Nikki McCray-Penson, an all-American level guard for the powerhouse University of Tennessee girls’s basketball workforce, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and a three-time All-Star within the WNBA, died on Friday. She was once 51.
Her demise was once introduced by means of Rutgers University, the place she was once about to go into her 2nd season as an assistant trainer of the ladies’s basketball workforce. The college did not say the place she died or cite a reason. McCray-Penson have been recognized with breast most cancers in 2013.
“Thank you my little sister, my friend, my foxhole partner, my teammate, my fast food snacker, my basketball junkie, my fellow Olympian, my gold medalist and now my angel,” Dawn Staley, the ladies’s basketball trainer on the University of South Carolina, the place McCray-Penson was once an assistant trainer for 9 years, wrote on Twitter,
At Tennessee, McCray-Penson was once a two-time all-American and a three-time all-Southeastern Conference participant. She helped lead the Lady Vols to a few consecutive regular-season convention titles and two convention event championships.
She started as a defensive specialist, however she developed into an offensive drive.
“It bothered her that she was considered so much of a defensive player,” her Basketball Hall of Fame trainer, Pat Summitt, advised The Tennessean of Nashville in 1994, overdue in McCray-Penson’s breakout season, when she averaged 16.3 issues a recreation as junior. “She wanted to develop the total game, and she has.”
In the similar article, McCray-Penson stated, “I had to learn to respond when being criticized and learn from mistakes. Pat is not going to motivate you. She added, “You have to come out with an attitude about yourself, and that comes from maturity.”
Sally Jenkins, a sports columnist who collaborated with Summitt on three books, said in a phone interview that there was a special connection between the coach and McCray-Penson. “Pat glowed when Nikki came to visit,” she said.
She added: “There were a lot of players who came to Tennessee who were like 15-story buildings, but the elevators only went to the 10th floor. Some kids found a way to get to the top and develop all their promise. Nikki was one of those.”
After graduating from Tennessee in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in education, McCray-Penson became part of the US team that would win the gold medal at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. After an early-round victory over South Korea, in which McCray-Penson led the team with 16 points and nine rebounds, she said, “We want to be the best basketball team in history.”
Overall, she averaged 9.4 points a game in the tournament and provided some of the stifling defense that limited opponents’ scoring. Four years later, when the US team won the gold medal in Sydney, Australia, McCray-Penson averaged 5.1 points.
By then, she had turned professional. With the Columbus Quest of the short-lived American Basketball League, which preceded the WNBA as a women’s league, she averaged 19.9 points a game, led the team to the league championship in 1997 and was named most valuable player.
She did not stay with the ABL for long. She jumped after one season to the Washington Mystics of the WNBA, which had been created by the National Basketball Association.
“I saw what the NBA can do to promote women’s basketball,” she told The Associated Press in 1997.
Starting in 1998, she spent four seasons with the Mystics, averaging 15.4 points a game and was selected for three All-Star games. She had less success over the next five years, when she played in Indianapolis, Phoenix, San Antonio and Chicago. She retired in 2006.
She quickly moved into coaching: She was an assistant women’s coach at Western Kentucky University for two years before moving to South Carolina in 2008, where she joined Staley, her teammate on the 1996 and 2000 Olympic teams.
After helping lead South Carolina to its first NCAA women’s basketball title in 2017, McCray-Penson was hired for her first head coaching job, at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. She coached the team to a 53–40 record over three seasons; In the 2019-20 season, she led the Monarchs to a 24-6 record and was named Conference USA coach of the year.
In 2020, she was named the head coach at Mississippi State University, but she resigned for health reasons after a 10-9 record in her only season there.
In 2022, Rutgers hired her as an assistant.
“Simply put, Nikki is a winner,” Coquese Washington, the Rutgers coach, who was a teammate of McCray-Penson’s with the WNBA’s Indiana Fever, told The Associated Press. “She has excelled at the highest levels of our game.”
McCray-Penson was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, in Knoxville, Tenn., in 2012.
Nikki Kesangane McCray was born on Dec. 17, 1971, in Collierville, Tenn. Her survivors include her husband, Thomas Penson, and her son, also named Thomas. Her mother, Sally Coleman, died of breast cancer in 2018.
“We know there’s no cure,” McCray-Penson advised The Clarion Ledger of Jackson, Miss., in 2020. “We reside with it. Every day, you do not let that outline you. You reside existence. You make each day rely. That’s what I noticed my mother do.”