Shaw
GREENFIELD — The transition should be smooth and if the new coach has any questions she can just walk across the hall and ask them.
Lindsey Shaw, in her 17th year as a teacher at Eastern Hancock, was approved to be the school’s new head girls basketball coach at Monday’s school board meeting.
Shaw, fresh out of a Hall of Fame hoops career at Franklin College, was the program’s head coach from 2o07-2011.
Since then she has been active coaching Eastern Hancock elementary and junior high teams, both boys and girls. The last six years, she led former coach Shari Doud’s youth program.
Doud, who retired from a 20-year head coaching career after this past season, led the program to back-to-back semi-state appearances, including a Class 2A Final Four last February. The last two seasons were the best in school history.
Shaw and Doud have known each other a long time. Doud and her father, Ed Clark, coached Shaw in AAU basketball and, currently, the former coach and new coach have classrooms across the hall from each other.
Shaw teaches sixth grade science.
“During the process of me trying to figure all of this out, we talked about how similar the two of us are in terms of things that we run and concepts, so I don’t think that’s going to be an issue,” Shaw said of the transition to be the program’s next head coach. “I think it’s just going to be it is somebody different. I’m not coach Doud. She left some big shoes and set the plan of how it’s supposed to be done. My goal is to help those girls continue to get a little bit better each day and hopefully at the end of it all we continue to see similar success.”
Along with similarities in basketball concepts, to help with the transition, Shaw has had most of the girls in the classroom, and coached many of them when she was Eastern Hancock’s eighth-grade coach.
“The girls. Hands down the kids, the girls in the program,” Shaw answered on why she wanted to get back to being a varsity head coach. “I’ve had the luxury the last few years to sit behind the scenes in the youth program and watch them grow up. I teach them in class. It really came down to a family decision of all of us talking. I’ve had the itch for a little bit, thanks to coach Doud, for kind of having me jump back in.
“Obviously I think the timing was right. I love these kids, Eastern’s home.”
Shaw grew up in Greenfield and played high school basketball at Roncalli. She went on to star at Franklin, a two-time conference player of the year, where she was inducted into the school’s athletic Hall of Fame in 2020.
She was only 23 years old when she started her first stint as the program’s head coach. The team struggled during that time with a 6-14 season in 2009-10 being the best of the four-year period.
Shaw admits she learned a lot from that experience and the time between that first head coaching job to now.
“I learned a lot of things, things I know I really wish I would have known back then as a 23-year old first-time varsity head coach,” Shaw said. “I had some really great kids back then I know they played their guts out for me and I coached my heart out for them. It just didn’t pan out those first four years the way any of us wanted it to. I’ve been able to reflect a lot here recently and make conscious choices and make good decisions based on that past experience.
“It helps too that this is home now. It was not home 17 years ago. I was this young outsider coming in. There’s a lot of great people, great families, great kids, and that makes it so much easier to step back into this role. Obviously, with Shari across the hall, that helps too.”
