San Jose State fired women’s basketball coach Jamie Craighead Turner on Friday morning, athletic director Jeff Konya announced in a news release.
Craighead Turner was the head coach for nine seasons in San Jose, with the Spartans going 89-160 overall and 54-93 in Mountain West conference play during her tenure. In 2021-22, San Jose State went 5-25 overall and 2-16 in the Mountain West, an in-conference record that doesn’t include their 39-point loss to Colorado State on Sunday in the first round of the Mountain West tournament.
Craighead Turner had her best season cut short by the coronavirus pandemic, as her 2019-2020 team finished 19-12 overall and 12-6 in conference, the first time San Jose State ended a season with a winning record overall since 2004-05. The Spartans would’ve surely participated in the Women’s National Invitational Tournament had the pandemic not ended the women’s basketball season prior to postseason play.
Craighead Turner signed a three-year extension coming off of the stellar season, which was set to expire in 2022-23, and had a base salary north of $200,000, according to Transparent California.
The Spartans entered 2020-21 as a favorite to contend for the Mountain West crown, picked second in the preseason coaches’ poll. But San Jose State only played four games before canceling the remainder of their season due to COVID-19 health and safety concerns, going 2-2. They had initially been forced to leave Santa Clara County in order to continue their season, playing one neutral site game on Grand Canyon University’s campus in Phoenix, before making the decision to end their season on Jan. 14, 2021.
After spending four years as the head coach of Sacramento State, Craighead Turner’s tenure in San Jose started just weeks before the beginning of the 2013-14 season, when former head coach Tim LaKose resigned unexpectedly on Aug. 30, 2013. But the reason for LaKose’s resignation would come out in 2016, when the NCAA punished the program and LaKose for violating rules about practice time and for not reporting the violations, which put the program on a one-year probation.
In the news release, San Jose State said it will conduct a “national search” for a new head coach.
A local name to watch as a possible candidate for the job is Cal State-East Bay’s Shanele Stires, who has led the Pioneers to a 22-2 record this season and the No. 1 seed in the West Regional of the Division II NCAA Tournament, which begins Friday in Hayward. Stires was the associate head coach at the University of San Francisco for Jennifer Azzi for four years before taking the job at Cal State-East Bay, where she’s currently 92-52 in six years.
Source: www.mercurynews.com