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Jessica Lenihan promoted, to take over as Greencastle girls’ basketball head coach
As the summer girls’ basketball league at South Putnam finished up, Greencastle assistant coach Jessica Lenihan had gleaned a lot from the Tiger Cub squad coming back and coming up from the 2022-23 season.
Whether that knowledge would be put to use was up in the air at the time, however.
It wasn’t until the week after the league finished that Lenihan was promoted from assistant coach to head coach of the Greencastle girls’ basketball team.
Lenihan, a 2015 Greencastle graduate, was an assistant under previous head coach and current Tiger Cub athletic director Doug Greenlee, coaching the JV team the past two seasons.
It was not the first time Lenihan had worked with the girls’ basketball program, having been a player under former head coach Brad Key.
Lenihan assisted the team in 2016 while also coaching fourth- through sixth-grade girls as well as the eighth-grade middle school team.
Studying to become a radiologist, Lenihan was away from coaching for some time before being asked to help at a volleyball camp under former head coach Maggie Walters.
A day during the camp eventually altered the course Lenihan took going forward.
“Even though I was doing radiology, I was a little indecisive in what I wanted to do in my career,” Lenihan said. “Maggie had asked me to help at a camp and one of the days, she let me run the camp myself.
“After that, she talked to me and said I was a natural at it and at working with kids. She asked me, ‘Why not go into teaching?’ and, after sitting down and thinking about it, I thought I would love to do that and was actually excited about it.
“I applied to Indiana State and went back to school to get into teaching,” Lenihan added.
From there, Lenihan was hired as a math teacher at Greencastle Middle School in 2021 and joined the girls’ basketball and volleyball coaching staffs in assistant capacities.
On the basketball end of things, Lenihan noted she learned a great deal the past two seasons, including when things weren’t going so hot for the JV team in the 2022-23 season.
“The first year, we had a good group of JV girls and had a decent season where we won seven or eight games,” Lenihan noted. “This past year, we did struggle a bit.
“As a coach, I had to learn to lose and learn how to keep the girls motivated, to keep their spirits up and to continue to get them to buy into the program.
“It was a learning curve when it came to those two things,” Lenihan added. “I am a competitive person and losing a lot was tough and frustrating on my end.
“Doug took me aside as we had the opposite sort of year going on, talking me through how he handled the previous year and how to keep encouraging the girls. Those are some of the best lessons I’ve learned so far.”
Greenlee resigned as girls’ basketball coach during the spring and Lenihan was one of several candidates to apply for the position, eventually being hired at the June 26 school board meeting.
“Doug told me around spring break that he was thinking about resigning,” Lenihan said. “When he had hired me as an assistant, it had just been a 1-on-1 meeting with him.
“For the head coaching position, I had to go through the whole interview process, doing my first interview around April. The waiting game made me nervous but I was thankful for the process as I had never been through a coaching interview before. It was awesome to experience that.”
Until the hiring was complete, though, Lenihan took charge of the team during the South Putnam summer league as an assistant with the team in the dark until late in the process.
“The girls were excited when they found out I was coaching them during the summer league and kept asking if I was going to be the head coach,” Lenihan pointed out. “I didn’t know at the start but when they found out during the summer league, they were really happy and enjoyed playing.”
Lenihan will be building a staff from scratch with Greenlee and assistant coaches Sam Call and Naira Caceres Martell all exiting the program, though the new coach has a couple of individuals in mind.
“I talked Joe (Lenihan) into working the summer league and he ended up liking it,” Lenihan said about recruiting her older brother for a few weeks of work. “He enjoyed coaching. I might even keep him on the staff.
“Jalyn Duff, another Greencastle graduate who played on the girls’ basketball team, got a job at Tzouanakis and I’ve been communicating with her about helping coach as well. While I don’t have any assistants yet, I’m still searching, talking to some people and trying to get some answers.”
Taking over for a team that was 23-5 and reached the semistate round for the first time in 43 years, Lenihan understood that the 2023-24 season would likely be a far different experience but said she wasn’t going to let the returning group rest on their accomplishments.
“My style of play will be about continuity on offense, setting things up from the same starting point each time and plays build off that set,” Lenihan said. “This is going to be a team that has heart, effort and hustle, the kind that, when a loose ball is on the ground, players are going after it and no one will be questioning their effort.
“I want a group that plays as a team, cheers each other on and goes after everything. That’s the kind of player that will play: someone with heart and hustle on the court. Things will come together with time and things will fall into place if we have those kind of players on the floor.”