SEATTLE — About five years ago, Yolett McPhee-McCuin, then the head coach at mid-major Jacksonville, called a coaching search firm to pitch herself for the open women’s basketball position at the Ole Miss. “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” she asked one of her Jacksonville assistants on the morning she rang them. After all, a decade earlier, McPhee-McCuin got her first coaching job because of another bold phone call she had made.
That first call came back in 2004. McPhee-McCuin, a former college player and the daughter of a coach, was looking to get into the profession. She was interviewing for an assistant’s role at Frank Phillips Community College, a school in a town of around 10,000 people in northern Texas. Three other candidates were too.
The reason McPhee-McCuin eventually got hired there, her father Gladstone “Moon” McPhee says, was because she called the school’s coach shortly after to thank him for interviewing her. She was the lone person to do so, and, her father says, the school’s coach appreciated the gesture.
A lot has changed since both calls. In the nearly two decades since the first, McPhee-McCuin, 40, has gone from assistant roles in Borger, Texas (nicknamed Booger Town), to Arkansas-Pine Bluff and Portland, before landing high-major…
