Q&A: Jasen Jonus, Oglethorpe head coach
When it comes to the SAA and Region 6 in women’s basketball, Jasen Jonus’ hiring at Oglethorpe has been one of the most notable storylines this offseason. As far as up-and-coming head coaches go in D-III women’s hoops, Jonus, who is soon to enter his fifth season as a head coach, is certainly a name to know.
At LaGrange, he stepped into the head coaching job after several years with the men’s team as an assistant, and found success early and often. A program that had posted just one winning season in the three years prior to his hiring, LaGrange went 8-4 in his first year, despite the challenges of the Covid pandemic. He led LaGrange to a 15-10 season with 10 wins in the USA South the following year before going 20-7 in 2022-23, the first time the Panthers won 20 games since 2010-11. He leaves LaGrange after posting back-to-back seasons with a win percentage above .700, and a 61-28 overall record in four years. Needless to say, Oglethorpe made the right hire.
A Birmingham-Southern alum, he returns to the SAA this season, leading a program that Alex Richey led to national prominence in recent years. The pieces are there for a big first year under Jonus, with Oglethorpe projected to return all five players who averaged 20+ minutes/game last season. Not too long ago, I had the chance to talk with Jonus about his decision to take the Oglethorpe job, his time at LaGrange, memories of playing for now-closed Birmingham-Southern, and much more. I hope you enjoy this insight and perspective from Coach Jonus in another D3WBBScoop Q&A.
You obviously achieved a great deal of success at LaGrange since taking over that program in 2020, including an 18-7 season just this last year. What prompted the move to Oglethorpe and this new opportunity?
I spent 11 years there [at LaGrange], went from the men’s side to the women’s side, and I met my wife there. I just can't say enough good things about LaGrange and that city. As for the opportunity, taking basketball out for a little bit, my wife had been commuting to Emory in Atlanta for the past five years, and that's about an hour-and-a-half drive one way. You know, it's kind of funny. As soon as I got the job at LaGrange during Covid, I told my wife that if Oglethorpe ever came open, that's the dream job right there for us as a family, but also basketball-wise, because of the location, how the institution has grown over the past 5-10, years, and what Coach Richey built. I mean, he took it from being a mediocre Division III women's basketball program to building them into a national power. It's just the perfect place to do it, being in Atlanta, having the resources they have, and their facilities. It's just a perfect place to build a powerhouse. So that was one of the main draws, right there.”
It’ll be a new conference, too. Or a return to the old, I guess, considering you played at Birmingham-Southern. I’m sure that it's exciting to enter into a new league with some new opponents and challenges in that respect.
“I would say it's a stronger league, not as many teams, but definitely a stronger league that we did well against being at LaGrange. We went 8-3 against the SAA in three years of playing them. The first year, of course, we played a limited conference schedule because of Covid. They're very talented [in this league]. So I think this league, especially now that we'll have Trinity (TX) and Southwestern starting the year after next, will make it a very strong conference. It's going to be tough, but we'll definitely have a chance to have hopefully two teams go to the NCAA Tournament, one within an at-large bid, one with an automatic bid, if we build our schedules right. And getting a chance to play in the SAA at Birmingham-Southern gives me a lot of confidence, because I kind of know the landscape of the conference, maybe not on the women's basketball side, but just with getting a chance to see the gyms and the environments we play in. Every gym is a little different. So I think that will benefit me.”
Looking back on your time at LaGrange, you took over your first head coaching job in a time when everything was up in the air during Covid. But to tie the previous year’s conference win total (8 wins) even while playing five fewer league games is pretty impressive. What did you take away from that first season?
“It was definitely interesting and stressful. I still remember the day we were in that lockdown and the old head women's coach at LaGrange called and said that he was resigning. You know, my wife actually played at LaGrange and graduated my first year there. So just to take over a position where she's an alumni from, and to actually inherit a pretty talented team was special. I think the most challenging part was changing the way they played and doing it during a pandemic, which was tough. Because we wanted to play faster, and they played very slow in previous years; called a play every possession. I had to make some tough decisions and get rid of some players that had been in the program but had been causing issues. Trying to manage all of that with, you know, the mask mandates, practicing in small groups and testing every single day, that was stressful. I'm not gonna lie, I aged a lot during that one year. But in finding success, I think my team saw their potential and that the sky was the limit if they continued to work hard. We ended up with a great year. I think it really helped develop my coaching style. Helped me make some tough decisions early to help me see what it takes to be a head coach.”
Obviously to transition from being an associate head coach with the men’s team to the head coach of the women’s team is a step up, considering you’re now the one running everything as a head coach. But how much do you think your role with the men’s team, and your time there learning from some great coaches, helped you find the level of success you did in the first season and make those tough decisions?
