Ever since he became girls basketball coach at Trinity Lutheran High School, one of Mike Lang’s goals was to have Donna Sullivan join his staff.
That goal became a reality earlier this summer, and this week she worked with the younger girls at the annual Trinity girls basketball camp in the Bollinger Athletic Complex, while he worked with the older players.
“Hopefully they picked up something this week,” Sullivan said. “We did ball-handling, dribbling, passing, shooting. The high school kids helped out with each part. Hopefully they picked up something they can take home and practice.”
Lang is going into his going into his seventh year as head coach at Trinity Lutheran.
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“This is something I’ve been working on since my first year,” he said. “The day I heard (former Waldron coach Rod Suiter) was no longer coaching I picked the phone up and I called Sull. We talk a couple times a week anyway.
“I told her, ‘This is our goal, this is what we want to do, and the best way for us to get there is for you to be on our staff, working with our kids and teaching along the way.’
“That’s what I’m looking forward to, having her knowledge here, feed off her knowledge and have her improve our program the way she’s done everywhere she’s gone.”
Sullivan will coach Trinity’s junior varsity team in the winter.
“She’s been running the JV during summer leagues, and the thing is I want her to have a voice in practice, in games, and we want our kids responding to her, which they’ve done so far,” Lang said. “It’s been a lot of fun this summer, especially having Sull around.”
“I like to teach the game and help them get better,” said Sullivan, who is in the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame. “I like to help give girls the skills they need to become a better player down the road. That’s what I like to do.”
Sullivan was head coach at Seymour for 31 years and helped “off and on for 10 years,” she said, at Waldron.
Sullivan, who received an award from the Indiana Retired Teachers Association at their annual meeting in Indianapolis on Wednesday, said, “Things changed at Waldron this past season, at the end of the school year.
“Mike had been asking me for the past four or five years (to join him at Trinity), and not travel an hour every day. I’ll be doing the same thing I was doing up there.”
This summer the Cougars are playing in a 16-team summer league. Trinity attended a Henryville shootout earlier and this weekend is playing in the Hanover shootout.
“It’s a busy and exhausting three and one-half weeks, but it’s a fun three and one-half weeks,” Lang said.
He said the AAU circuit picks back up in July.
“Our gym is always going to be open,” he said. “We’re challenging our kids to get up a pretty large number of shots through the end of July. If the kids want to come in for individual workouts in July we’ll put them through the workouts. We don’t make them be in here in July, they’ve always got to be kids, but the doors are always open.”