Finding a broken team, Vanessa Blair-Lewis dared George Mason to dream big

FAIRFAX, Va. — It was a center court gathering during that practice in 2021 that was routine: a quick message from the coach before the George Mason women’s basketball team took the floor.

What followed after the huddle broke was not customary. Vanessa Blair-Lewis, the new coach, led her players to the gym’s northeast corner and directed their attention to an item covered in black awning — just left of the men’s 2006 Final Four banner —that had mysteriously appeared days earlier.

“We didn’t know what it was,” Jazmyn Doster, then a junior on that 2021-22 team, recalled. “I’m trying to figure out: is it for volleyball or another sport, who is this for?”

She and the team realized, as the tarp was lowered, it was for them. A bold prediction for a team coming off a three-win season:

FUTURE WOMEN’S ATLANTIC 10 CHAMPIONS

“We’re not putting this on social media, we’re not telling everyone about this,” Blair-Lewis told the team that day. “What you do here every day without the bright lights, without the cameras, will show if one day we’re worthy of this.

“And we will be.”

Fast forward to earlier this week as Blair-Lewis settled into a chair just inches away from an impressive piece of hardware that proved her quite the prognosticator: the 2025 A-10 Women’s Basketball Championship trophy. Four years after Blair-Lewis demanded that her team believes in themselves, the Patriots will make the program’s first-ever appearance in the NCAA tournament where 11th-seeded George Mason will face No. 6 seed Florida State on Saturday in Baton Rouge.

This season marked an incredible season during which the Patriots won their first ever conference tournament championship, recorded a school-record 27 wins and reached back-to-back 20-win seasons for the first time in program history.

“I’m ecstatic for the team and I’m so proud of coach,” said Former Patriots player Amaya Scott, who followed Blair-Lewis from Bethune-Cookman to George Mason and played in that first 2021-22 season. “She pours into the team, pours into the community and is a coach that creates an environment where players can succeed.”

The joy of succeeding was all over the face of Blair-Lewis in the closing seconds of the A-10 tournament championship win over Saint Joseph’s, as she draped her arms around guards Kennedy Harris and Paula Suárez and gave them a “mission accomplished” embrace.

“I told everyone my vision at my first press conference. I said, ‘we’re going to hang banners,’” said Blair-Lewis, in her 26th season as a head coach, and her fourth at George Mason. “I believed that it was our job to make the players believe that as well.”

Prior to Blair-Lewis’s arrival, it was easy for the players to not believe. Consecutive seasons of failing to reach double-figures in wins — the second that three-win season when the team was winless in conference play — left a trail of crushed spirits.

“Basketball is all about team dynamics; some teams are businesslike, other teams are so in tune with each other and we just didn’t have any of that.” Doster admitted. “It was just chaos. On the court, off the court — it wasn’t cohesive in any sense of the word.”

That was the cloud that hovered over team members on April 7, 2021, the day Blair-Lewis was announced as the new coach.

Just before the official announcement at Eagle Bank Arena, Blair-Lewis went to the locker room where the players had gathered. She wanted to know, going into the job, what they were feeling.

Most of the players, meeting their new coach for the first time, were apprehensive until one, nudged by a teammate, blurted out her truth.

“We didn’t win a game in conference,” one responded. “I’m embarrassed.”

Feeling that players’ pain, Blair-Lewis concluded the press conference that followed with a promise. 

“You just signed up with a coach who’s crazy enough to believe that you can win,” Blair-Lewis told the gathering. “I cannot wait to start hanging some banners here.”

Why so confident? Blair-Lewis had proven her ability to win.

At every level.

As a teenager, Blair-Lewis didn’t want to play basketball. She wanted nothing to do with the grueling workouts that her father Robert Blair, a youth coach, had put her older sisters through.

But when you’re tall, the coaches will find you. And while Blair-Lewis — then Vanessa Blair — spent most of her early years barely leaving the bench, she was hooked after hitting two clutch free throws in a regular-season finale that sent her Largo High School (Md.) team to the playoffs.

The woman who coached the Largo girls retired at the end of that season, and attempts to find a replacement were futile. “No one wanted to coach girls basketball then,” Blair-Lewis said. 

When her father came home from his job at HUD and announced he had stopped by her school, Blair-Lewis wondered if there was something wrong with her grades.

