Greenwood approves Jessie Huffman as new girls basketball coach

Jessie Huffman takes over a Greenwood girls basketball program that has spent too long fighting uphill. The Woodmen finished 1-22 last season, averaged just 32.7 points per game and have gone under .500 in nine of their last 11 seasons, a stretch that left the program 78-178 under four head coaches.

Greenwood approved Huffman, 38, during a school board meeting Tuesday evening, giving the Woodmen a coach who knows the area, knows the pressure and knows what a rebuild looks like. Huffman was a former Whiteland point guard, a four-year letterwinner at Whiteland Community High School and a three-time Mid-State Conference selection. She was also the Daily Journal’s Player of the Year as a senior in 2005-06, a resume that still carries weight in Johnson County basketball circles.

Her playing career added to that credibility. Huffman won Ohio Valley Conference Freshman of the Year honors at Eastern Illinois University after starting all 29 games as a freshman, then transferred to IUPUI for her final two college seasons and graduated rather than taking a fifth year. That path matters for Greenwood because it puts a former high-level guard on the bench, someone who has already navigated both elite high school basketball and Division I-level expectations.

The hire arrives at a critical time. Greenwood will move into the Hoosier Legends Conference in the 2026-27 school year after being a Mid-State member since the league was founded in 1942, so Huffman is not simply stepping into a coaching job. She is walking into a program transition that will shape how Greenwood is judged against familiar Johnson County rivals and a new set of conference opponents. The first work begins immediately, with offseason planning, roster evaluation and the culture shift that usually decides whether a program stays stuck or starts moving.

Huffman also brings local coaching experience that should matter in a rebuild. She spent three seasons as an assistant at Whiteland under Kyle Shipp and later spent three years as a junior varsity assistant at Indian Creek. That background gives Greenwood a coach who understands both the development pipeline and the day-to-day demands of building a varsity roster that can compete.

For Greenwood, this is more than a routine hire. It is a reset at the top, a chance to change the direction of a program that has struggled for years and to enter a new conference with a coach whose name already means something in Indiana girls basketball.