Erica Randolph where she belongs as she leads Hahnville boys into playoffs

NEW ORLEANS – Erica Randolph was meant to be a basketball coach.

It took a while for her to realize it, but someone seemingly had a game plan for her.

Randolph’s initial coaching opportunity came some 17 years after her playing career as a shooting guard at Dillard University ended.

She is in her first season as a head coach of the Hahnville High School boys’ team, becoming the first woman to fill that role at a Class 5A school in Louisiana.

The Tigers (18-13) were placed as the No. 18 seed in the Division I non-select bracket Monday and will play their playoff opener at No. 15 Live Oak on Friday.

“When you have a long basketball career, playing in high school or playing in college,” Randolph said, “you just think that that road has kind of ended and your journey is going to be something else.

“But my journey has always come back to basketball regardless of how many other times I tried to do something else. I was always led to right back in that gym again.”

The California native “fell in love with the culture and the food in New Orleans” and passed on opportunities to return to her native state because “I just never felt like that was what God designed me to do.”

After her playing career ended in 1999 she worked in the restaurant business “for years.” Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 and afterward she worked “a couple of other odd jobs.”

While working one of the odd jobs she ran into an acquaintance that worked at East St. John High School and knew her from her playing career. He suggested she would make “an amazing teacher” and that “you eventually could try to coach.”

“I was like, ‘I don’t really think that’s for me,’” Randolph said of coaching.

But she put her Science degree to work and started teaching biology at East St. John.

While she was teaching at the school Yussef Jasmine, who played at Loyola at about the same time that Randolph played at Dillard, became a basketball coach with the Wildcats. The two would periodically discuss basketball.

After ascending from assistant coach to head coach, Jasmine tried “two or three times” to hire the biology teacher as an assistant coach, but, Randolph said, “I had no desire to coach.”

But Jasmine was short-handed and asked Randolph if she would break down some film of the Wildcats for him.

“So I broke the film down,” Randolph said, “told him some strengths and some weaknesses, some challenges I thought that his team had.”

Jasmine said he was “impressed” by her breakdown. He continued to try and get her involved as an assistant coach.

“Eventually,” Randolph said, “the timing was right,”

That was in 2016. Randolph was not only a varsity assistant, but she was the head coach of the freshman and junior varsity teams. She made her debut as the freshman head coach in a game against Booker T. Washington.

When asked what she recalled about that milestone in her life, she replied simply, “I lost. I’ll never forget.”

And, by the way, it was by 12 points.

But something more important than the final score happened that night.

“From the moment I stepped out there, I knew, this is where I belong,” Randolph said. “Like, everything else I’ve done in my life up to this point, it made sense.”

When it was pointed out that the place where she belonged was a place she didn’t seek, but that was presented to her, she replied, “That’s my life – multiple times.”

After one season Randolph followed Jasmine to Hahnville and helped Jasmine lead the Tigers to the state semifinals each of the last two seasons. When Jasmine accepted a job as head coach at Dunwoody High School in Atlanta last spring, Jasmine was poised to succeed him.

Randolph, who said, “I never coached girls because no one ever asked me to coach girls,” added that there’s nothing uncomfortable for her about coaching a boys team, but, “it’s very uncomfortable for other people.”

“For me there are no complications whatsoever, other than I’m big on communication,” she said. “And one of the things I think that young males struggle with is communication. But that’s why I am who I am to them, because I talk to them beyond basketball.

“They’re going to be the head of household, so we have to learn how to communicate. So if you’re going to miss practice, you have to talk to me about why you’re gonna miss practice or what other priorities that we have.”

Randolph recognizes that she has “a different perspective and a different style of coaching” than what her players are used to.

“When a female yells at a young man, it comes across differently, which is why I changed my tone and my demeanor,” she said. “A lot of times, I think when a male coaches another male, and it’s forceful, it’s not perceived as that. So I am mindful with how I correct them, or where I correct them, or especially when I’m coaching in front of everybody. I’m very mindful of how I interact with my players.”

Randolph said that when she became a head coach she had to adjust because her shouts for a timeout from the bench would go unheeded by the officials. So she just started walking onto the court to signal a timeout and the officials got used to it.

“It just didn’t register that a female voice can be calling timeout,” she said. “I’ve never understood it.”

Randolph was strategic about the schedule that the Tigers played this season. The non-district schedule included wins against Rummel, Jesuit, Karr and De La Salle, narrow losses to Karr and John Curtis as well as lopsided losses to Newman and Country Day.

“Our schedule was extremely tough,” Randolph said. “We have played some of the best programs in the area. We’re battle tested. I think that when everybody saw the schedule, they were like, she’s crazy. She’s a first-year coach.

“I don’t think that I was crazy. I think that I wanted to get better as a coach. And I believe that if you want to be great at your craft, you have to be able to experience different types of basketball, which all of those teams give to you. Being a first-year head coach, I knew that there was going to be some challenges, but I think (our record) kind of speaks for itself.”

Jasmine observed Randolph in her biology classroom and noticed “she was a great teacher” and he admired her “interaction with her students.” Both skills, he was convinced, would translate to the gymnasium.

Apparently he was right.

“She’s a very competitive person,” Jasmine said, “but at the same time, very compassionate.”

Senior Jordan Moore transferred to Hahnville last spring to play his senior season. The coaching change took place after he had made up his mind to join the Tigers.

“People were saying some negative things, saying how the coach needs to be a man, a woman can’t do that.

“I wanted to get my own opinion. So when I got there, it was just like, OK, I hear what they’re saying, but is it true?”

Moore said after a loss to East St. John this season, “Somebody came up to me and told me, ‘y’all need a new coach.’

“I don’t agree with it,” he said. “And I correct them when I do hear it because she’s doing an amazing job. Definitely.”

Jordan said he has noticed one difference in playing for coach Randolph compared to the men that coached him: “She doesn’t curse you out.”

Junior guard Elijah Harris said after a few practices he realized, “This is just my coach; it was just the same as a man coach.”

Before she got into coaching, Randolph said she would routinely wake up in the middle of the night.

“When you are woken up every night at between three and four o’clock in the morning, you’re not listening to what it is that God has to say,” she explained. “I was like, ‘Why am I always waking up at this particular time?’”

Then she came to realize what was happening.

“I wasn’t listening during the day to the message,” she said. “I wasn’t walking in what my purpose was.”

But after she coached her first game, “all of a sudden it stopped.”

“I don’t wake up at that time anymore,” Randolph said. “I wake up at 5 or 5:30 to go to the gym before I go to work.”