Coaching Tamecka Dixon was fun, as former Kansas assistant Pam DeCosta puts it, because she and her fellow coaches could be certain that every day, “‘Meek’ was going to show up and give everything that she had.”
“That was very comforting as a coach,” DeCosta added, “because there was no question mark. You knew what you were getting.”
And when it came time for tipoff, what the Jayhawks reliably got was one of the greatest players in KU women’s basketball history, a dominant guard who as a senior averaged 20.8 and 5.6 rebounds per game and earned Big 12 player of the year and second-team All-American honors in 1997, and whose jersey now hangs in the rafters at Allen Fieldhouse.
Then, as a 13-year-long encore performance, she joined the WNBA beginning with its inaugural season, a league in which she was a three-time All-Star and two-time champion. Dixon was a player for whom “that drive and that dog in her” were so intense that they spread throughout the rest of her team, DeCosta said.
But did she ever seem like someone who might become a coach herself?
“No, not at all,” DeCosta said. “Not at all.”
And yet, while it took more than a decade following the conclusion of her professional career, Dixon can now be found roaming the sidelines in her hometown of Linden, New Jersey, where she’s about to enter her second season as the head coach of the Linden High School girls basketball team — in another gym where her number is retired.
“It’s amazing being back,” Dixon told the Journal-World. “The community has always supported me at every level. So to be back and to be able to give back to this new age of girls, it’s been an incredible opportunity, an incredible blessing, and I’m extremely humbled that they chose me to help lead the next group of players.”
It’s not as if Dixon was detached from the world of basketball in the intervening 15 years. Shortly after she retired, she formed a performance training business with her own personal trainer, who had worked with her throughout her WNBA career. They partnered with 24 Hour Fitness facilities in New Jersey and remained in that field for about eight years; Dixon also worked camps and clinics and assisted her father, Russell “Boo” Bowers, in the grassroots basketball scene.
In the meantime, she spent time as a financial advisor and an insurance agent and later managed an Avis location.
“I think when her playing career winds down, like a lot of players, you’re not sure what that next chapter looks like, so you go out and you try different things, you try to find that second journey, what that looks like,” DeCosta said. “Trial and error.”
The groundwork for Dixon’s foray into high school coaching was laid when she took over basketball operations at Peak Sports Academy, a sports complex in Mountainside, New Jersey. She had the chance to attend a lot of high school games and found them not quite up to her standards; when Dixon had played for Linden, the Lady Tigers won multiple state championships.
“I just didn’t like what I saw,” Dixon said. “When I was playing there, we were obviously a powerhouse program and I just felt like it just needed a culture shift. What better person could it be than me to try to bring that culture back?”
Linden High School coach Tamecka Dixon is pictured on Thursday, Aug. 14, 2024, in Linden, N.J.
Dixon had always been fairly close with her alma mater’s athletic department and basketball team. She said they would check in with her from time to time. But Dixon never quite had the bandwidth required to fully commit herself to what she knew would be a rebuilding project that would require her full attention, nor did she feel she was at the right place in her life — at least, until 2024, when the girls basketball job came was open.
“We just started talking about basketball in general, the kids in Linden, the team, some of the players, and what she was doing with herself and things like that,” Linden athletic director Mike Firestone said. “But when there did come the opportunity for us to move in a different direction, she was the first person that came to mind for me. And then we started on those conversations, felt her out a little bit more as to where she was in her life, what type of commitment she could possibly bring to Linden.”
It became clear, Firestone said, that Dixon was “a perfect match.” Her presence in a gym where she once lit up scoreboards, on her way to great things at Kansas and in the WNBA, could attest to what Linden’s students might be able to accomplish with hard work on and off the court.
“If you know Tamecka you know what a great role model and a good person she is,” he said. “Basketball aside, she’s a great person and she’s somebody that could teach really good values for our students.”
On the court, Dixon largely derived those values from past coaches she played for. She said that in her return to coaching she has sought advice from her KU head coach Marian Washington, former assistants like DeCosta and Misty Opat, and her peers who have entered the field.
Off the court, Firestone said Dixon set out to make every student “feel as though they are a valuable asset to the program.”
