JOURNAL STAFF
There were some outstanding candidates to be the third Shreveport-Bossier Journal Sportsperson of the Year, including both of the previous winners.
PGA Tour golfer Sam Burns, the 2022 winner, had another excellent year, surging in the FedEx Cup playoffs, then helping Team USA win the President’s Cup. Now early in her sophomore season on the LSU women’s basketball team, Mikaylah Williams was last season’s Southeastern Conference Freshman of the Year and she was greeted by thousands of adoring supporters in her return home with the Tigers Dec. 8 at the Brookshire Grocery Arena.
They did not disappoint. But the SBJ had an undeniable candidate, whose years of coaching excellence helped him pull off an unthinkable challenge this year.
LSUS men’s basketball coach Kyle Blankenship expanded his role last season. When the LSUS women’s team found itself without a head coach shortly before the season tipped off, Blankenship agreed to steer both teams.
It worked better than anyone dared to hope.
In June he was presented the Jimmy Collins Award by the Allstate Sugar Bowl’s Greater New Orleans Sports Awards for the likely unprecedented feat of coaching both the women’s and men’s LSUS teams to outstanding seasons, and most notably, national tournament victories on the same day in March.
He collected 65 percent of public votes cast on the Sugar Bowl’s website, while Jay Clark, who steered the LSU women’s gymnastics team to the NCAA championship, was a distant second at 30 percent. Down the list of public voting were Jeff Willis, who coached the LSU Eunice baseball team to a junior college national championship, and McNeese basketball coach Will Wade, the former LSU coach who led the Cowboys to 30 wins, the NCAA Tournament, and the biggest single-season turnaround in NCAA Division I history.
The Jimmy Collins Award is not presented annually, but only in remarkable cases, named for the New Orleans sportswriter who launched the Sugar Bowl’s awards in 1958.
Blankenship, coach of the LSUS men’s team since 2012, stepped into an interim head coach role with the women’s program in October 2023. The Pilots had another superb season, going 28-5 and reaching the NAIA Sweet 16. The Lady Pilots had an even more impressive regular season, 22-0 in the Red River Athletic Conference and 30-3 overall, upset in the second round of the NAIA Tournament. Each team had only one first-team All-RRAC selection.
It was a one-off for Blankenship to handle both LSUS teams, he said in late June, but he was proud and happy to savor it.
“Being included with those four coaches, and winning the LSWA Coach of the Year award for the state, having coached one year of women’s basketball, that’s not a bad way to go out,” he said in June.
There wasn’t much different in the approach to handling the men and women’s teams, he said.
“From the basketball aspect, we tried to coach them the same. We tried to implement the same philosophies offensively, play through transition and play fast. With the women, we were able to slow some things down in the halfcourt and execute at a higher level, just because the game is a little bit slower. At times I felt like I was coaching more than what you do on the men’s side, where you can get into some isolation and two-man game. It was fun for me to do that and dig deep into my playbook, and have those girls go out there and execute.
“Make no bones about it – they listen better, and they go out and try to do exactly what you ask. That was always fun,” said Blankenship.
He was quick to not claim coaching brilliance was at the core of such a doubly triumphant 2023-24 season for LSUS basketball.
“We had a lot of success because of the great players who were in both programs. That women’s team had already been put together before I took over, and I had to just try not to screw it up. It was the most challenging year of my life, but it was also the most memorable one I’ll ever have in coaching,” said Blankenship. “I don’t think it’s something that can be sustained long-term, but we did it with a lot of great help from my assistant coaches, the support of my family, and everybody else involved with our program allowed it to go as well as it did.”
He’s back to his familiar role soley as men’s coach this season.