DeAnn Craft, who has over 20 years of success coaching women’s basketball at various levels of the college game as well as in the professional ranks, has joined NJIT as assistant women’s basketball coach in July 2015.
“I am delighted that DeAnn has joined our basketball family here at NJIT,” said Lanpher in announcing that Craft has joined the Highlanders. “She is a true professional who is very well respected coach in the collegiate game. DeAnn brings a wealth of knowledge and experience and more importantly her passion, energy and love of the game makes her an invaluable addition to our staff.”
Craft, a 1987 graduate of the University of Central Florida, comes to NJIT having compiled 153 wins with 14 seasons as a head coach at four-year colleges
She began her coaching career as a graduate assistant at UCF before moving on to Wichita State as an assistant coach.
Her first head coaching opportunity came at the two-year level, as she led Cowley County Community College to 66 wins in 96 games, earning a place in the national Top 20 in both 1993-94 and 1994-95.
Craft moved to pro basketball as an assistant with the Richmond (VA) Rage of the American Basketball League, which operated for a time in the 1990s in competition with the WNBA. The Rage players included all-time great Dawn Staley, who is currently head coach at South Carolina.
After a year with the Rage, who played in the 1997 ABL championship series, Coach Craft returned to college ball as an assistant at San Diego State.
Her first Division I head coaching position arose at Lamar (Beaumont, TX), which she guided to its highest finish in the Southland Conference in 2000-01 and posting victories over two NCAA Tournament teams and two WNIT teams.
Craft moved to another Texas Division I program when she joined the staff at Texas Pan American (now Texas Rio Grande Valley). She signed on as associate coach before assuming the helm as head coach from 2003 to 2009. Her 70 wins at UTPA are the most in that program’s history.
Having coached in more than one region of the United States, Craft took her first New England-based job, taking over as head coach at NCAA Division II Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH. At Saint Anselm, playing in one of the nation’s top DII conferences, Craft guided her teams to a ranking of #6 in the nation in scoring defense and tops in the conference (NE-10) in two of her three seasons. In 2011, her Hawks were ranked in the 2011 ESPN/Coaches Poll for Division II in consecutive weeks.
One of her star players through her last season at Texas Pan American and her first three seasons at St. Anselm was Epiphany Smith, who has been an assistant on Lanpher’s coaching staff at NJIT since her graduation from St. Anselm in 2012.
Craft’s most recent coaching post was a stint as head coach at NAIA Montana Tech and she ran her own design business from January 2014 until accepting her new spot as an assistant coach with the Highlanders in the summer of 2015.
