COMING HOME TO WIN

Legendary Alabama football coach “Bear” Bryant once said ‘I heard mama calling’ when he left Texas A &M to return to his alma mater as football coach. Ramer girls’ basketball coach Erika Wright Donnell experienced something similar this fall when a lastminute coaching hire at her alma mater got her into coaching. Donnell had a job working at the Corinth Head Start when Ramer principal Dr. Sondra Kiser called to ask if she would like to coach the Lady Eagles. She got the call on Sept. 29 and the season was beginning the first of October. It took three days of praying, lots of talks with her husband Mario, and a glance at how she could work two jobs during the day. A school in the Corinth School District had tried to convince her earlier in the school year to take a coaching position and she declined the offer. It was a different story when it was Ramer School calling Erika back home to coach where she played junior high basketball. “I took the job and only knew two players (Brooklyn Hopkins and Bailee Shelton) when she got to meet the team for the first time,” said Wright. It was Hopkins that helped tag her with the Coach E name and it stuck the rest of the season. Donnell said it took two regular season games for her to feel comfortable as a coach. She had so little preparation time to begin the season that everything was coming at her in a whirlwind. While she mentioned that she never got nervous while playing basketball, Coach E said it was nerve racking to be the head coach of a young team. Ramer had lost all their starters from last season and it was a total rebuilding job in her debut season for Coach Donnell. The new coach realized quickly that she was going to need to be a mentor to the players off the court as well as teach them about basketball. “There are a lot of mood swings with young girls and I could tell when I came into the gym if something was wrong,” commented Donnell. Coach E spied a problem the week of the Selmer game in the McNairy County Tournament. She had one group of players on one end and another group of players on the opposite end of the court. The coach brought them together and told them she wanted them to create a Tik Tok video on their own. It was not long before she saw all the players together laughing and having a good time with each other. This video turned into something special when they blended it with them after they won the county championship. Donnell is almost unbeatable in the county tournament. She was 4-1 as a player with two county championships and now is 2-0 as a coach with one county championship. Her success this year as a coach has her ready to begin a new season to defend the county title after a summer of hard work. She admits now about thinking of possibly coaching on the high school level. A personal achievement that meant a great deal to Coach was she became the first African-American to coach the girls’ team at Ramer. “It will be something I was to explain to my girls when they get older and someday to my grandchildren,” remarked Donnell.Coach E was very proud to say her parents, Donna Wright and Paul Wright, did not miss a game this season. Mr. Wright said during the county tournament championship game that he never got as nervous when his daughter was playing instead of coaching. After Donnell graduated from Ramer in 2003, she played for four years at McNairy Central and her team won district and region titles in 2007. Donnell missed most of the season with a torn ACL and still managed to be in the school’s 1,000-Point Club.Donnell played two years of college basketball at Northeast and finished her career as a player at Rust College. She is married to Mario Donnell and they have two daughters, Avery and Ava. Avery is named after Erika’s family that has seen many star basketball players wear the purple and gold. The one thing that blew Coach E away off the court was the love she received from the community. “I was getting hugs and congratulations from people that I did not even know. They would message me and tell me how they were supporting and rooting for our team which made me very happy.”

Story Submitted by: Jeff York