Breaking the Glass: Tamika Williams-Jeter is winning at the game of basketball and life

Breaking the Glass is a series that highlights women in sports who aren’t on the court or field but are game changers in their own right. From the C-suite and sideline to the DJ booth, these women are breaking sports’ glass ceiling.

Tamika Williams-Jeter has built a career on knowing when to pivot. Her voice, steady and self-assured, reflects the confidence that has carried her from national championship-winning days at the University of Connecticut to the WNBA, and now to the head coach’s office.

Williams-Jeter knows how to shift, how to adjust, and how to carve out space when the play changes. What makes her presence so striking is not only her ability to adapt. It is the tenacity that anchors her when she has to adjust course.

Williams-Jeter talks about basketball with the reverence of someone who knows hoops gave her a sense of direction. When asked about the challenges she faced as a young girl pursuing sports, she doesn’t hesitate. 

“The challenge was everybody said it’s not gonna be, you can’t do it, it’s not there yet,” she said, recalling the disbelief that trailed her ambitions. “You’re a girl, you’re a Black girl from Jefferson Township, Ohio. Do you think you’re gonna get a degree? Do you think you’re gonna play professional basketball? Do you think you’re gonna win a national championship? Nobody’s ever done it.” 

The doubters told her she was crazy to think she could make it. 

But for Williams-Jeter, the game was never just a stage to play on, but a foundation to build upon.

“I was a Black kid from Jefferson Township, Ohio. Nobody knows what that is,” she said. The way she framed it, every achievement since has been less about disproving doubters and more about honoring the roots and community that shaped her.

Williams-Jeter is Dayton through and through. Jefferson Township sits just two steps before the cornfields, in a tiny pocket of western Ohio. Her parents carried strong values with them from Mobile, Alabama. Her mother was an educator, her father a Vietnam veteran who served in the Air Force before planting in Ohio. Together, they built a home that valued education and principles as much as any sport.

The youngest of three, Williams-Jeter watched from the sidelines as her brother and sister turned their natural talent into opportunities on the court. Her brother had a robust basketball career at Miami University in Ohio, while her sister enjoyed an impressive career at Bowling Green State. At first, sports weren’t something that Williams-Jeter participated in on a competitive level. But soon, she fell in love with ball.

“I was in drill team, a cheerleader, in Girl Scouts. I would paint my nails every day and then go outside and beat all the boys,” she remembered with a laugh.

The turning point came when a teacher/sports coach at her school, Ms. Ann Abel, introduced her to volleyball. Soon basketball and softball followed, and Williams-Jeter discovered that the thrill she felt watching her siblings compete was just as powerful when she stepped onto the court.

By the time she landed at Chaminade-Julienne, a small Catholic high school in Dayton, the spotlight had already found her. National rankings put Williams-Jeter at the top of her 1998 recruiting class. Letters arrived in stacks. MTV and ESPN showed up with cameras and followed her around. She was still the kid from Jefferson Township, but her path made it clear that the prototype no longer had to look the same. 

After graduating from Chaminade-Julienne, the next step for Williams-Jeter was Storrs, Connecticut, where she joined a freshman class that carried as much hype as any in women’s basketball history: Sue Bird. Swin Cash. Asjha Jones. Keirsten Walters. Tamika Williams.

Dubbed the “TASSK Force” by fans, they were a recruitment class expected to transform a program that had tasted success but had not yet shaken the weight of the University of Tennessee’s dynasty. The spotlight that followed her through high school only grew brighter at UConn.

But Williams-Jeter’s first year did not unfold like the storybook many had written for that freshman class. Sue Bird tore her ACL, and the team finished with numbers most programs would hang banners to commemorate. But in Storrs, 28 wins, five losses, and an early exit in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA tournament was considered unfinished business. The headlines questioned whether the group could deliver on expectations, but inside the locker room, veterans wrapped their arms around the newcomers and kept the standard intact.

By her sophomore year, that standard became the reality. The veterans who had guided the rookies now leaned on the young class to deliver, and that they did. She won her first national champion, toppling Penn State in 2000. In Philadelphia, in front of coach Geno Auriemma’s hometown crowd, they defeated coach Pat Summitt’s Tennessee dynasty in the 2002 national championship game.

“I feel like that’s when Connecticut really arrived,” Williams-Jeter said. “We figured out the prototype. We’d taken down the giants. We were no longer chasing.”

In 2002, she closed out her collegiate playing career with numbers that still stand in the record books. Williams-Jeter not only left as a two-time national champion, but also as the program’s all-time leader in field goal percentage at 70 percent, which is also an NCAA Division I record. She also ranked 14th on UConn’s all-time scoring list.

That same year, she became a first-round pick in the WNBA draft, selected sixth overall by the Minnesota Lynx. For six seasons she anchored their frontcourt before joining the Connecticut Sun in 2008.

The WNBA was still young when she stepped into it. She looks back now and sees those years as a bridge.

“There’s no way on God’s green planet that I thought I would see the W where it is now [or] college sports” she said when we spoke in June, reflecting on the league’s growth and where it needs to go in the future. “I thought I’d be dead looking down like, ‘Man! That’s really cool that they finally got it done’ not living and being vibrant enough to experience it and being like, ‘Man, this movement is awesome.’”

In 2002, while playing professionally, Williams-Jeter accepted a graduate assistant position at the Ohio State University, planting the seeds of what would become her coaching career.

“My body was so broke down after we finished my rookie season,” she said.

She continued playing in the WNBA until 2008, and although opportunities to play overseas came her way, she was no longer fully committed to pursuing them.

