Early in the morning of June 26, 2019, DeLisha Milton-Jones woke up in a cold sweat. It was still dark out, and she wasn’t supposed to start her day for another few hours. The night before, one that had every reason to be joyful and celebratory, was darkened by a feeling of guilt, and it ended in what Milton-Jones called a “horrible nightmare.”

She had agreed to leave her head coaching job at Pepperdine to become an assistant coach at Syracuse. But she wasn’t certain about her decision.

“It’s hard to leave a situation where you’re one of one on the west coast,” Milton-Jones said. “There aren’t a lot of former athletes that are head coaches, then there aren’t a lot of female head coaches in the Division I level, then add the fact that I’m African-American.”

Milton-Jones’ husband, Roland, calmed her down before falling back asleep. When Milton-Jones woke up, she felt refreshed. “I have to be bold,” she thought. She remembered why she decided to leave her home of more than three years: It was the right step for her coaching career.

Seven months later, Milton-Jones works with Syracuse’s (10-11, 4-6 Atlantic Coast Conference) post players and has been a “great help” to their development already, head coach Quentin Hillsman said. As the Orange’s new recruiting coordinator, Milton-Jones has also helped secure top-15 recruits Kamilla Cardoso and Priscilla Williams for SU’s 2020 recruiting class. They’re all steps toward her main goal of building Syracuse into a final four-caliber team once again.

“If you can find the prototype of a player that fits the needs of the (2-3) zone and what (Hillsman) wants offensively, we’re going to blow the roof off with that team,” Milton-Jones said.

It had always been Milton-Jones’ “dream” to become a coach after she played, specifically a men’s one because they could “handle my demeanor on the court,” she said. At the time of her retirement in 2016, she ranked in the top-10 in WNBA history in points (5,571), rebounds (2,574) and steals (619) and was the all-time leader in games played (499). She was a two-time WNBA champion with the Los Angeles Sparks and two-time Olympic gold medalist.

Just a month after she retired in September 2016, Milton-Jones was hired as an assistant coach with the Pepperdine University women’s team. The Waves went 7-23 in her first season on the coaching staff, leading to Milton-Jones taking over for Ryan Weisenberg as head coach.

She initially struggled at the helm. It was “difficult for (the players) to see me as the head coach and not rely on what they were taught before,” Milton-Jones said. The Waves went 10-20, but the following season they finished with their highest win total (22) since 2002-03 and advanced to the WNIT’s Sweet 16.

“By the second year, I had that whole year and summer with them,” Milton-Jones said. “I was able to really just empty them out and start from scratch and we built a great foundation. We were able to go far.”

Then, when Tammi Reiss left for Rhode Island, Hillsman’s SU staff had an opening. Hillsman and Milton-Jones knew each other through mutual friends but had never met in person prior to the summer of 2019. Text messages and phone calls started in May, “basketball philosophies lined up,” Hillsman said, and Milton-Jones accepted the assistant coaching job on June 25.

In their conversations, Milton-Jones and Hillsman talked about Syracuse’s famous 2-3 zone. Milton-Jones remembered thinking, ‘Man, that thing is nasty,’ when watching the Orange’s Final Four team on television run it in 2016. Almost everything about SU’s style of play intrigued her.

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Milton-Jones stepped in as the Orange’s recruiting coordinator, building on the relationships Hillsman and assistant coaches Vonn Read and Cedric Solice had already formed with recruits — most notably with Kamilla Cardoso, the fifth-ranked prospect in the class of 2020.

Cardoso’s “caretaker” is a longtime friend of Milton-Jones’s, which she said made the recruit more accessible and their conversations more natural. On Nov. 7,  SU officially landed the 5-star forward.

“First of all, you’ve got to listen to (Milton-Jones) because she knows exactly what it takes to play at the highest level,” Hillsman said. “Second, her knowledge of the game is just tremendous.”

In her new job, Milton-Jones has stayed true to what she learned at Pepperdine — forming relationships with players is paramount. When the Orange break off into positionals in practice, Milton-Jones joins the post players and is “not one to hold her thoughts on how we can improve,” forward Maeva Djaldi-Tabdi said.

The 45-year-old is their primary defender during drills, something she demands to do because she knows how they need to be defended in order to learn. One-on-one sessions with post players Djaldi-Tabdi and Amaya Finklea-Guity after SU’s daily 5:30 a.m. practice ends are followed by walks to the locker room filled with chatting and laughing.

“I like it when they feel like they’ve done something spectacular because it was against a WNBA player. I’m like, ‘Let me turn my defense up,’” Milton-Jones said. “Every blue moon I’ll give them a little something and they’ll be like, ‘Damn. Imagine that for 40 minutes.’”

While Milton-Jones’ work has not been enough to turn around Syracuse’s downward-spiraling season, her value as a coach and recruiter could be an integral piece in SU’s journey back to national prominence. And with players like Cardoso and Williams coming in next season — plus a full year of learning under Milton-Jones for the Orange’s current post players — that journey could be shorter than expected.

“It’s important for the (upcoming) class to be the first building block, the first foundation laid for another Final Four run very soon,” Milton-Jones said.

Published on February 6, 2020 at 12:02 am

Contact David: ddschnei@syr.edu