Basketball season is quickly approaching.
And a familiar name is returning to the sidelines.
J.D. McKenzie, who was the head coach for 14 years at Notre Dame and won five district championship trophies during that stretch of time, will again lead the charge — this time for his alma mater at Minford beginning next month.
It’s certainly a statement hire for an already competitive Minford girls basketball program — and is a hire that only adds to the parody that has made life in the SOC III, from a girls basketball standpoint, entertaining to absorb in every facet.
But it took some convincing from Minford athletic director Brent Daniels — who began his pitch at the McKenzie’s family business, The Barnyard, in Wheelersburg.
“Crystal (wife) and I are really excited about it,” McKenzie said. “We didn’t really have any plans to get back into coaching, but that’s my alma mater and we live about three minutes from the school. It came up, and Brent had come into my feed store looking to order some paint for the football field. He was leaving and said, ‘Oh, by the way, I need you to coach girls basketball.’ I just kind of brushed it off. Then he kept texting me about it.”
McKenzie and his wife, Crystal, who will be among those on the coaching staff with J.D., rejoin the game after a highly successful Notre Dame girls basketball stint that completely changed the expectations of the program as it transformed into a perennial regional and statewide powerhouse.
Over his last nine seasons at Notre Dame — from the 2015-16 to 2023-24 campaigns — McKenzie helped direct a program that won 204 games while losing only 26 over that stretch of time. The Lady Titans won every one of its 120 SOC I conference games during that timespan.
McKenzie then guided Notre Dame to its first-ever district championship during the 2017-18 season, a year where the Lady Titans went 25-1 en route to making the Division IV, Region 15 Semifinals, then advanced to the same stage the following year. McKenzie then guided Notre Dame to its first-ever regional final appearance in 2019-20, and in those three seasons alone, the Lady Titans went 63-6 overall.
McKenzie then led Notre Dame back to the OHSAA Division IV, Region 15 Finals during the 2022-23 season, a year in which the Lady Titans went 24-3 and held its opposition to just 661 points in 27 games for an average of less than 25 points per contest (24.5) during the season.
Then, after taking a leave of absence to attend to the health of his mother, Barbara, who sadly passed away in November 2023, McKenzie returned to guide the Lady Titans to its fifth district championship during the 2023-24 campaign, which was his last season on the bench for Notre Dame. That group finished 20-5 overall.
During his time at Notre Dame, the Lady Titans saw several players continue their careers at the collegiate level from a basketball standpoint in multi-sport standout Hagen Schaefer (Shawnee State), electrifying guard Ava Hassel (DePauw), tough as nails center Katie Dettwiller (Saint Francis) and sharpshooting dynamo Ella Kirby (Wilmington).
Schaefer helped the Shawnee State women’s basketball program win two Mid-South Conference Tournament Championships during the course of her career, achieve a No. 1 NAIA National ranking in 2017-18 and was a consistent four-year role player.
Hassel, a four-year starter at Notre Dame who finished with 1,451 career points with the Lady Titans, finished her college career with 1,197 points. She was a three-year starter for DePauw (Ind.) and a three-time First-Team All-North Coast Atlantic Conference (NCAC) honoree.
Dettwiller, who got a full ride to play at Saint Francis when the program participated at the NCAA Division I level, was a two-year starter for the Red Flash. Kirby is in her third season at Wilmington this fall and plays both women’s basketball and women’s tennis for the Quakers.
Additional multi-sport athletes that earned opportunities to play college sports outside of basketball who played for McKenzie include Brooke Pierron (Ave Maria softball), Lexi Smith (Wheeling volleyball), Cassie Berry (Shawnee State softball), Isabel Cassidy (West Virginia Wesleyan softball), and Bri Hicks (Shawnee State volleyball), with many others serving as highly efficient starters and four-year contributors that stuck to a grinding, tenacious style of play that remained consistent throughout McKenzie’s coaching tenure with the Lady Titans.
