![\"\"](\"http:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/Greg-Coleman-300x225.jpg\" "\\"Greg")
Greg Coleman\u00a0always knew he\u2019d find himself back at Lehigh coaching basketball after having been an assistant there a decade ago.<\/p>\nGreg Coleman\u00a0always knew he\u2019d find himself back at Lehigh coaching basketball after having been an assistant there a decade ago.<\/p>\n
When Lightning\u00a0position opened up in 2011, he decided it wasn\u2019t the right time. He had been a head coach for just four seasons, and had finished his first campaign at Island Coast.<\/p>\n
But when Lehigh head coach\u00a0Dawn McNew stepped down in February after five seasons on the job, Coleman immediately took notice.<\/p>\n
The Lightning had six applicants for the job, including one candidate from Delaware and interviewed three, two of which were phone interviews. They brought in McNew as a \u201chead consultant,\u201d athletic director Nicholas Dysert said.<\/p>\n
Coleman, who had finished up his sixth season with the\u00a0Gators, was given the program\u2019s only face-to-face interview and was hired officially on Wednesday, though Lehigh announced the position within the school on Friday. He began his career as a freshman\u00a0coach under Matt Herting at Bishop Verot, though later moved on to Lehigh, where he coached with then-head coach\u00a0Mark Morehead.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe wanted the job,\u201d Dysert said. \u201cHe was an assistant here previously. As he told us in the interview, this was his dream job.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Lightning, who were featured in the prestigious\u00a0City of Palms\u00a0tournament in December, went 19-8 last year \u2014 though six losses came by virtue of holiday tournaments to highly talented teams \u2014 and reached the first round of the region playoffs, where they fell to Golden Gate at the buzzer.<\/p>\n
Over McNew\u2019s tenure, the Lightning were 92-40 and made regional finals appearances in the 2013-14 and 2014-15 seasons. However, the program endured controversy last season when an explicit rap video surfaced and the coaching staff and nine players were suspended just days before the district playoffs began.<\/p>\n
Lehigh volunteer assistant Mike Bonilla, who held the head coaching position for about a week during the suspensions, was one of the six candidates considered for the job. He will move on to become an assistant on the Bishop Verot bench next season.<\/p>\n
Coleman will bring two members of his staff from Island Coast to Lehigh. That will include his father, Greg Coleman Sr., and another varsity assistant. A proponent of full court pressure, Coleman hopes to implement an aggressive defense that can cause turnovers and create mismatches for 32 minutes.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s one of those things, you can\u2019t go in and say, \u2018This is how we\u2019re going to do things,\u2019\u201d Coleman said.<\/p>\n
Offensively, he said, \u201cI might not touch it at all. What they\u2019ve done in the past has worked well. If it\u2019s not broke why fix it?\u201d<\/p>\n
Coleman, 36, holds a career record of 124-122 over nine seasons with Ida Baker and Island Coast. He won a district championship with the Gators during the 2011-12 season and reached the region playoffs three times.<\/p>\n
Bottom of Form<\/p>\n
Over his last three seasons with Island Coast\u00a0he went 35-43.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously, the talent that\u2019s out there is one of the best in all of\u00a0Southwest Florida,\u201d said Coleman, who\u2019s a 1998 graduate of Bishop Verot. \u201cThat\u2019s a plus. But that\u2019s not the biggest reason. In this county, your talent can be gone with a snap of a finger. The biggest thing is, my wife and I grew up in south Fort Myers. I\u2019ve been looking to move back on that side of the river for some time now. So it felt like the right time to move with my family.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Greg Coleman\u00a0always knew he\u2019d find himself back at Lehigh coaching basketball after having been an assistant there a decade ago. When Lightning\u00a0position opened up in 2011, he decided it wasn\u2019t… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39688"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}