SEATTLE — About five years ago, Yolett McPhee-McCuin, then the head coach at mid-major Jacksonville, called a coaching search firm to pitch herself for the open women’s basketball position at the Ole Miss. “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” she asked one of her Jacksonville assistants on the morning she rang them. After all, a decade earlier, McPhee-McCuin got her first coaching job because of another bold phone call she had made.
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That first call came back in 2004. McPhee-McCuin, a former college player and the daughter of a coach, was looking to get into the profession. She was interviewing for an assistant’s role at Frank Phillips Community College, a school in a town of around 10,000 people in northern Texas. Three other candidates were too.
The reason McPhee-McCuin eventually got hired there, her father Gladstone “Moon” McPhee says, was because she called the school’s coach shortly after to thank him for interviewing her. She was the lone person to do so, and, her father says, the school’s coach appreciated the gesture.
A lot has changed since both calls. In the nearly two decades since the first, McPhee-McCuin, 40, has gone from assistant roles in Borger, Texas (nicknamed Booger Town), to Arkansas-Pine Bluff and Portland, before landing high-major assistant roles at Pittsburgh and Clemson. She has gotten married and had two daughters. Since 2013, she has served as the head coach of the Bahamas women’s national team, and just last year, she also joined the bench of her homeland’s men’s national team.
McPhee-McCuin understood she was not Ole Miss’ first choice. She was “at peace” with that fact when she reached out for the job. She still is. Yet her passion, energy and tenacity appealed to the search firm and school’s administration, which hired McPhee-McCuin in April 2018.
Over the course of her first three years, the Rebels went 3–29 in SEC play, a run of futility that included an 0-16 conference record in 2020. “A low point for her,” her father says. But now, for a second year in a row, the Rebels have made the NCAA Tournament. On Friday, No. 8 seed Ole Miss will play No. 5 seed Louisville in the Sweet 16 — the first time the Rebels have reached this stage since 2007 and only their second appearance since 1992.
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McPhee-McCuin’s self-belief — and the belief she instills in her players — helped Ole Miss get here. “When nobody else believes, she gets them to,” said Lynn Bria, Stetson’s longtime coach and a mentor of McPhee-McCuin. “If you want to look at a blueprint about how to do this, then look at Coach Yo.”
8-seed Ole Miss SHOCKS 1-seed Stanford on the road to advance to the women’s Sweet 16.
It’s the Lady Rebels’ first Sweet 16 appearance since 2007.@OleMissWBB | @OleMissSports pic.twitter.com/Xy8BdghpmW
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) March 20, 2023
McPhee-McCuin puts it this way: “You spend five minutes with me, you believe you can fly too. I just have a belief in myself. I’m not apologetic about it.”
When McPhee-McCuin arrived on Miami Dade Community College’s campus for her sophomore year in 2001, she recalls feeling “broken.” Having been raised by her father, who developed youth programs and coached the Bahamas national team, and her mother, Daisy, an educator for three decades, all she knew was “excellence.” Back home in the Bahamas, McPhee-McCuin says she “was a big deal.” In America, she wasn’t.
Despite being the first Bahamian woman to sign a Division I letter of intent, she seldom played during her freshman year at Florida Atlantic, averaging just 1.3 points and 1.2 assists per game. The season is a part of her biography, but it has largely been scrubbed from her stories about her, omitted by multiple official media guides listing her resume.
In July before her second college season, McPhee-McCuin was in Miami watching the WNBA’s now-defunct Miami Sol take on the Orlando Miracle when a chance meeting altered her trajectory. Miami Dade’s coach, Susan Summons, recognized McPhee-McCuin from when the nearby schools had played an exhibition the prior fall. Summons called McPhee-McCuin over to her seat. “So, what are you doing this summer?” Summons asked.
McPhee-McCuin told her she wasn’t sure. She just knew she wasn’t going back to FAU.
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“I’m looking for a point guard, and I love your game,” Summons replied. She extended McPhee-McCuin an invitation to a team workout. “We’re gonna raise your confidence level by 100, and we’re gonna get you back to D1.”
Despite being 5-foot-5, McPhee-McCuin had aspirations of playing in the WNBA. She was a guard with a nice handle, a nice crossover and a nice jump shot. More than that, though, “she was relentless. She had a motor and she had grit,” Summons says. “I never had to worry if Yolett McPhee was gonna show up. She was like a Tasmanian devil.”
At Miami Dade, a once-dejected McPhee-McCuin spent countless hours in Summons’ office, talking about playing point guard and growing as a leader. Both there, and on the court, Summons repeatedly told her, “You could be a star. You have to believe.”
McPhee-McCuin says, she had “always seen excellence from our small little island, so I’ve always believed.” Her Ole Miss team’s mantra this season is “no ceilings.” And yet, back when she met Summons, even she needed a push. “When I went to Susan Summons, she just picked me up,” McPhee-McCuin says. “She’s the one who taught me about confidence, and instilling confidence in players. She made you think you could be a force.”
McPhee-McCuin spent one year at Miami Dade before graduating and moving on to Rhode Island. Having reestablished herself in the junior college ranks she played more at URI than she had in her time at FAU. Nevertheless, there were still times, her father recalls, that McPhee-McCuin would call him and his wife in tears, telling them she wanted to come home.
