With Ole Miss women March Madness bound again, Coach Yo’s upbringing holds secret to success

OXFORD — When Gladstone “Moon” McPhee finds his seat to watch Ole Miss women’s basketball take on Gonzaga in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament on Friday, he’ll see a piece of himself prowling the sideline.

The mannerisms. The emotion. The fire. So much of how Rebels coach Yolett McPhee-McCuin acts on the court comes from her father, a basketball coaching legend in the Bahamas.

“Watching her is like watching myself,” McPhee said last week, seated at a table inside the Tuohy Basketball Center. “When I see all her mannerisms, and I watch her mood in practice – that’s daddy. There’s some things that you can run from, and there’s other things that you can never run from. She’s a part of me.”

And her mother, Daisy – an educator and principal of 31 years ‒ she’s there, too. In the way McPhee-McCuin speaks to the team she leads. In how she organizes and pursues her goals. In her sense of focus.

“She’s definitely a leader like I am,” Daisy said.

McPhee-McCuin – known around Oxford and in the basketball community at large as “Coach Yo” – has guided Ole Miss into March Madness for a second-straight season, snapped a run of 14 consecutive losing SEC campaigns and reclaimed the Rebels’ in-state superiority after 14 consecutive losses to Mississippi State.

She was raised for this – even if nobody realized it at the time.

“It’s in her DNA,” Moon said. “I’m proud of her.”

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Starting early

Moon arranged his daughter’s first coaching job when she was around 10 years old, taking charge of a team full of 8-and-under boys.

When McPhee-McCuin wasn’t actually coaching, she spent some time pretending – to her parents’ amusement.

“It used to be so funny,” Daisy said. “I would fall down laughing.”

As a teenager, though, McPhee-McCuin’s focus lay firmly on her own game. She woke her father up at 5 a.m. every weekday, and they’d trudge out of the house to an outdoor court nearby, where a small light gleamed just enough to see. They’d get their work in, and McPhee-McCuin would return home, clean herself up, and be at school with her mother in time to unlock the gates at 7 a.m. Now spending much of their time in Oxford, McPhee-McCuin’s parents offer similar support to her two daughters, Yasmine and Yuri.

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That daily routine forged her into a superstar in the Bahamas. In fact, it took a trip to the United States to play AAU ball for McPhee-McCuin to realize she wasn’t the best player in the world. She went on to become the first Bahamian woman to sign a Division I Letter of Intent, playing at Rhode Island following two years at a junior college. But the coaching seeds were sewn.

“I guess he was grooming me,” she said. “But I don’t know that he wanted me to be a coach, either, now that I think about it. I felt like he wanted me to be a lawyer. … It wasn’t a dream that we were chasing.”

Daisy and Moon McPhee

Making it big

Moon really doesn’t like small planes.

But he took a gulp and boarded the one that carried him, his daughter and the rest of their family to Oxford, where McPhee-McCuin was introduced as Ole Miss’ coach in April 2018 after five successful seasons at Jacksonville.

“I had no choice but to cry,” he said. “Seeing a little girl from the Bahamas in a big place like this.”

The little girl’s impact on the big place’s women’s basketball program has been nothing short of transformative. Ole Miss, once a power under Van Chancellor, had been to March Madness three times since his departure in 1997. When the eighth-seeded Rebels (21-8) play the ninth-seeded Bulldogs (28-4) on Friday (9 p.m., ESPNU) at Maples Pavilion in Stanford, California, they’ll have cemented their second trip in five seasons under McPhee-McCuin.

They’ve done it with defense, physicality and a willingness to play in transition. The Rebels own the SEC’s second-best scoring defense behind only unbeaten South Carolina and have mastered the art of winning with force rather than finesse.

Watching her father’s teams as a child, McPhee-McCuin was too young to store detailed information about their style. But, undoubtedly, the way Ole Miss plays is the product of the identity her parents helped her forge.

“I think my coaching style is a combination of my culture in the Bahamas and the coaches who have coached me, and what I feel like is true to who I am as a person,” she said. “Fiery. Tough. Competitive.”

Coach Yo and her family at a tournament in The Bahamas

There in the background

These days, Moon says he opts against giving McPhee-McCuin much coaching advice. That’s often limited to a brief postgame conversation between father and daughter. It’s his belief that no one can tell a coach how to do their job.

“That’s up to you. You have your philosophy. Somebody else has theirs,” he said.

“Nobody can tell you how to do it. And no one is going to take that feeling of losing like you. You get the feeling of winning – but losing, it’s all on you.”

Daisy and Moon have been staying with their daughter through the bulk of the season, and they’ve learned that Ole Miss losses ‒ infrequent as they are – make for quiet nights are home before the cheerfulness is restored in the morning.

So, was Moon the same back in the day?

“I very seldom lost,” he said, smiling.

David Eckert covers Ole Miss for the Clarion Ledger. Email him at deckert@gannett.com or reach him on Twitter @davideckert98.

This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: The story behind Coach Yo’s success in basketball is her parents