Then, came a conversation with Ohio State head coach Jim Foster about an opening for a third assistant position. She hesitated at the thought. At just 23, the idea of coaching women her own age, many of whom were players that she played with in AAU tournaments, felt strange.

“I don’t think you understand who you are to them,” Foster told her.

His encouragement was echoed by her mother, who reminded her that doors don’t stay open forever. Reluctantly, she agreed to give it one year.

Coaching lit an unexpected spark in Williams-Jeter. From helping players develop on and off the court, the experience brought a feeling that she hadn’t expected but left her feeling full. “There’s no better feeling than to grow someone and then see them leave and do great things,” she said. 

After her first stint at Ohio State ended in 2008, Williams-Jeter went to the University of Kansas for two seasons before she pivoted again, this time stepping away from coaching altogether. For three years, she ran her own insurance agency, worked as a women’s basketball analyst for ESPN, served as a U.S. State Department Sports Ambassador, and traveled across Africa and Asia to lead women’s empowerment initiatives.

Those experiences reawakened her love for the game. Not just the X’s and O’s, but the teaching, the mentorship, the life lessons woven into it. After conversations with her father, she decided to return to coaching. Matthew Mitchell at Kentucky offered her a spot on his staff, and she jumped back into the fold in 2015.

After spending two seasons with Kentucky, Williams-Jeter went on to coach alongside head coach Coquese Washington at Penn State, joining the program in 2016. While there, Williams-Jeter began her journey into motherhood, welcoming her first child while balancing the demands of her job. After several seasons at Penn State, another call came from Ohio State in 2019, and this time the pull of home was too strong to ignore. 

She returned to Ohio State as an assistant coach, balancing scouting reports with raising two young sons. Life was moving fast. Her second child was born just three weeks before she packed up and moved back to Columbus. Then came Covid. In the stillness of that season, the weight of family hit harder than any box score. 

“During Covid, I found out [my] mom has severe short-term dementia, so I really [was] just gonna take a year off,” she recalled. She was also still grieving her father, who died in 2014.

Even in that difficult time, basketball found her again. 

In 2021, Brian Agler, the coach who had drafted her in Minnesota and a fellow Ohio native, reached out from Wittenberg University. Wittenberg was home to a Division III program near her hometown and Agler’s alma mater, where he is a Hall of Famer.

Preparing to retire, he wanted Williams-Jeter to be his successor. At first she resisted. She had never seen herself as a head coach, and Agler knew that. However, he was persuasive, showing up as another steady voice helping her see her light when uncertainty made the path hard to find.

He talked her into it, and eight months later Wittenberg won the NCAC tournament in 2022 under her leadership. Suddenly her phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Athletic directors from across the country wanted her to consider leading their programs. What she thought was hiding out at a small school became something else entirely: proof that she could lead.

Then, Williams-Jeter got a call from University of Dayton expressing interest. From there, Agler sat her down for a blunt conversation. Williams-Jeter wasn’t thrilled at the idea of moving back home, but he helped her see that the move home wasn’t just about basketball, it was about crafting a legacy. 

“Your mom’s there, your family, your community. You’ll get to go out and talk to kids and all that stuff,” she remembered him saying. “And he’s like, ‘Well, you won’t have this job.’ That’s pretty much what he told me. I’m like, ‘What, you don’t like working with me?’ And he says, ‘I love working with you, but I’m not gonna let you make a dumb decision.’” 

Others echoed the same sentiment, urging her to step into the opportunity.

“I had some other people advocate,” she said, reflecting on the decision. Surrounded by voices she trusted, Williams-Jeter accepted the head coaching position at Dayton, which became her next pivot, and perhaps her most defining one yet as she enters her fourth season as head coach.

For Williams-Jeter, coaching has never just been about the scoreboard. Yes, wins matter but life is more robust than a scorecard. What she wants most is to leave players better than she found them and to build relationships that last long after the eligibility period. 

“You wanna have a forever relationship,” she said. “They have to feel inspired, motivated, communicated with. The number one thing is to hold them accountable, [but also] respect them and care.” 

Outside of the game, she instills in her players all of the ways that basketball is a training pad for life. The hours of early practices, the grind of conditioning, the ability to deal with defeat and remain coachable, all of it can be applied to different areas of life. 

“Most of the time in corporate America, they pull ex-athletes because people know we know how to manage [our] time, [we] know how to push through early mornings, [we] know how to hear we’re not good at something and keep working,” she said. That’s the edge that athletes carry with them beyond the game.

Being a Black woman in leadership means the room often notices her before she even speaks. Williams-Jeter doesn’t shy away from that weight. 

“When they see Tamika, they’re expecting a Black woman, [but] probably not a 6-foot-2, 230-pound Black woman,” she said. “But that’s what they get but understanding the power in that and what comes with that, owning that and being a trailblazer, so that other people feel comfortable walking into rooms where nobody looks like them.”

Legacy, for Williams-Jeter, isn’t measured in banners or rings. It’s measured in the spaces she opens and the confidence she leaves behind for those who come next. She tells her players — and anyone willing to listen — that the platform they stand on is powerful, and it should be used with intention.

“There’s so many rooms you have to walk in and own the platform you’re on and really work it,” she said. “But also understand the power of your voice and your movement.” 

Back in Dayton, where the seeds of her story were first planted, that legacy feels even sharper. Williams-Jeter came home not just to coach, but to show her community what’s possible when you keep breaking the glass. Williams-Jeter is showing the next generation that the game doesn’t define you, it prepares you to define everything else.

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