Where Are They Now — Tynesha Lewis ’01, ’04
THEN: An upstart freshman on Kay Yow’s 1998 Final Four squad
NOW: Head women’s basketball coach of the UNC Asheville Bulldogs
Growing up in Macclesfield, N.C., in a family favoring light blue, Tynesha Lewis ’01, ’04 always felt she would play basketball for UNC. But after a recruiting visit to Chapel Hill didn’t feel right, Lewis kept her options open. Tennessee called. UConn called. They had the same question: Was there any way they could get Lewis out of her home state?
“I was like, ‘Not a chance,’” Lewis says, adding all it took was one meeting with Wolfpack head coach Kay Yow to commit. “To this day, I’m still in North Carolina.”
Lewis, 46, is entering her second year as the head women’s basketball coach at UNC Asheville. It’s her second head coaching gig, after coaching from 2021 to 2024 at Elizabeth City State University, where she was a Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association Coach of the Year and won a conference championship.
It took Lewis some time to arrive on the sidelines as a coach. She was All-ACC at NC State from 1997 to 2001, including starring for Yow’s 1998 Final Four team as a freshman. “My teammates thought I was crazy because I wrote [Yow] a letter during my recruiting process [saying] that I was going to take her to her first Final Four,” Lewis remembers. She parlayed that success into a five-year WNBA career, playing for the Houston Comets, Charlotte Sting and Minnesota Lynx. She also taught middle school math and worked in pharmaceuticals before a friend invited her to be an assistant coach at Illinois State in 2012.
Lewis has quickly risen through the coaching ranks. She loves that coaching allows her to stay competitive, something that shines through on her résumé dating back to 2001, when she recorded the first triple-double in Wolfpack women’s history, against Florida State.
At the outset of her first season in Asheville last year, Lewis even competed against nature, having to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina. She and the team were displaced to Charlotte, N.C., hotels for a month. “We were exhausted before we even started. I was just super proud of these student-athletes,” she says, adding that they took on the predominant characteristic she saw in the community’s response to the storm’s devastation.
“Resilient.”
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