Nikki McCray-Penson, an all-American level guard for the highly effective College of Tennessee ladies’s basketball group, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and a three-time All-Star within the WNBA, handed away Friday. She was 51.
Her dying was introduced by Rutgers College, the place she was about to enter her second season as an assistant coach of the ladies’s basketball group. The college has not mentioned the place she died or named a trigger. McCray-Penson was identified with breast most cancers in 2013.
“Thanks my little sister, my boyfriend, my foxhole companion, my teammate, my quick meals snacker, my basketball junkie, my fellow Olympian, my gold medalist and now my angel,” Daybreak Staley, the ladies’s basketball coach on the College of South Carolina, the place McCray-Penson was an assistant coach for 9 years, wrote on Twitter.
At Tennessee, McCray-Penson was a two-time all-American and three-time all-Southeastern Convention participant. She helped lead the Lady Vols to a few consecutive regular-season convention titles and two convention event championships.
She began as a defensive specialist however advanced into an offensive power.
“It bothered her that she was such a defensive participant,” her Basketball Corridor of Fame coach, Pat Summitt, instructed The Tennessean of Nashville in 1994, late in McCray-Penson’s breakaway season, when she averaged 16.3 factors. achieved per recreation. a junior. “She wished to develop the entire recreation, and she or he did.”
In the identical article, McCray-Penson mentioned, “I needed to be taught to react when criticized and be taught from errors. Pat will not encourage you. She added, “It’s important to come out with an angle about your self, and that comes from maturity.”
Sally Jenkins, a sports activities columnist who collaborated with Summitt on three books, mentioned in a phone interview that there was a particular bond between the coach and McCray-Penson. “Pat was beaming when Nikki came visiting,” she mentioned.
She added, “There have been lots of gamers who got here to Tennessee that had been like 15-story buildings, however the elevators solely went to the tenth flooring. Some children have discovered a solution to get to the highest and preserve all their guarantees. Nikki was a type of.”
After graduating from Tennessee in 1995 with a bachelor’s diploma in schooling, McCray-Penson turned a part of the U.S. group that might win the gold medal on the 1996 Summer time Olympics in Atlanta. After an early win over South Korea wherein McCray-Penson led the group with 16 factors and 9 rebounds, she mentioned, “We need to be the most effective basketball group in historical past.”
General, she averaged 9.4 factors per recreation within the event and offered a few of the stifling protection that restricted opposing gamers’ scoring. 4 years later, when the US group gained the gold medal in Sydney, Australia, McCray-Penson averaged 5.1 factors.
By then she had turned skilled. With the Columbus Quest of the short-lived American Basketball League, which preceded the WNBA as a ladies’s league, averaged 19.9 points per gameled the group to the nationwide championship in 1997 and was named most precious participant.
She didn’t keep on the ABL for lengthy. She jumped after one season to the Washington Mystics of the WNBA, which was based by the Nationwide Basketball Affiliation.
“I noticed what the NBA can do to advertise ladies’s basketball,” she instructed The Related Press in 1997.
From 1998, she spent 4 seasons with the Mystics, averaged 15.4 points per game and was chosen to a few All-Star video games. She had much less success over the subsequent 5 years, taking part in in Indianapolis, Phoenix, San Antonio and Chicago. She retired in 2006.
She shortly moved into teaching: she was an assistant ladies’s coach at Western Kentucky College for 2 years earlier than shifting to South Carolina in 2008, the place she joined Staley, her teammate on the 1996 and 2000 Olympic groups.
After main South Carolina to its first NCAA ladies’s basketball title in 2017, McCray-Penson was employed for her first head teaching job, at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. She coached the group to a 53–40 report over three seasons; within the 2019–20 season, she led the Monarchs to a 24–6 report and was named Convention USA Coach of the 12 months.
In 2020, she was named head coach at Mississippi State College, however she resigned for well being causes after a 10-9 record in her only season there.
In 2022, Rutgers employed her as an assistant.
“Merely put, Nikki is a winner,” Coquese Washington, the Rutgers coach, who was a teammate of McCray-Penson’s with the WNBA’s Indiana Fever, instructed The Related Press. “She excelled on the highest degree of our recreation.”
McCray-Penson was initiated into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, in Knoxville, Tenn., in 2012.
Nikki Kesangane McCray was born on December 17, 1971 in Collierville, Tennessee. Her survivors are her husband, Thomas Penson, and her son, additionally named Thomas. Her mom, Sally Coleman, died of breast most cancers in 2018.
“We all know there is no such thing as a treatment,” McCray-Penson told The Clarion Ledger of Jackson, Miss., in 2020. “We stay with it. Each day you do not let that outline you. You reside life. You make daily depend. That is what I noticed my mother do.”