“You’ll probably be seeing a lot of the stuff that we implemented in the past,” McKenzie said. “My biggest thing, watching film, is getting the girls to buy into playing really, really hard. That was a big thing for us in the past. Our teams played extremely hard, did the little things well, and communicated well on the court. Those are principles that we’re going to definitely put an emphasis on. We love defense, want our teams to be really good defensively, and want to switch up and confuse and be physical. We don’t want anybody to look forward to playing against us. That’s going to be a big thing — knowing that when they play us, it’s going to be a dogfight.”
McKenzie, who is a 1995 Minford graduate, said that the Lady Falcons’ girls basketball program was the only program that he would’ve returned to. The drive from the McKenzie residence to Minford High School is three minutes, a drive that’s certainly convenient when juggling the family farm, the family business, family life in general, and now, a return to coaching the sport of basketball.
Additionally, McKenzie’s late father, James David McKenzie, is a 1963 Minford High School alum.
“I know I wouldn’t coach anywhere else,” McKenzie said. “This would be the only place that I would. It being our home, my alma mater and where our kids go to school, it all fit at the right time. We’re excited about getting started with them. I pretty much stayed in touch with everybody in the community. We always knew what was going on out here. It does make the thought of it more appealing.”
Minford’s girls basketball talent is also appealing. Promising junior Kerigan Davis is a player who has shown the ability to play all five spots on the floor, and brings back one of the most versatile skillsets in the entire area regardless of conference or division. Makenna Enz and Marley Rhodes are present soccer stars who played significant roles as ball hawkers, with Enz taking on a greater role in the final half of the season out front.
Ava Flaig is another potential letterwinner that could be up for return, as is Sadie Tieman, another girls soccer star who adds depth to the backcourt, and Nevaeh Bryant. A promising freshman class joins the potential six returnees.
Minford does lose Emma Carter, Lainey Howard and Riley Kasee to graduation from last year’s roster, which reached the OHSAA Division V District Semifinals, but the Lady Falcons won the SOC III title in 2023-24, shared the gold ball in 2024-25, advanced to the regional semifinals in both seasons, and have consistently been competitive in the sport even in the years where regional trips, which Minford has made three times as a program in the last decade, did not occur.
The plan, McKenzie said, is to implement much of the same concepts that were applied within the Notre Dame girls basketball program to Minford’s girls basketball program.
“I’ve been watching film here and there, trying to get a fingerprint on what the girls can do, what their strengths and weaknesses are, things like that,” McKenzie said. “We’re obviously going to be behind. New coach, didn’t have a summer with them, they’re learning what I want to do, the terminology that we use is going to be different. The goal is to get them together as soon as fall sports end, and to grow the whole year and make the same progressions as we did in the past, which is to be playing our best basketball at the end of the year. We’re not going to have everything in that we need to start the season, and we’re going to go through some growing pains and things like that until we gel and grow together, but the goal is to be the best basketball team that we can be at the end of the year, not at the beginning.”
Regardless of how the formula ultimately comes together, the goals, McKenzie says, will be consistent — to compete for the SOC III Championship on a yearly basis and advance deep into postseason play.
“The first goal, every year, is to have a chance to win the conference, and then make as deep of a run as you can in the tournament,” McKenzie said. “For this season, when we get together and start later this month, the goals, from the first game to the 22nd game and, hopefully, to the 25th or the 27th game of the year, are for the team to look like two different ones in a good way, and to see that we’re day and night better than what we started back in October. I believe that’s the goal of every coach — to constantly be getting better every day and making positive strides on both sides of the basketball to get better. It’s going to take the girls getting used to my coaching staff and our expectations and what we do, and obviously us getting to know the girls and how to coach them. It will be a little bit different for me. I’m not in the building like I used to be, and don’t get to see them every day and have those relationships that were built during school hours and not just practice hours, but we’re excited about the opportunity and are looking forward to it. Hopefully, we can do some good things.”