Next year, the Douglass (Texas) High boys basketball team will have a new head basketball coach, but the school will not. If that sounds like a paradox, it isn’t, it just highlights one of the more unique coaching solutions that a school has proposed in some time.
As reported by MaxPreps, Douglass has hired Dayna Westbrook as the school’s new head boys basketball coach. Westbrook is very familiar with the school and the program because she currently serves as the Douglass head girls basketball coach. In the 2013-14 school year, she will serve as both, becoming one of few known coaches to serve in both positions in the country.
Of course, what makes Westbrook’s situation so unique isn’t just that she’s coaching both a boys and girls basketball team simultaneously, but that she’s doing so as a woman. The coach herself recognized in an interview with MaxPreps that her role would probably get extra eyeballs because of her sex, but insisted that she only agreed to take on the additional role for the school of just 90 students because she was ideally suited to it because of her past experience with the team’s roster.
That experience comes from her role as the official Team Mom during the 2012-13 campaign -- her sons Reed (a now graduated senior) and Bryce (then a junior) Westbrook were among the team’s leading scorer -- and her time coaching a number of the varsity squad’s players on a summer travel team called 936 Elite.
All of which has made the transition to Westbrook as head coach a comfortable one on both sides, even if having a woman behind the bench will be a new look for most future Douglass opponents.
"So far everything has been really positive," Westbrook told MaxPreps. "The boys are used to having me around."
As for anyone who assumes that Westbook will only take on the boys hoops mantle for a year until her son graduates, one look at her resume at the school would lead one to conclude otherwise; the multisport veteran and former Stephen F. Austin University basketball standout also coaches softball, tennis and golf at Douglass.
And girls basketball, of course. That’s something that isn’t about to end no matter how successful her run proves as the school’s boys basketball coach.
Want more on the best stories in high school sports? Visit RivalsHigh or connect with Prep Rally on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.