Stephanie Findley, who has won more women’s basketball games than any other coach at any four-year Oklahoma university, is retiring from Oklahoma Christian.
Findley has been involved with OC’s program for 44 of its 45 years of existence – four as a player, three as an assistant coach and the last 37 as the second head coach in the program’s history. She posted a 640-484 record as a head coach. The No. 2 person on Oklahoma’s coaching wins list, former Oklahoma coach Sherri Coale, is an OC alumna who played for Findley.
Through the end of the 2020-21 season, Findley was one of only 86 women’s college basketball coaches ever to record at least 600 wins. She’s among 42 coaches on that list who have accomplished that feat working at only one school.
Findley was a four-time Sooner Athletic Conference coach of the year honoree, having received the award in 1986, 1988, 1990 and 2000. In 1986, she was named coach of the year in NAIA District 9 after guiding the Lady Eagles to the national quarterfinals and she was coach of the year in NAIA District 2 in 2000. She was inducted into the OC Athletic Hall of Fame in 2004.
Findley took 13 teams to the NAIA Division I tournament, including nine of the last 13 years OC was a member of that organization. The Lady Eagles reached the “Sweet 16” five times and advanced to the national quarterfinals in 1986 – her first season as coach – as well as in 2003 and 2010.
During the 2012-13 season, OC’s first as a member of the National Christian College Athletic Association, she guided the Lady Eagles to the Central Region title – the program’s first postseason tournament win since 1986 – and a fourth-place finish at the NCCAA Championship. In the region title game, OC beat eventual NCCAA champ Southern Nazarene. In 2013-14, OC again won the NCCAA Central Region title and eventually finished fifth at the national tournament.
The Lady Eagles made a strong debut in NCAA Division II and the Heartland Conference, as they would have finished third if the league had chosen to count OC’s games in the regular-season standings in 2012-13. OC finished in the top four in the Heartland standings in three of its first four seasons in the league. In 2015-16, OC’s first season of eligibility to compete in the Heartland and Division II postseason, she guided the Lady Eagles to a fourth-place league finish, and they tied for fourth again in 2016-17.
OC picked up its first postseason win at the Division II level in March 2018, beating Newman (Kan.) in the first round of the Heartland Conference Championship tournament. In 2018-19, Findley coached the leading scorer in NCAA Division II, OC guard Addy Clift, and Findley guided the Lady Eagles to an upper-division (seventh-place) finish in the Lone Star Conference during the pandemic-shortened 2020-21 season.
Findley, from Lexington, was a playmaking guard for OC from 1979 to 1982 for the program’s first coach, Max Dobson. After three seasons as Dobson’s assistant, she became the head coach with the 1985-86 season, in which she guided the Lady Eagles on a memorable postseason run. Exactly 36 years ago on Monday, OC set a still-standing NAIA record by shooting 79.6 percent (39 of 49) from the field in a 92-68 win at Cameron in the district championship game.
Many of Findley’s former players have enjoyed success in the coaching ranks, including Coale and former OU assistant coach Jan Ross; Nichole (Sanders) Copeland, who won a Class 6A high school girls state title at Mustang; Tasha (Turney) Diesselhorst, hired in 2016 as Northwestern Oklahoma State’s head coach after winning a prep state title at Pond Creek-Hunter; and Lisa (Chenoweth) Zamroz, now the head coach at The Master’s (Calif.). Other former players-turned-coaches include Tara Satterfield (Bethel High School), Haley Myers (Okarche High School) and Hope Heinen (Deer Creek High School).
Findley is a member of the NCAA Division II Women’s Basketball Coaches Association. She served three terms as the president of the NAIA Women’s Basketball Coaches Association, most recently in 2005-06. She was the NAIA representative to the USA Basketball Women’s Collegiate Committee from 2000 to 2004 and once served on the board of directors of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.
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