The Bulldogs boys basketball squad has a new head coach with the recent hiring of Donnie Husband to replace the retiring Greg Nichols. Greenwood Athletic Director, Dr. Dustin Smith, announced the new hire on Friday, March 9th, after Husband was officially approved by the School Board.
Husband will be the team’s third head coach in the past four years, following Nichols and his predecessor, Brian Martin, who left for Greene County Tech in Paragould after the 2014-15 season.
Nichols, a long-time head coach in Texas and Oklahoma, was promoted from assistant to GHS head coach after Martin’s departure, and helped turn a struggling program around, winning four, seven, and 16 games, respectively, in each of his three seasons.
He took his last two teams to the state tournament, but always planned to retire after three seasons as head coach. He had previously retired from coaching and teaching in Oklahoma.
Coach Husband is also the third head coach Greenwood has hired out of Oklahoma, following Rick Jones (football) and Ronnie Sockey (softball), both of which have been wildly successful since coming to South Sebastian County. Jones has won seven state titles in his 14 seasons at Greenwood and Sockey has earned one state championship since his first season in 2013.
Like the man he is replacing, Husband is no novice in the sport of basketball or the job of head coach. He has posted a 599-363 record in 34 years as a head coach, all in Oklahoma, including coaching stops at Rush Springs, Silo, Duncan, Latta, Merritt, and last year at Keys, Oklahoma.
“We really zeroed in on [Coach Husband] once we found out he was interested,” said Dr. Smith. “We talked to him and we shared a mutual interest of where we wanted the program to go, our vision, and building upon what Coach Nichols has done the last few years. Looking towards the future, Coach Husband is the natural fit for that.”
“His resume speaks for itself,” added Smith. “What’s more important to us is the way he gets his kids to play hard. They compete night in and night out. They compete in practice in order to play. Those were things that resounded with us over and over again.”
As for Husband, there were several things that attracted him to the Greenwood job.
“The biggest thing to start with is location,” he said. “My wife has family in Pocola, Fort Smith, and Keota. She has family here. She knew about the school, the academics, and the reputation.
“Then once I started meeting people, it was just an impressive group, and people that I wanted to be around every day,” said Husband.
GHS basketball fans can expect to see a fun style of play as evidenced by Husband’s back-to-back state championships in 2013 and 2014 at Latta, Oklahoma.
“We’ll try to get up and down the floor and create quality shots,” said the new head coach. “If we don’t have a lot of size, we may end up shooting a lot of perimeter shots. We’ll run some sets. We’ll be organized offensively.
“Defensively, we’ll base everything off a strong half-court man-to-man, and then press or play zone when we need to, but [we’ll be] a multiple defensive team.”
Unfortunately, the new Top Dog must virtually reconstruct a his starting five. Greenwood started five seniors at the end of last season with one experienced junior, Peyton Holt, coming off the bench for significant minutes. Holt returns next season, along with fellow junior Jack Gaston, who also came off the bench a lot for Coach Nichols last season.
“I think the first thing [the fans] will see is a group [of players] that work extremely hard,” said Husband. “My mission statement as a coach has always been that we’re going to play harder than our opponent, and we’re going to practice harder than our opponent.
“Whoever is the best team in our class, [every day] we’ll talk about [if] we practiced hard enough, and did we [improve] enough to compete with them today. I think that’s where you start.”
The new GHS coach also takes over at a time when the Arkansas Athletics Association is reorganizing all non-football sports by eliminating one classification. The blended conferences of the past couple of years are now gone, along with the district tournaments.
The newly configured Class 5A will have 32 teams after the merger of Class 6A with the 16 largest schools in Class 5A. Greenwood joins Russellville, Siloam Springs, Alma, Greenbrier, Vilonia, Little Rock Christian and Maumelle in the new 5A-West conference. The top four teams in the double round-robin schedule will advance to the Class 5A state tournament.