Overview:
Renee Jimenez compiled a win-loss record of 270-151 during 15 seasons as a women’s basketball coach at the NCAA Division II level
Renee Jimenez is still caught off guard by feelings of déjà vu six months after her introduction as UC Santa Barbara’s newest coach.
The memories rush back as soon as she pushes open the Thunderdome door.
She’s a young girl again, learning the game of basketball at camps run by coach Mark French, or watching his Gaucho women win one Big West Conference championship after another.
Or she’s marking her 18th birthday by lighting up the scoreboard with three-pointers to help Ventura High School win the 1999 Santa Barbara Tournament of Champions.
Or she’s coaching Cal State Monterey Bay to an upset victory over the Gauchos in a preseason exhibition.
Those Thunderdome flashbacks, Jimenez said, “happen all the time … at least once a week.”
“I mean, I was in there so many times as a kid,” she added. “When I walk in there, sometimes I almost believe that I’m not there.
“It’s like, ‘I can’t believe this is mine.’”
But she will indeed make her debut as UCSB’s coach when the Gaucho women play host to Claremont-Mudd-Scripps at 7 p.m. Wednesday.
“I can’t tell you how cool it is to be home,” Jimenez told Noozhawk. “This has literally been my dream job and I’m super-excited about it.”
The urge to coach flickered to life soon after she attended those Gaucho camps. She began volunteering to work clinics while she was still playing for Ventura High.
“I remember going to games here (at UCSB), and games at UCLA, when they were really good,” Jimenez said.
“I don’t know why, but I gravitated toward watching the coaches and thinking, ‘This is their job! This is what they do!’”
Her interest to play basketball was stoked while chasing down the softball pitches of her older sister, Rebecca.
“She and my dad would throw in the front yard — she’d have to throw 100 strikes every night,” she recalled. “He’d sit on his bucket and catch for her and I’d wait for passed balls on my bike and ride down the street when they went rolling.
“It was kind of our post-dinner routine.”
Eventually, that routine might have sent her off chasing a larger ball.
“I was dragged to so much softball that it’s probably why I gravitated toward basketball,” she laughed.
“I was either freezing or burning at her games, no in-between, so my thought was, ‘How do I get into a gym?’”
Kids Play
Jimenez’s 12-year-old daughter has dragged her back behind that old eight-ball. Although young Quinn plays youth basketball, she also launched her own softball pitching career at age 6.
“I’m like, OK … Here we go again,” Jimenez said. “I’m cold or I’m hot — either/or — and I need shin guards and knee pads and all that kind of stuff.”
Family is a core value for the 42-year-old coach. Her wife, Chelsea Carlisle, has given up a 12-year-old career as associate head coach at UC San Diego to join her staff at UCSB.
They have two other children: 4-year-old twins Skylar and Mason.
Three of her Gauchos, she pointed out happily, also have a twin for a sibling.
“We’re like the twin family, for sure!” she said.
Jimenez succeeded Bonnie Henrickson, who retired in March after nine seasons as UCSB’s head coach.
Henrickson won 465 games total over a 27-year career. She reached the NCAA Tournament seven times during prior stints at Kansas and Virginia Tech.
Eleven Gauchos returned from last year’s team in spite of the coaching change.
“That’s unheard of right now with how the portal works,” Jimenez said. “I attribute a lot of that to how these kids enjoy each other. They’re very close.
“They love this school and they want to graduate from here. They understand the value of a UC degree — a big part of it was that.
“And it was also that Bonnie was going on into her retirement life. There were no ill feelings. This is what everyone could be excited about together. I could and they could.”
Jimenez is already a 15-year head coaching veteran.
She spent the last eight seasons at Cal State San Marcos. She took the Cougars to last year’s NCAA Division II Final Four after upsetting top-ranked Gannon University of Erie, Pennsylvania.
Quinn is already talking about an Elite Eight run for the Gauchos.
“I’m like, ‘No, no, no! … You’ve got to back it up a little,’” her mom said. “She was probably 4 or 5 when I started at San Marcos, and so I asked her, ‘Quinn, do you ever remember our team there being bad?’
