It’s a place he knows well.
“I’ve never won in that building,” he said with something of a laugh. "I coached the Kentucky State women in the ’90s and Central State was our big rival.
"I had top 20 teams, a team that won the SIAC (Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference) championship, teams that won multiple division championships, went to the NCAA Tournament, we had a 26 game winning season. We were very good.
“But so were they. Coach Theresa Check had a heavyweight program. We’d really go at it with them up there, but we couldn’t beat them. It was a tough place to play.”
Back then, when the Thorobrettes would come into Beacom/Lewis – with its numerous championship banners hanging up above – the place would be packed with CSU students who were loud and partisan and only were drowned out by the drum and brass-heavy pep band that would take the decibel level to new heights.
Under Check – who is in the Ohio Basketball Hall of Fame, the NAIA Hall of Fame, CSU Hall of Fame and others – the Marauders were an NAIA power, going to a record 13 straight national tournaments and winning 407 games in 17 seasons.
Check remembered those games with Davis’ Kentucky State teams:
“They were always one of our biggest rivals. We always got their best and hopefully we gave them ours. We had some great games.”
And that’s a tribute to Davis, who inherited a last-place program and in the six seasons he was there, turned it into an SIAC power.
He showed the same Midas touch at other stops in his long career.
In the late ’80s, he guided a last-place team at Morristown College, a small, now defunct HBCU in Eastern Tennessee, to a second-place finish in the Eastern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.
At Livingstone College – his alma mater where, as a player, he led the nation with a 35 points per game scoring average – he turned a one-win team into a 15-game winner.
And at Saint Augustine University in North Carolina, he took a perennial loser and turned it into a top 20 program while the team’s GPA also led the conference four years straight.
Successes like that are part of the reason CSU Athletics Director Tara Owens and the school’s hierarchy chose him over the more than 100 applicants who applied for the job.
“Coach Davis comes to CSU with an extensive coaching background while consistently displaying integrity and a tireless dedication to the development his student-athletes,” Owens said in a statement. “We are confident that Coach Davis will instill a winning culture both on and off the court while creating a quality collegiate experience for our students.”
This week CSU also announced it was hiring Cathy Parson as its new women’s basketball coach and Ray Lewis as the men’s and women’s volleyball coach.
The Marauders soon will announce a new cross country and track coach, as well.
Parson led programs at Howard University, Frostburg State, Stratford University and Christopher Newport University. In 1998, she was the interim head coach of the WNBA Washington Mystics.
As a player at West Virginia, she scored a school record 2,113 career points and is in the Mountaineers' Athletic Hall of Fame.
Lewis guided the Benedictine University men’s team in Mesa, Ariz. to the NAIA national championship in 2019 and to a runner-up finish the year before.
As for Davis, the past three seasons he coached the Elizabeth City State women’s team, taking a program that had five straight losing seasons and leading them to a 16-16 finish in his second season.
Last year his team lost its star post player to a knee injury and the Vikings finished 12-18.
He was replaced even though he said he believes it was one of his best coaching jobs ever.
His playing career was honored last season when he was inducted in the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA) Hall of Fame.
Considered one of the greatest player in the league’s history, he scored 1,800 career points, led the nation in scoring in the 1987-88 season and is especially remembered for his uncanny shooting ability.
Over his career, he made 56 percent of his field goal attempts, 53 percent of his three-point tries and shot 94 percent from the free-throw line.
His entire playing and coaching career has been at HBCUs: North Carolina Central, South Carolina State, Morristown, Livingstone, Kentucky State, Saint Augustine, Shaw and Elizabeth City.
“Although it’s not necessarily been by design, I’ve always ended up at an HBCU,” he said. “For me it was always more about the family atmosphere and the tradition at an HBCU.”
He said he felt that when he came to visit CSU.
He takes over a program coached the past six years by Joseph Price. Last season the Marauders went 17-13.
Davis’ first day on the job at CSU will be Sunday.
‘I was always directing’
Davis grew up in Sunbury, North Carolina, where the 2010 population was listed as 289.
“I’m just a small country boy,” he laughed.
He said one of his first hoops was on the side of a barn. That rural rim gave birth to one of the best marksmen the college game has ever known.
Although he said he drew recruiting interest from ACC and SEC schools as he was coming out of Gates County High School, he was guided toward HBCUs by his coach, who had been mentored by the legendary John McLendon, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famer who had coached at several HBCUs, as well as Cleveland State and pro teams like the Cleveland Pipers and Denver Rockets.
But even as he was producing his gaudy box score lines, Davis said his coaches were telling him his future was as a coach.
“I was always a talkative guy, sort of like Chris Paul now,” he said. “I’d tell people where to go and chew them out if they missed an assignment. I was always directing.”
Over is 29 years as a coach – 17 as head coach – Davis said he got to know Owens, who was a successful college coach before becoming the CSU athletics director:
“I coached against her when she was at Cheyney and Elizabeth City State.”
That he’s now ended up at the school that once was his nemesis doesn’t surprise him:
“I’m a firm believer that our journey and our destination are what they’re supposed to be.”
Coaching comes down to relationships
While all the teams he’s coached – except for a brief stint with the Livingstone men – have been women, he said that’s not a factor as he takes over the CSU men:
“From an X and O perspective there’s not a lot of difference. The way they think and what makes them click may be different, but it comes down to individual relationships and deciding what each person needs.”
Making those decisions now during these COVID 19 times isn’t easy. The pandemic shut down all sports this fall at CSU and in the SIAC and it still has not been determined when the Marauders will begin practice or play games this season.
Davis said he doesn’t yet know how his final roster will look, but the team has lost its star player from last year.
Darweshi Hunter – an HBCU All-American and the SIAC Player of the Year as a freshman – transferred to Weber State, an NCAA Division I school. The 6-foot-5 guard led the SIAC in scoring (20.7) last season and led the Marauders with a 6.1 rebounding average.
Davis met his players for the first time on Thursday via a Zoom call. He told them his door was always open, but that he would stress accountability and doing things the right way in the classroom and on the court. He said they’re going to win in both places.
While many of his past players can attest to that, there is one group that feigned displeasure when it heard he was taking over at CSU
“Yeah, some of my old Kentucky State kids said they’re mad at me,” he laughed. "They said, ‘You’re going with the rivals?’
“They were teasing. I know they’re happy for me.”
They know he’ll finally be winning in the Beacom/Lewis Gym.
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