayton coach Anthony Grant, who was then the head coach at Alabama.
“He gave us an exhibition game my second year there,” Jackson said. “When he was at Alabama, his door was always open for us at Stillman, whether it was coming over and watching practice, work outs or his camps.
“He’s one of the guys you look up to. He’s coached at the highest levels of basketball, places you aspire to coach at. You never hear anything bad about him and he always has something positive to share with you. He’s someone you want to emulate.”
Jackson then accepted a job at Grambling, which was trying to rebuild itself after a sweeping NCAA investigation found multiple violations in numerous sports and put the school on two years of probation.
From the ashes, Jackson immediately turned Grambling into a hoops’ phoenix. His initial team went 17-14 and beat Georgia Tech in Atlanta. It was Grambling’s first winning basketball campaign since the 2005-06 season. The Tigers won their first Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) regular season title in 30 years, and he not only was honored as the SWAC Coach of the Year but was named the Ben Jobe National Coach of the Year, an honor given to the most outstanding minority coach in NCAA Division I basketball.
Even with the crushing road schedules to begin each year, Jackson has had just one losing season in his previous six at Grambling.
Last year the Tigers went 24-9 and beat Colorado and Vanderbilt. It was the most wins for the program since it joined Division I in 1977.
Jackson again was named the SWAC Coach of the Year and after the season he was awarded a new four-year contract extension.
Credit: Brad Tollefson
Credit: Brad Tollefson
Road trips
This season the Tigers opened at home on Willis Reed Court, the floor honoring the school’s greatest basketball alum, and now are halfway through a 10-game nonconference road schedule. They will play in eight different states and just came off a four-game, eight-day road trip.
After the UD game, they go back home to Louisiana for finals week and then head to Pullman, Washington; Des Moines, Iowa; Hammond, Louisiana; and Gainesville, Florida.
Counting this season, Jackson will have taken his teams to nonconference games in 24 states. Some the Tigers visited multiple times, including eight trips to Texas, six to Arizona and four each to Alabama, Iowa and California.
“Look, the reality of the situation is no, I don’t want to do this,” he said. “I don’t think any coach in low-major basketball wants to take these games on. But it’s really about fund raising. You play these buy-in games against name programs and Power 5 teams and the tough part is, you’re going to lose the majority of them.
“When you’re constantly on the road, you often end up with two hours to practice in any gym you can find. Your games are officiated by refs who don’t know you and you miss a lot of family time at home, including most Thanksgivings.
“I’ve got a wonderful wife,” Jackson said.
Their three children include a daughter finishing up college, a son who’s making a name for himself as a high school point guard and 4.0 student in Louisiana and the youngest boy, who’s in middle school.
The day after Thanksgiving, Grambling lost a hard-fought game at Troy.
Afterward, Jackson said Troy coach Scott Cross told him: “Hey man, I just want to tell you’ve done a phenomenal job of resurrecting that program.”
Jackson knows his 2-5 Tigers will have their hands full at UD Arena:
“Dayton has one of the best environments in college basketball. Night in and night out, the Arena is sold out, whether they’re playing Grambling or an A-10 team like St Bonaventure.
“It’s an incredible environment, actually better than some of the Powers 5s we’ve been to.
He’ll tell his players the same thing he often does before games like this:
“I say, ‘Our goal is to go out and silence the crowd.’ The best feeling ever is when you’re sitting there on the bench and the home crowd has to give the rally cheer to lift up their guys because we’re making it hard.
“Hearing those rally chants, that’s when I know we’re doing our job.”
Then again, a lady in Iowa made that same point in loud and crazed fashion.
Right up until the cops came.
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