Fast Play and Rebounds
Paul Mills
Terry Nooner
Two Dynamic Guards and New Coach Terry Nooner Lead Shocker Women Into the Season
By Joe Stumpe
As an assistant women’s basketball coach at the University of Kansas, Terry Nooner found himself being headhunted by some of the top programs in the country as the Jayhawks’ fortunes rose.
“I remember telling my boss, (KU head coach) Brandon Schneider, the year before that I wouldn’t leave KU for another assistant’s job,” he recalls. “It would have to be a head coaching job. And I told him specifically, I said a job like Wichita State.”
He was hired to coach the Shockers women’s team in April.
“I wish I could figure out what mindset my mind was in when I said those words so when I talk about the Powerball, I can say it the same way,” Nooner joked last month.
For now, Nooner is focused on winning basketball games as WSU’s 10th head women’s basketball coach. He replaces Keitha Adams, who went 80–93 over six years and got to the postseason once — a first-round loss to Kansas State in last year’s NIT tournament. Adams returned to UTEP, where she previously coached 12 years.
Nooner is probably best known to local basketball fans as a former guard at KU from 1997–2000, helping lead Roy Williams’ teams to three Big 12 championships, four NCAA tournaments and one Sweet Sixteen. Since then, he has coached at Southern Illinois, Alabama, Maryland, Texas and for the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers, in addition to KU.
The Shockers return nine players from last year’s 18–15 team but only one player — guard DJ McCarty — who ranked in the top five in scoring. McCarty also led the team in assists and steals. Nooner landed another talented guard, Tre’Zure Jobe, as a transfer from Emporia State, where she was a two time All-American. Jobe won a state championship while playing at Wichita South High for Antwain Scales, who joined Nooner’s staff this spring.
“We’re going to be guard oriented,” Nooner said. “We have two dynamic guards who play well together. They both can play the point; they both can play off the ball.”
“We have very good forwards who are not necessarily back-to-the-basket players but are very athletic and mobile and can play on the perimeter,” he added. “We want to make sure we try to keep the paint open and look to attack the basket and create drives and kick threes.”
Not surprisingly, Nooner has added a home-and-away series with KU to the schedule, with the Jayhawks coming to Koch Arena on Dec. 10.
Nooner said his players aspire to play an up-tempo style, which they’ll likely get a chance to do in their first regular season game, a Nov. 6 road trip to the University of Oklahoma. The Sooners averaged nearly 85 points a game last year while finishing fourth in the Big 12 with a 25–9 record.
“You want to play fast, we’re going to give you your first test right out the gate,” Nooner said.
The fact that Paul Mills has watched the movie “Hoosiers” hundreds of times isn’t all you need to know about Wichita State’s new basketball coach. But it’s a good starting point.
Like the main character in that movie, Mills once coached at a tiny high school. Also like that character, Mills is uncompromising in what he expects from his players.
In a pre-practice interview last month at Koch Arena, Mills said a standard “has to be set. Like, ‘These are the expectations.’ And then you’re just trying to find people who want to meet those standards. And then you’re getting rid of the people who don’t want to meet those standards.”
“As I tell the players, ‘You’re high-level people, with high-level standards, and we’re expected to play high-level basketball.’ ”
Through a career rise that looks unlikely from the outside, Mills has by all accounts held himself to the highest standards of all. The son of a Texas pastor, Mills grew up idolizing Michael Jordan. He was a good, though undersized, high school basketball player in Houston who reportedly suited up for just one college basketball game — for NAIA school Southern Wesleyan University — before a scary back injury ended his playing days.
He coached his first team, at a small Christian high school, while working full-time as a bank analyst. He quit the banking job and took a huge pay cut to teach and coach at another Christian school, whose team he took to the semi-finals of the Texas state tournament. After serving as a volunteer assistant at Rice University, Mills was hired by Baylor coach Scott Drew and spent 14 years helping transform that program from one of the worst in the country to one of the best.
Along the way, stories about Mills’ work ethic, rapport with young players and metrics-based approach to the game — along with a fondness for fast driving and gift of gab — spread among fellow coaches and basketball insiders.
His reputation spread after being hired by Oral Roberts University in 2017, taking over a team that had won eight games the previous season. In six years under Mills, Oral Roberts compiled a 106–83 record, going to the NCAA Sweet Sixteen in 2021 and notching an undefeated Summit League regular season last year. He accomplished that despite some obstacles to recruiting posed by the school’s conservative religious culture.
In March, he was hired to replace Isaac Brown, whose teams went 48–34 over three years, with one American Athletic Conference championship and NCAA tourney appearance. In the months since, Mills has brought in his own staff (most with ties to Oral Roberts or Baylor), put together a roster and set an ambitious non-conference schedule featuring games against K-State, KU and Missouri. The team went 3–0 in exhibition games played during a trip to Greece in August.
If Mills’ teams at Oral Roberts are a guide, Shocker fans can expect to see a higher-scoring team than in recent years.
“I would prefer to play fast and not turn the ball over,” Mills said. But he also stressed that he doesn’t “have a quote–unquote ‘system’ … It is, man, what do we do well? And let’s find a way to do that well. This is a really good rebounding team. We were able to find that out in Greece. And we have guys who are really good at pursuing the ball, defensively and offensively. So, we need to be good at rebounding.”
The Shockers return three players who logged significant minutes last year: Xavier Bell, Isaac Abidde and Kenny Pohto. From the transfer portal Mills snagged Ronnie DeGray III (Missouri), Colby Rogers (Siena), Dalen Ridgnal (Missouri State), Quincy Ballard (Florida State), Harlond Beverly (Miami) and Bijan Cortes (Oklahoma), along with incoming freshmen Yanis Bamba (Canada) and Joy Ighovodja (Nigeria).
Fans will also likely see a more animated coach on the sidelines. Although he doesn’t curse, Mills notched technical fouls and became somewhat of a target of fans of other Summit League schools while at Oral Roberts. Mills acknowledged he “can be fiery toward officials” in a Q&A with Shocker announcer Mike Kennedy.
It’s a trait he apparently leaves on the basketball court. In 2020, Miles earned a master’s degree from Dallas Theological Seminary. Last year, he was one of 25 finalists for the Skip Prosser Man of the Year Award, given to the Division 1 coach who best displays moral integrity off the court. He and his wife, Wendy, who he’s known since the seventh grade, have two teenage daughters, Audrey and Abbey.
Mills said his family appreciates the welcome they’ve received here. After joking that it’s deserved “because we’re still undefeated,” Mills said he’s been able to focus on his passion — coaching — without much attention.
“There’s the occasional (conversation) at QT — ‘Are you the new coach at Wichita State?’ I don’t think people know my name for the most part. It’s good. If I’m not at the house, I’m at the office, and if I’m not at the office, I’m at the house. I don’t really venture out much.”