“She was like, ‘No! … What do you mean that you guys were bad?’ And I’m like, ‘OK, kiddo, so we’ve got to brace ourselves — this is going to take some time.
“We were really good there the last five years, and so all she knows are championships and winning and NCAA Tournaments.”
A Real Hot Shot
Jimenez won plenty of games while growing up in the girls basketball hotbed of Ventura.
She was a junior when Ventura High overcame Diana Taurasi, now the WNBA’s all-time leading scorer, to upset Chino powerhouse Don Lugo High in the second round of the 1999 CIF-Southern Section 1A playoffs.
Jimenez laughed when asked how she stopped Taurasi.
“Oh, heck no — I didn’t guard her!” she replied. “I’m a defensive coach but I was never a defender. I was a shooter.
“We can’t do both, you know! … That’s asking way too much of us, man!”
Glenn Gray Jr. coached Ventura High to a 25-2 record during her senior season.
The victories included two upsets over a nationally ranked Buena High team that included Courtney Young and Kelly Greathouse.
The Cougars were ousted in the second round of that year’s playoffs, however, by a Santa Barbara High team led by future Gaucho star Lisa Willett.
“They had some great players like Lisa and Araceli Gil,” Jimenez said. “We all played against each other for a really long time.”
Relationships have always been paramount for her.
Her respect for Ned Mircetic — the winningest coach in the history of California women’s junior college basketball — kept her in town for one more season at Ventura College.
“I played for Ned because I’d known him my whole life,” Jimenez explained.
They won a state championship together in 2001.
Jimenez spent the next three years at San Francisco State. She set school records for the most three-pointers in both a season and a career and served for two years as the Gators’ team captain.
Cardinal Rule
She was still playing for San Francisco State when she took the first step toward a coaching career, volunteering to work the summer basketball camps run by renowned Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer.
“Instead of going out at night with the camp counselors, I’d stay back and help Tara and her staff with the snack bar, or by counting shirts, to get ready for the next day,” she said.
“I just knew that I needed to be around them.”
VanDerveer, who retired last spring as the winningest coach in NCAA women’s basketball history, offered Jimenez an unpaid internship as Stanford’s video coordinator after her senior season of 2004.
“Right away I went, ‘I’ll do it!’ … But she was like, ‘Well, I think you should talk to your parents first,’” Jimenez said. “But I said, ‘No, no, no, no! … I’ll figure it out and do it!’
“I drove down to Stanford three times a week to work in the office and, as soon as I graduated in May, moved into some apartment in East Palo Alto.
“I worked football games, lacrosse, rugby, just to make ends meet. My parents helped me a little bit, too.”
VanDerveer was so impressed by Jimenez’s initiative that she convinced then-San Diego State coach Beth Burns to hire her as an assistant coach the next season.
“I was an assistant coach in Division I at 23,” Jimenez said. “Tara definitely fast-tracked my career, that’s for sure.”
She was a head coach at Cal State Monterey Bay by age 26. She took the Otters to three NCAA Division II Tournaments in five years, which included a 27-4 season in 2010-2011.
Jimenez made an impression during the preseason of that year on Kelly Barsky, a UCSB assistant coach at that time, when her Monterey Bay team upset the WNIT-bound Gauchos, 53-49, in an exhibition game.
Barsky, who is now in her second year as UCSB’s director of athletics, found a kindred spirit when she interviewed Jimenez for the Gaucho coaching job in the spring.
“I told Kelly, ‘I love Santa Barbara, and this is obviously my dream job, but a big part of this job is that you’re here,” Jimenez said. “I said, ‘You’re my head coach, and I want to make sure that we’re in this together.’
“Kelly wants it to be great. She still has her coaching mentality, which is so cool. She is fiery. She’s demanding. She’s energetic.
“She also loves people and cares about people, and that’s somebody that I wanted to be with in the trenches.”
Getting Defensive
Jimenez’s career as a head coach took her from Monterey Bay to Cal State San Bernardino for two seasons before she landed at Cal State San Marcos.
Person-to-person defense was an emphasis at every stop.