“I credit Coach Kendal Wallace—my mentor on the men's side for almost seven years—he gave me a lot of responsibilities. He trusted my opinion. So I was making those decisions as an assistant coach, as a GA, as an associate head coach—all the way up. He trusted me. I was doing all the work that a DOBO (Director of Basketball Ops) does at the Division I level. I was making food orders, hotels and all those little things that I think helped prepare me to be a head coach. You got to think on the fly, everybody's looking at you, all the players, all the assistant coaches. And that was another thing; I didn't have an assistant coach [as the WBB HC at LaGrange]. I had some volunteers, but during my time as the head women's coach, I have not had a full time assistant coach.
“This is a name you need to know. Parker Lovett. He was my student assistant at LaGrange, he will be a big time Division I coach one day, because he is very driven. He's a junior at LaGrange and plays on the JV team on the men's side. He was my student assistant the past two years, and he helped me out tremendously. If I didn't have him, we probably wouldn't be as successful as we were. And Daniella Vizcaya, she was a volunteer assistant for me, and helped out a lot, and she was doing two full-time jobs helping out. There was a lot on my shoulders, but I think Coach Wallace and a lot of my mentors from Birmingham-Southern—Mitch Cole, Chris Graves, Duane Reboul, along with Bucky McMillan, who is at Samford—helped me with any of the problems I was having. And they told me, as a head coach, ‘It's a heavy burden, but ultimately, you're going to live and learn from your decisions.’ That's what I had to do. We're all human. But it helped me grow over these four years as a head coach. Probably the biggest piece of advice I've ever gotten was from Kendal Wallace, and it's, ‘You're never going to be ready to be a head coach. You're never going to have all the answers. And you know, you got to learn from your mistakes. That's what the best coaches do.’”
I love that you brought up those assistant coaches, because I think people sometimes forget that as part-time coaches or student assistants, they’re doing it because they truly have a passion for the sport and the program. A lot of that speaks to the mentality of D-3 as a whole. Just how valuable was it to have those coaches on staff as you built up LaGrange?
“That's so critical. Those types of people that want to learn and are passionate about the game and passionate about basketball in general. I think that's so crucial to have. And over my 11 years at LaGrange, we had so many of them from the men’s side to the women's side. And I mean, it takes a lot. You know, you're away from your family a lot. You're pouring into the student athletes to help them be better people and better basketball players. It takes special people to do it.”
The style of play you all had at LaGrange was fun to watch with it being up-tempo on both ends of the floor. And obviously that helped lead to some of you all’s success. Was inputting that playing style something you had in mind as you moved up the coaching ranks or was it more, ‘This is who we have on the floor, and this style is going to be most effective?’
“I think it was a little of both. In my playing experience at Birmingham-Southern, we played fast and shot a lot of threes. We pressed, and actually ran a version of the system, with five-in and five-out. I don't necessarily love that part of it, and I tweaked it, which helped me when I saw the team that was inheriting.
“They had a lot of really athletic guards, and we had a lot of good bigs as well, who could run. Our post players weren't the best to back to the basket, but they were very good screeners and good rebounders. So in my mind, I thought, you know, what can we make? Make us play the easiest, score more points, and not have them thinking about trying to run so many sets, right? And I took that from Birmingham-Southern, a little bit. That's the kind of style I love to play. I was a scorer. I loved to shoot threes when I played, and that's the type of style I think can win you games. In my interview for Oglethorpe, I told my AD Todd Brooks that there's a time to play fast. You can't constantly play fast all the time, because it might bite you, because there's going to be teams that are going to slow you down. So you have to be good at playing slow and good at playing fast. I think last year, they weren't great at playing slow at times, and they were pretty decent at playing fast. So I think we need to find a happy medium there for our team in the future. We're going to run, we're going to push it. I think they averaged about 64 or 65 points a game. That's got to be in the seventies. That’s a long answer, but yeah, that's how I love to play, and I'm going to continue to play that way and recruit that way.”
Obviously, there's different iterations of fast-paced play. Grinnell runs a completely different system than some of your other teams that you see across the country that are playing fast. At the end of the day, there is an organization to it. It's not just throwing the ball up and down the court and trying to trap on defense. There is an organization and control and a reason behind what you're doing outside of just trying to score a ton of points. There's a lot that's involved for the players to be thinking about, even if you're not running set plays on every possession, right?
“I think that's a huge thing, because when you take so much thinking out of the game, you don't want your players to become robots and constantly thinking, ‘Oh, I automatically throw it here.’ You’ve got to let them read, react, and make plays as a basketball player. I think as a player, that's fun for them to play that way. It's going to translate to wins when you finally get it down. Emory is a team that I really love to play against, and they do a great job with that. I think Misha [Jackson] does a great job of letting them be able to make plays and just play. They have very high IQ players that can shoot the ball really well, and they know how to play. I'm trying to get to that level.”
