WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
Nikki Drew coached Lakota East High School to the 2011 Division I girls basketball regional finals. She is no longer coach of the Thunderhawks.
BORN TO COACH
FORMER XU POINT GUARD NIKKI DREW WORKS WITH STUDENTS IN THE CLASSROOM—AND ON THE COURT. BY RODNEY McKISSIC
P H OT O G R A P H B Y B A R B T R I M B L E
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IT’S A CLICHÉ—USED REPEATEDLY WHEN DESCRIBING A CLEVER POINT GUARD—BUT when Nikki Kremer starred for the Xavier women’s basketball team, she was truly a coach on the floor. Maybe that’s why she easily made a transition into teaching and coaching. After a successful career as a high school girls basketball coach, Kremer—now Nikki Drew—took her passion to the classroom, where she’s a health and physical education teacher at Lakota East High School. “A lot of people will tell you that a lot of teachers make good coaches and coaches make good teachers,” Drew says. “They’re hand-in-hand. I’m not going to highlight a bad test grade or a missed shot.” Drew is big on positive reinforcement, especially during her basketball training sessions and while coaching her third-grade team, which features her daughter, Samantha. “I want to make sure girls stay in a game that was so good to me,” says Drew, who is also director of girls development for the Cincinnati Shock AAU program. “They have one bad experience and they want to stop playing. I feel like I can try to keep their heads on straight.” Drew played for the Musketeers from 1995 to 1999 and left as the school’s career assist leader (541). She is perhaps best remembered for her performance in the 1999 NCAA Tournament against Connecticut in the final game of her collegiate career. She finished with 23 points, six assists, and two steals in 40 minutes while playing on a swollen knee the size of a softball. Xavier led UConn into the final minutes before losing 86–84. “Nikki did things that even surprised me,” then-XU coach Melanie Balcomb told
XavierNationMagazine.com
COOL DOWN
reporters after the game. After graduating from Xavier, Drew played in Germany and France before suffering a career-ending knee injury. “You can only do so much with your body, and it had been my third knee surgery at the time,” says Drew, who earned 11 varsity letters in basketball, softball, volleyball, and track at Mercy High School. “That’s when I poured my passion into coaching, when I couldn’t quite play at the level that I wanted to.” Balcomb left Xavier for Vanderbilt after the 2001–2002 season, and Drew joined her staff as the director of basketball operations. Drew set up travel, on-campus recruiting, finances, and video exchange and loved every minute—but realized a college coaching career would be short-lived. “It was probably one of the best things I did, and at the time I loved the experience,” Drew says. “But I always knew I wanted to teach, and college basketball obviously doesn’t work with that. I knew I wanted to have a family someday, and it’s a hard profession to have a family. People make it work, but it’s harder.” Drew turned her focus to high school basketball and coached at Colerain and Lakota East. Her 2010–2011 Lakota East team went 19–6 and reached the Division I regional finals. “I will be the first to admit that in order to be successful you have to surround yourself with good people and good kids,” Drew says. “I hate to take all the credit for that. Of course, when you find your niche and you find success it’s hard to walk away.” But that’s exactly what she did two years ago to spend more time with Samantha and her husband, Jeff. “I’m doing the normal motherly thing at this point, where I’m teaching during the day and getting my kid off to where she needs to be,” Drew says. Drew has taught a sports medicine class at Lakota East for the last seven years. “I still feel like I’m coaching in my classroom because that’s kind of who I am,” she says. “The personal training, which I do on the side, keeps my heart into coaching.”
SPRING 2015
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