Along with the new faculty and staff on campus, a plethora of new coaches joined the Ravens this year.
Women’s basketball, women’s golf, cross country and the Ravens football team were the teams with the biggest hires.
On June 11, AU announced the new head women’s basketball coach, Jon Gin.
Gin graduated from the University of North Florida and started his coaching career as an intern with the women’s basketball team at Florida State University. Shortly after, Gin became a student assistant for the Women’s basketball team at the University of North Florida.
After graduation, Gin took some time off of coaching before getting a graduate assistant job at Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville. Gin then coached a year of high school prep men’s basketball before getting a job as an assistant at Gannon University. Most recently, he served as an assistant coach at Covenant college.
AU is Coach Gin’s first head coaching position at the collegiate level, but he feels ready for the task.
Gin said that AU has the “big three majors” when thinking about recruiting for Women’s sports which is something that attracted him to the job opportunity, along with the size of AU’s campus and the opportunity to win with this team.
In Gin’s first season, he emphasized that his main goal for the women’s basketball team is “to put Jesus back in the middle of everything for us.”
The assistant coach to Coach Gin is also a new member of the Ravens Athletic coaching staff and will also be heading up the women’s golf team.
That person is first year coach Morgan Douglass. Douglass, a Covenant College graduate, played basketball for the Scots. After graduation, she was a graduate assistant on the same staff as Coach Gin for two years.
Growing up, Douglass played golf with her family, giving her a different type of respect for the sport.
When Coach Gin asked her if she wanted to come to Anderson and be an assistant and have the opportunity to coach golf, Douglass said, “It was a no brainer.”
The men’s and women’s cross country teams at Anderson also experienced a coaching change going into this year.
The Ravens welcome first-year head coach Karis Johnson. Johnson is an Indianapolis native who graduated from Lawrence Central High School before attending McKendree University in Lebanon, Illinois.
After graduating from McKendree, Johnson worked as a graduate assistant for the track and cross country teams at Lewis University.
After being a graduate assistant for two years at Lewis, Johnson heard about this opportunity from former AU track and cross country coach Sol Stephens.
“I have known Coach Stephens for a long time,” said Johnson. “I remember talking to him when I was in middle school.”
Part of Johnson’s motivation for coaching is the rewarding feeling of getting to be with the team everyday during practice and seeing how excited they are to run on the mornings of a race.
The football team also added a few new hires to the staff before the season. None more important than the hire of Offensive Coordinator Eric Lantz. Lantz came from within the HCAC at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.
“I wrote my goals down when I started coaching, and one of them was to be a coordinator by the time I was 28,” said Lantz.
Lantz graduated from the University of Miami (Ohio) in 2015. After graduation, Lantz worked for free for the Miami football staff as a manager before getting the job at Rose-Hulman, where he served as the defensive backs coach and wide receivers coach for four years.
At 28 years old, Lantz has been tasked with taking the Ravens offense to new heights in just his first year.
“My biggest goal here is to get us, as an offense and as a team, to take care of the little things,” said Lantz. “When we do that as a team, the big things will take care of themselves, like winning ball games.”
With fall sports already underway, the new coaches are already taking on their new roles, but some familiar faces on campus have also taken on new roles on different sports teams.
The Ravens swim and dive team has a new head coach in Emma Maubach who helped start the swim team at Anderson.
Also, the Ravens men’s golf coach is Coach Carter Collins who is also currently an assistant for Coach Handy of the Ravens men’s basketball team.
With all the promising new hires and roles, the future looks bright for all the Ravens going into their seasons this year.