Mincy could be next great coach
He turned the Ridgeway High School locker room into a wardrobe of men’s formal wear.
As Sharon Mincy sifted through the various memories in life that indicated her son was destined to become one of the youngest head coaches in college basketball, she finally arrived at that one, from more than 15 years ago.
It was Jordan Mincy’s idea for the Ridgeway boys basketball team to wear a suit and tie to school on days of home games. He found a professional approach transformed their personas.
So it was Mincy who made sure every player followed through. He brought dress shirts from his own closet and borrowed his father’s shirts for the bigger players on the team. He even went to K&G Fashion Superstore to buy as many collared shirts as he could.
Throughout Ridgeway’s run to the 2005 state championship, all of these shirts were in Mincy’s locker just in case, hanging there as proof that he long ago knew how to bring people together through basketball.
“It’s innate,” Sharon Mincy explained. “It’s in his DNA.”
There are just three Division I head coaches from the Memphis area this college basketball season. Jordan Mincy is the least recognizable of the trio, when compared to Penny Hardaway (Memphis) and former Tiger teammate and assistant coach Tony Madlock (South Carolina State).
Mincy, 35, just began his first season at Jacksonville University, toiling in the Atlantic Sun Conference after six years spent working as an assistant coach under Mike White at Florida. It is an under-the-radar start for a coach worth keeping tabs on.
The story, if Mincy were to be the next great coach from the Memphis area, would be one the whole city could embrace.
He was a team captain at Ridgeway who graduated from Kent State as the Mid-american Conference’s all-time leader in games played. He grew up in Cordova, the son of a teacher and a police officer, and the younger brother of two Division I basketball players, who ended up transferring from Briarcrest to public school because his father refused
to shelter him.
“They're two different worlds," Mincy said. "It was the best dynamic of my life. You learn how to carry yourself in those settings."
But as Mincy finished up at Kent State, he didn't immediately gravitate to coaching. He thought perhaps he would go into pharmaceutical sales like his sister. “It's crazy,” he admits now, and credits a conversation with former Ridgeway coach Wes Henning for convincing him to embrace what seemingly everyone around him assumed he would become.
At Jacksonville, Mincy inherited a program that hasn't been to the NCAA Tournament since 1986. All but three players on the roster are either transfers or freshmen Mincy brought in this offseason. He won his first two games and a new $8 million practice facility is being built, but the team was picked to finish 10th in the Atlantic Sun preseason poll.
This won't be easy.
"Everything is coming at you so fast," Mincy admitted. "If you don't know, you better hurry up and learn, and a lot of it is going to be learned on the fly.”
So even a few games into his tenure, he found himself dissecting how he conducts himself on the sideline and what plays he's calling at the end of games. He never had to worry about such details during his decade-long rise as an assistant coach.
But there's a sense Mincy, named one of ESPN'S top 40 coaches under 40 in 2020, is positioned to figure it out quickly.
“If I had to go back and do it again as a first-time head coach at a young age,” Jacksonville assistant coach Scott Cherry said, “I would do exactly what he's done.”
Cherry is the other part of this Memphis-based story. He's the former head coach at High Point University who Tubby Smith replaced upon being fired by Memphis in 2018. Cherry then coincidentally moved to the Memphis area because his wife is from West Tennessee.
Cherry spent a year volunteering at Briarcrest, where his son played basketball, and thought for a moment he “didn't want to be around college coaching ever, because we were so angry and upset and disappointed.” But Cherry, a member of the 1993 North Carolina national championship team, got the coaching itch back while working with Ernie Kuyper's Hoop City grassroots basketball program.
The past two offseasons, Cherry badly wanted back into college coaching. And then Mincy called.
They got to know one another because both worked for the same staff at South Carolina at different times. Cherry admits to twice trying to hire Mincy as an assistant coach at High Point only to be rebuffed.
“He's the guy in the room, it doesn't matter if this person doesn't like that person, he's trying to get along with both of them and trying to see if there's a way to mend those fences,” Cherry said. “He can relate to them because of his age, because of who he is, where he's from, his background.”
The job, in many ways, fits Mincy like a good suit.
You can reach Commercial Appeal columnist Mark Giannotto via email at mgiannotto@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter: @mgiannotto