She may have been a shooter during her playing days, but Burns drummed it into Jimenez during her three seasons as a Division I assistant that “defense wins championships.”
“That’s what coach would say,” she said. “When you’re a new coach and you’re an up-and-coming program, the one thing you can control is the defensive end of the floor.
“We have players here who can get after it. We have good athleticism and can move around the floor … we can create a little bit of havoc.”
Five of this year’s Gauchos are seniors. They are led by All-Big West point guard Alyssa Marin, who averaged 12.1 points on 38.1% three-point shooting and 3.3 assists last season.
The other seniors are returning backcourt starter Anya Choice (7.2 points, 36% in three-pointers), 6-4 center Flora Goed (5.1 points, 3.6 rebounds), 6-foot guard Analillia Cabuena, and 6-2 redshirt transfer Cayla Williams.
The front line is anchored by 6-4 junior Laurel Rockwood. Two additional juniors — Skylar Burke (7.5 points, 6.3 rebounds) and Jessica Grant (6.7 points, 60 three-pointers) — are key players on the guard line.
A pair of sophomores — 6-foot Zoe Borter (4.1 points, 37.1% from three) and 6-foot Kanani Coon — add both size and athleticism to the backcourt.
Jimenez increased that depth by recruiting Oregon State point guard Martha Pietsch out of the transfer portal.
She’s played for several years in Germany’s national team program and averaged 10.8 minutes per game across two seasons for a Beavers squad that advanced to last year’s NCAA Elite Eight.
“We have fantastic guards — that’s something I really inherited here — and most of them can really handle the ball,” Jimenez said. “If a guard gets a rebound, we’re going to push, and it doesn’t matter who the guard is.
“Last year, Alyssa was giving the ball up and then she wouldn’t get it back. So what I’m trying to teach her is that, ‘Now you get to get out and run, and when the ball gets up to you, you’re going.’
“Martha has lightened up some of that load for Alyssa … of feeling like she had to organize the floor and do so much.”
The freshman class includes 6-1 redshirt Olivia Bradley from Australia, 5-7 Arshiya Ranjitkar from Union City’s Piedmont High, 5-9 Bojana Radnjic from Montenegro, 6-1 Karena Eberts from Orinda’s Miramonte High, and 5-11 Malani Mastora from Alameda High.
The Gauchos will be even deeper by December when Williams, a transfer from Richmond, and Bradley are medically cleared. Both are expected back for the Big West season after having undergone knee surgery last year.
“When we get Cayla and Liv back, we’ll be hitting on all cylinders,” Jimenez said.
The French Connection
Just like daughter Quinn, Jimenez dreams of long NCAA Tournament runs for the Gauchos. She was at the Thunderdome 20 years ago to watch the Gauchos beat Houston and advance to the NCAA Sweet 16 of 2004.
“We just had our meet the team event and coach French came,” she said.
“I was like, ‘I’ve got to take you to breakfast because I have so many questions about how you got it going and where you felt the tipping points were for you.’”
She also picked Henrickson’s brain over breakfast a few times.
“This was a great group of kids to come into as a new coach because they have been so wide-eyed and willing,” Jimenez said. “Their eyes are like laser beams when you speak to them.
“There has never been a second of pushback. If I go, ‘Hey, we’re going to this event,’ they are organized, they’re early, they’re wearing the same thing, they look the part.
“They’ve created a very caring family culture within their own team, and that’s credit to Bonnie and her staff and what they’ve done.”
The daughter of Yolanda and John Jimenez is bringing a lot of family to the Gauchos, as well.
“My dad was actually born in Santa Barbara and went to school here until about third grade,” she said. “I have a lot of family in town … I mean, a lot.
“I grew up coming up here and going to Fiesta and the whole thing.
“Season ticket sales are up 15%-20% from last year, and I’d guess a good chunk of that is family.”
Her staff keeps bumping into them around town.
“They tell me, ‘Everyone we meet, you’re related to them,’” Jimenez said. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, this is where I’m from, guys … This is home.’”
And basketball has now become her season of Thanksgiving.
