The SAC Basketball Coaches of the Year have been announced. On the girls’ side, Homestead head coach Rod Parker and assistant coach Kara Ankenbruck shared the honor. On the boys’ side, Bishop Luers’ head coach Fonso White received the honor. The news was made public in an article published by the Journal Gazette.
“The SAC’s a fantastic conference with many talented coaches and players in it,” Parker said. “So whenever you get that recognition it’s definitely worthy and it means a lot to us.”
“I was so happy to hear that Coach Parker was recognized as Coach of the Year,” Ankenbruck said. “I see the time and dedication that he puts into this program day in and day out, and this year was no exception. To be named beside him is obviously humbling and an honor.”
“I take it that I didn’t do it all on my own,” White said. “It’s special because I had a great group of young men that bought into what we were trying to do and how we wanted to go about doing things, and I had a great coaching staff behind me.”
The Spartans went 26-2 overall and won their seventh sectional title in 10 years. Some of the marquee wins on their resume included wins against Carroll, Luers, Lawrence North, and Northfield.
Parker and Ankenbruck shared head coaching responsibilities during the season. Parker was the head coach for most of the season but had to miss 10 games after being diagnosed with Cancer. Ankenbruck served as the interim head coach in his absence, and led the team to a 9-1 record during that span.
“He told me [about his diagnosis] right before he told the team,” Ankenbruck said. “It was hard to keep an eye on the prize, which was working hard and attaining those basketball goals. But my first reaction was hoping that he was going to be okay, and once we found out that he had beaten the cancer, and he was coming back, we were just overwhelmed and very proud of the girls that they maintained that focus and kept working hard for him.”
“I’ve been blessed with some great assistant coaches over the past several years, but Kara is exceptional,” Parker said. “She’s very knowledgable in the game, she’s a great role model, she’s a great motivator. She really knows how to lead athletes and players to a common goal. She’s been very important for our program for years.”
Parker has been the head girls basketball coach at Homestead for 19 years. Under Parker, the Spartans have won seven sectional titles in a span of 10 years. They won State back in 2017.
“I think the big thing is that we’ve got a really good feeder program going right now,” Parker said. “We have a lot of young kids playing, a lot of buy-in from the players, hard work in the offseason, and I think that we just have a very strong culture right now with the kids in our program who play important roles for our team to be successful. And we’ve obviously had some very talented players the last seven to 10 years. But they’ve worked well together, and they’ve been able to give up some of the personal spotlights for the team’s success, and it’s been very rewarding.”
Ankenbruck has been an assistant coach at Homestead during a good portion of Parker’s career.
“I’ve coached at pretty much every level, and we kind of lost count of how many years we’ve coached together,” Ankenbruck said. “It’s not even a job for me. It is friends spending time together, working together, to build up a program. Coach Parker, myself, and the other assistant coaches, we just have such a great relationship on and off the court and in practice and outside of practice.”
As for White and the Knights, they went through a huge turnaround this year. Luers went 4-18 last year, White’s first season as the Knights’ head coach. He had taken over a program that had only won one game the year before he took the job. This year Luers finished 15-7 and won the SAC regular-season title.
“I think the biggest reason [for the turnaround] is that a lot of guys stayed committed to the hard work and to coming in to play the system the way we play it, and do things the way we like to do and just get out and get at a fast pace, and play fast,” White said. “And again, a lot of guys buy into what we’re trying to do as coaches, and the things on development that we’re trying to get them to understand to be better players, not just for themselves, but for us as a team.”
Like the Homestead girls, the Luers boys won several big games. They picked up conference wins against Carroll and Snider, earning a tiebreaker over both teams for first in the SAC. Outside the conference, they beat Mishawaka Marian (who went on to win a sectional championship) and New Haven (who also won a sectional title). In the New Haven game, the Knights were without senior leader DeMarcus Hudson. He had suffered a season-ending foot injury.
“Like I told someone, you cry sometimes…when you see kids fulfill something that they didn’t deem possible for themselves. You’ve just got to get them to buy in and believe,” White said. “Even when DeMarcus went down, we had a ‘next man up’ mentality, and a lot of guys stepped up throughout the whole season. Kids like Landon Moore, Nick Thompson, John Peterson; they were able to jump in and fill some scoring voids for us when Naylon [Thompson] wasn’t hitting or Jalen Causey wasn’t hitting.”
The Journal Gazette usually hosts a banquet where the SAC Boys’ and Girls’ Coaches of the year are recognized. However, because of the Coronavirus pandemic, there was no banquet this year. Rather, the Journal Gazette contacted White, Parker, and Ankenbruck over the phone to inform them that they had won.
White was also told by Luers athletic director Kevin Godfroy that he would be receiving the award for Boys’ Coach of the Year at a later date. Since Parker and Ankenbruck are sharing the honor of Girls’ Coach of the Year, the question remains as to whether they each will get separate awards, or if Homestead will be given one single solitary award.
“That’s a good question,” Parker said. “I’m assuming that we’ll probably each get one this year. I don’t know if they’re going to mail them both to the school or to us individually. But I guess I would probably expect them to go to the school for us to pick up.”