It was on one of her trips back to the island during her two years at URI she informed her family she wanted to go into coaching. Her mother wanted her daughter to become a lawyer or a doctor. The thought of Yolett spending a career patrolling the sidelines “almost killed her,” Moon McPhee says. And yet, McPhee-McCuin dreamed it. So she did it anyway.
McPhee-McCuin was just a few games into her five-year tenure as Jacksonville’s head coach when she realized a difference between her prior stops at Pittsburgh and Clemson. In an early December 2013 contest against Florida State, the Dolphins trailed 14–0 less than five minutes into the game and wound up losing by 38 points — their biggest loss of the season. Afterward, Charlton Young, then an assistant with the Seminoles men’s team, pulled her aside and told her “not to go off on her kids.” He said he could tell they were learning and that she was learning too.
Yolett McPhee-McCuin and the No. 8 seed Rebels face No. 5 seed Louisville on Friday night. (Kevin Langley / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)Jacksonville’s women’s basketball program had only begun in 1999 and was under-resourced when she took it over. During her first season, they took an eight-hour bus trip for a game at Tennessee State. “What is this? I can’t do this,” Darnell Haney, her assistant, remembers her telling him. McPhee-McCuin wasn’t at Clemson anymore. And starting in her second year at Jacksonville, in order to avoid a gym conflict with the men’s basketball and women’s volleyball team, the Dolphins practiced at 6 a.m.
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McPhee-McCuin was used to early morning workouts. As a 10-year-old, she practiced at 5 a.m. with her father, developing her fundamentals before returning home to get ready for school. This was Division I basketball, however. She sought out players to Jacksonville who didn’t mind the early-morning workouts and matched her desired style: tough, relentless, tenacious, passionate.
Much of what McPhee-McCuin still looks for in recruits hasn’t changed. “Her personality is what her teams are,” Bria says. But it was with the Dolphins, away from the bright lights and cameras McPhee-McCuin now finds herself in front of, that she first learned to be a head coach. There, she learned how to handle different types of players, and deal with athletic administrators. She learned to be selective about the issues she raised. “Initially, I thought I would fight any battle. I don’t care what it was,” she told reporters Thursday. She is now more emotionally intelligent. She said that “if (Ole Miss) was my first stop, I would have been fired already.”
In the summer of 2016, as the Bahamas national coach, McPhee-McCuin became the first female coach to win a CentroBasketball Championship. The night she did, she sent a voice message to her Jacksonville team’s group chat, prognosticating that the ensuing season they would win the ASUN championship. Jacksonville would do just that, beating Florida Gulf Coast in the title game that March to earn the program’s first-ever NCAA Tournament bid.
She would coach two more seasons with the Dolphins, earning WNIT berths in both. For all her success, though, by the end of 2018, Bria says, McPhee-McCuin had done all she could do at Jacksonville: “Her head hit the top of the ceiling.”
Shortly after Ole Miss knocked off No. 1 Stanford on Sunday in the second round — a tournament upset marking the first time a top seed had fallen before the Sweet 16 since 2007 — McPhee-McCuin took to Twitter. She had already drafted a celebratory tweet that morning.
My parents prepared me for the moment. My husband prepared me for this! The SEC prepared me for this moment! Jose Fernandez prepared me! Karl Smesko & Lynne Bria prepared me for this moment! My Lord & Savior anointed me for this exact moment! #NoCeilings #StampThat ❤️💙
— Coach Yo (@YolettMcCuin) March 20, 2023
Later that night, she also texted a photo of the message to Bria, ensuring that the Stetson coach, who is not as online, saw it. “She just gives way too much credit. She’s done the work,” Bria says.
The work no longer entails 6 a.m. practices like it did at Jacksonville — Ole Miss usually practices at 1:30 p.m. But Haney says he still sees McPhee-McCuin “rolling up her sleeves and getting dirty.”
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McPhee-McCuin is constantly building relationships, whether it’s talking to her current players in the gym or in her office, or prospective recruits on the trail in homes, high schools or virtually. “Any situation that I have going on outside the court, I’m able to talk to her and she’s able to mentor me, give me advice, and lead me in the right direction,” Rebels graduate guard Myah Taylor said.
She messages her players before every game, oftentimes with a motivational quote or video. Sometimes she asks them in a team group chat to send an emoji reflecting how they are feeling. “She has always done things that show she’s in the fight for us,” junior forward Madison Scott says.
It helps, too, that she has the basketball mind to compliment her interpersonal acumen. “She’s a brilliant coach,” says Chris DeMarco, an assistant with the Golden State Warriors and head coach of the Bahamas men’s national team. Ole Miss plays physical and scrambles back into position even if its players are beat off the dribble. The Rebels are sixth nationally in HerHoopsStats’ defensive rating, and they crash the boards exceptionally well, having gone from 263rd when McPhee-McCuin took over to 15th nationally in offensive rebound rate.
McPhee-McCuin recognizes that her team’s success has larger implications. “I just think representation matters, no matter what,” she said Thursday. She wants to show the players she coaches on a team that is majority Black that they can take the route she took when their playing careers end. She wants people from the Bahamas (or anywhere) to know that they can have “a dollar and a dream,” she said, and still succeed. She wants her path to serve as a blueprint.
As a student at Miami Dade, McPhee-McCuin would ponder the question Summons often asked: “What history do you want to make? What history do you want to be a part of?”
The answer to that question is still growing by the game.
(Top photo of Yolett McPhee-McCuin: John Todd / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)
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