Do you find that running more of a read-and-react style gives your players an added sense of responsibility? Considering in a lot of situations, they’re the ones making the split-second decisions, rather than looking to the sideline for a playcall?
“Oh yeah. And you have to be able to play that way. And then, there's times, you know, where you're down to 10 seconds left. Okay, coach is calling to play they should know, right? We've been running it for weeks and weeks and practicing it well. Then you got to execute. You have to really think about it. ‘This is what we're going to do, or what if the defense overplays, we're going to get a back door.’ That's when the IQ and the thinking does come in. I think at LaGrange, I had a lot of very athletic players, and I had a couple that had really good basketball IQs, but some of them were more reactionary players. It's going to be a little different at Oglethorpe. From what I see on the film that I've been watching of them—and of course we played them last year—I think we have more skilled players. I know our post players are going to be better, like Keimarya [Rivera]. She’s going to do a lot of good things for us.”
And I have to ask about your college career at Birmingham-Southern, especially considering the recent events that led to the college’s closure. You were a key part of the BSC team that made the program’s first-ever appearance in the D-III national tournament in 2012 as well as a junior on the 2010-11 team that won the NCAA Provisional Tournament. What did it mean to you to be part of such a historic time in BSC men’s hoops history?
“It meant everything. My brother played at University of Alabama and Birmingham-Southern had recruited him throughout his high school career when they were Division I. I loved that campus, and it meant a lot to our family when we went to team camps there, and I spent a lot of time there. So when I was coming out of JUCO and Coach Cole [at BSC] was recruiting me in the beginning, I thought I was going to try to play D-I or D-II basketball. But once, once I went back to campus and saw it, ‘I was like I got to come here. This place is special.’ And, you know, spending three of my four years there and making lifelong friends…I think that's the biggest part. When I speak to my brother about it, he doesn't have lifelong friends from playing in Alabama and Troy. It was all big business side of things, playing Division I basketball. And my Birmingham-Southern brothers, I see them at least once or twice a year. We go on a big golf trip and we still hang out. It's a brotherhood, and it just sucks to see our institution managed poorly over these past 15-20 years and going under. So playing there, getting the experience that we had, winning, and just, you know, wearing a Birmingham-Southern uniform was everything. I still think about those days. And even now coaching, it's going to be weird not having them in the conference. I showed a couple recruits around last week, and the banner is still up there at Birmingham-Southern in our gym, and I'm like, well, we’ve got to take that down. That no longer exists. So it's sad. It's very bittersweet, but I will never take for granted those days that I had at Birmingham-Southern.”
You all went 98-17 in your three years there, and even as you all transitioned to full-fledged D-III membership, that group accomplished so much. What do you remember about that 2011-12 season, going 25-3 and reaching the national tournament in the very first year BSC was eligible?
“It was amazing. We were very talented. I remember winning the conference regular season and we were riding some crazy home win streak. I think it was one of the longest in the nation at the time. We just did not lose at home (BSC went 13-1 at home that year, only losing to Centre in the SAA Tournament semifinals). And honestly, when we won the regular season and got to host our conference tournament, we thought ‘We're about to win this thing.’ We could have hosted all the way up until the Sweet 16, probably. I remember going into the conference tournament with so much confidence. We won the first round game very easily, and then we got upset by Centre. It felt like everything ended when we lost that game. But you know, when Selection Sunday came around, I remember sitting in our locker room with our team and them calling our name out that we were going to be playing in the NCAA Tournament. It was an amazing feeling. It gave us hope. Unfortunately, we lost in Lexington, Kentucky against Wittenberg in the first round. But it was amazing to accomplish that.”
In thinking about how the SAA is continuing to gain strength and some of the success we’ve seen from teams here in the southeast, I’m glad to see the D-III programs in this part of the country gaining some more of that attention. And I hope that continues because there are some great players in Region 6. I certainly look forward to watching your first season unfold at Oglethorpe and wish you the best of luck. Thanks for your time today!
“It's awesome. I do think that attention is growing, and there's so much talent at the Division III level that gets overlooked. I mean, so many D-III teams upset D-II and NAIA programs. At LaGrange we play an NAIA Division I school, Point University, which is right down the road, every year as a regular season game. The last two years we had them beat, and just couldn’t close it. The talent level is just crazy. It's so close. And I know at Oglethorpe next year, we are scrimmaging Young Harris, and in my opinion, we should beat them. They're Division II, and we should beat them with the talent that we have. So I love the attention that you're bringing to it, and I hope it continues to grow because I truly believe Division III is the purest form of college athletics. You know, you're taking big money out of it. These kids are playing a sport because they love it and they want to get a great education. That's why I love this level so much.”