Marianne Ward knew something was missing.
After she graduated from the University of West Alabama with a major in sports management and a minor in business, Ward went to work in ticket sales for the Birmingham Barons, the Double-A affiliate of the Chicago White Sox. But she could tell it wasn’t a career to which she wanted to devote her life.
Coaching, she realized, was.
It was in her blood, after all — her father and brother work as football coaches, and Ward started to find her love of basketball again when she briefly worked with the girls team at her alma mater, Winston Academy.
Thinking about getting back into coaching, Ward asked her dad for advice. “‘You have to go with your gut,'” Joe Ward told his daughter. “If this is what you feel like you’re meant to do, then you’re meant to do it.'”
So Ward took a coaching position at Starkville Academy before last season, working as a head coach for the Volunteers’ junior high girls team and as an assistant under varsity girls head coach Bill Ball.
“I just ran with it,” she said, “and now I’m here.”
On Thursday, Ward’s coaching journey took another step. She was named the new head varsity girls coach at Starkville Academy, a move in the making for more than a month.
“It means a lot,” she said. “It means there’s people there that have faith that I can go out and I can do the job right and get things done.”
Starkville Academy athletic director Chase Nicholson, who was present at 10 a.m. Thursday when it was announced that Ward would be taking over the position, saw Ward’s initiative in her first season as an assistant under Ball — the stress she placed on fundamentals and her relationship with the team’s veteran players.
“We’re really, really excited about her,” Nicholson said. “She’ll pull as much rope as you give her, and she’s still pulling.”
When Ward started at Starkville Academy, she was told the varsity girls team might be looking for a new coach in a few years as the school hoped to split up its programs and limit the responsibilities of Ball, who also coaches the varsity boys team.
“It’s tough to win two titles at the same time,” Nicholson pointed out. “Our goal is to get back to that point where we were a force in independent school basketball.”
Around late January, Nicholson, Ball and head of school Jeremy Nicholas met with Ward, hoping for her thoughts on accelerating the timeline they had previously floated. They asked Ward how she would feel about taking over the following season, but they already knew what Ward’s answer would be.
“‘I feel like I can do this,'” she told them.
In hiring Ward, Nicholson said, Starkville Academy can return to the heights it reached not long ago. Under Glenn Schmidt, who coached the girls team for 13 years, the Volunteers had a string of three straight district titles, two straight MAIS Class 4A titles and one MAIS overall championship. In 2012-13, the Volunteers went 43-0 under Schmidt, who also coached at the Mississippi University for Women and Starkville High School.
Schmidt, who announced Ward’s new position Thursday along with the hiring of a new assistant coach — former Starkville Academy player Nora Kathryn (Carroll) Smith — will serve as a mentor for Ward, who is only 24 years old.
Ward, who graduated from Winston Academy in 2014, remembers playing against Schmidt’s intimidating Volunteers teams during her own high school career.
“Every time I played against them, I was told to play my hardest,” Ward said, “and every time I played my hardest, it was never good enough …”
In her new position, Ward aims to take the Starkville Academy program back to the power it was when she faced off with the Volunteers — in more ways than one.
“I hope to get this program back on track to what it used to be and to help the girls realize that, ‘Yeah, this is basketball, but it also helps out in real life,'” Ward said. “When things go wrong, we’ve gotta figure out how we’re gonna get past it.”
Under Ward’s leadership, Starkville Academy has confidence their new coach can do just that.
“We’re really, really excited about her and the future of the basketball program,” Nicholson said.
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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