“I feel as though (if) you want to be a really good coach, you have to develop relationships with your student-athletes,” Firestone said. “Kids are a lot smarter than we think sometimes. They know a coach who’s all in … She’s all in. When the season’s over, she’s still having conversations with the students regarding what their goals are, staying on top of them with academics, attendance, things like community service. She wants to build a well-rounded student-athlete.”
That’s largely taken place over the course of this past offseason, because Dixon had to deal with an abridged preseason cycle when she first took the job. Linden announced her appointment in May 2024, three months after the Lady Tigers had finished their season with a 9-15 record and a 36-point first-round loss in the first round of the state tournament, and just one week before the start of summer-league basketball.
“She missed anything that happened after the winter season concluded,” Firestone said.
When she got started, Dixon said she underwent a “huge learning curve” as she adjusted to teaching the game at a very basic level. Firestone bore witness to this adjustment process firsthand. Linden was in “the bottom division” last season, he said, and when the Lady Tigers ran into higher-level programs, “you can tell, as a coach, we’re teaching a different game than those teams.”
“A lot of times, you hear good players don’t always make good coaches,” Dixon said. “And the reason it is is because some people can’t really — they know what to do but they can’t teach it. And so that was the biggest adjustment for me. Not that I can’t teach it, but understanding that maybe my girls need me to break it down to the most fundamental level and start teaching it from that.”
Linden High School coach Tamecka Dixon instructs her team at a game against Rahway on Saturday, Jan. 4, 2025, in Rahway, N.J.
The Lady Tigers started their season in December with a 46-point loss to the same team that had ended their last campaign, and they opened the year 2-9, according to NJ.com’s high school sports database. But they strung together a series of wins in late January, won the Union County Valley Division with a 9-2 league record and defeated Union High School in the first round of the state playoffs, before falling to Plainfield in the quarterfinals.
“I’m happy for the program, happy for the kids,” Firestone said. “Now we move up in the division. We’re going to be going up against some better programs, programs that have been more established, and I think it’s a good test for us just moving forward in that direction where we want to get someday.”
As Firestone put it, Dixon didn’t have as much time to build relationships as some coaches, owing to her late arrival in 2024. Dixon, for her part, said that maybe some of her predecessors at Linden might have looked at the coaching job as a part-time gig, but she wanted to “to give and really mentor and develop these girls year-round.” She’s already seen considerable improvement over the course of the offseason, as she was able to put her players through a full summer program.
“I definitely took pieces of every coach that I’ve played for in developing what type of culture I wanted to build here at Linden,” she said. “I think that it’s starting to rub off. We’re a defensive-minded unit. We get up into people, we play tough defense. I like us to be uptempo, we play an uptempo style. It’s kind of everything that I loved to do when I was playing.”
With months to go before her sophomore season, as it were, begins, Firestone said he’s excited to see what comes next.
“I know that she’s not satisfied and she wants to get better and better, just like when she was an athlete,” Firestone said. “And I know that’s going to happen with us as well.”
DeCosta, who coached at KU under Washington from 1993 to 1996 and from 1998 to 2003, followed Dixon’s professional career from afar in the years afterward. DeCosta later served as a head coach at Lynn University and at San Jose State and has been out of the coaching business since leaving Oklahoma in 2019, and she and Dixon have reconnected in the years since.
“Lately we’ve been talking much more,” she said. “It’s good to see that she’s in a coaching position, in a coaching role, a mentor role to young kids, and especially in New Jersey and where she grew up. I think it’s awesome.”
She said that when she sees her former players go into coaching, she tells them, “You’re a saint.”
“I think at the high school level, it’s still a little bit pure so you can really have an effect on a kid’s life,” DeCosta said. “I still believe that at that level, at the high school level, that you can really effect change in a young person’s life and kind of help guide them through.”
That includes Dixon, off to a strong start in a career path DeCosta never thought she would pursue.
“I just think coaching’s meant for her,” DeCosta said. “When she does ask me for advice, I give her my two cents, but she’s on the right path. I really can’t say much of what I would give her. She’s doing the right things. She’s showing up for the kids.”
Courtesy of Tamecka Dixon
Courtesy of Tamecka Dixon