“He said he was the new coach at Largo, and I’m thinking ‘The boys,’ ” Blair-Lewis said. “I said ‘Great, dad,’ and then he said he’s coaching the girls. And I was thinking ‘Why are you doing this?’ ”

Blair had a reason: he saw potential in his daughter and wanted to make sure she had the proper guidance to maximize her talent.

Blair-Lewis was contemplating an offer from Virginia, but decided to pivot when the school signed three post players including the Burge twins — Heidi and Heather — who each stood 6-foot-5. Mount St. Mary’s coach Bill Sheahan invited Blair-Lewis to the school’s Western Maryland campus, a two-hour drive from her home in Prince George’s County.

Sheahan asked her dad, out of the presence of Blair-Lewis, “would you be comfortable with your daughter in my care.”

Blair said yes, and the men shook hands.

“Going to Mount St. Mary’s was the best decision I ever made,” Blair-Lewis said. “It set me up for the career I have today.”

Her play at The Mount was stellar: a dominant 6-1 post player who was a two-time Northeast Conference Player of the Year (1990-91, 1991-92) averaging a double-double in each of those two seasons. She was named the Northeast Conference Player of the Decade for the 1990s and was later inducted into the NEC Hall of Fame.

After playing two years professionally in Sweden, Blair-Lewis returned home and worked briefly alongside her father as an assistant coach at Largo and later as an assistant under Sheahan at The Mount.

Blair-Lewis intended to leave The Mount after two seasons to return to school and study law, but Sheahan persuaded her to return for one more season. While in her office in September of 1998, months before the start of the season, Sheahan walked in and told her he was retiring, launching one of the most perplexing conversations of her life.

 “Well, if you’re leaving,” she said, “Let’s make this the best year you’ve ever had.”

“I’m going to retire on Friday,” he told her. 

“What?” 

“And I’ve spoken to the athletic director, and your press conference will be Friday.”

“My press conference … for what?

“To succeed me as coach.”

Floored, Blair-Lewis told Sheahan she had to call her dad. “Oh, we already spoke and he’s OK with it,” Sheahan responded. And with that exchange the head coaching career of Blair-Lewis, midway through her 20s, was launched.

Blair-Lewis was an immediate success, leading her team to 21 wins on the way to winning the Northeast Conference Coach of the Year award at the end of the 1998-99 season — the same decade she had won those two NEC Player of the Year Awards. She’s the only person in league history to win both awards.

She later coached 13 seasons at Bethune-Cookman, leading the team to four Mid-Eastern Conference regular-season titles (2016, 2017, 2018 and 2020), three berths in the WNIT (2016, 2017 and 2018) and one MEAC tournament title resulting in the team’s first appearance in the NCAA tournament (2019).

“I went to Bethune because I felt a real genuine spirit from her and she was someone who really cared about your future after basketball,” said Scott, who played three seasons at Bethune-Cookman under Blair-Lewis before following the coach to George Mason. “There were many times I counted on her to help me through some things that are personal and it’s good to know that at a time where you just might need a hug, that she’s there for you.”

It was the success of Blair-Lewis with her teams on the court — and that interpersonal connection with her players off the court— that made her an attractive choice for a George Mason program to reverse the fortunes of a team that experienced two straight seasons where they failed to win 10 games.

“Coach Blair-Lewis will do at Mason what she has always done,” said Dr. Gregory Washington, the George Mason president, at the 2021 press conference announcing her hiring. “A, win and B — more importantly — she will provide opportunities for young women and she will help them develop in ways that will transcend the court.”

Blair-Lewis, who brought her entire staff from Bethune-Cookman to George Mason, accomplished that by taking a splintered team — that, as Doster said, was overwhelmed by “chaos” — and creating a winning, family environment. That family environment stems from her own strong foundation includes her parents, her husband (former NBA referee/current college referee Eric Lewis) and her two sons.

Doster gives an example: her mother was in a car accident, which she shared with just a few players. The 6-2 center, who graduated last year, was struggling to get through practice when Blair-Lewis approached and said she wanted to go over some plays she had on her clipboard, which was in the locker room.

“We’re walking and I’m struggling to keep myself together and she says, ‘I didn’t want to make a scene, but I heard about your mom,’ ” Doster added. “I broke down in tears, and she said, ‘if you want to go home, I’ll take you right now.’

“Sometimes it’s the little things that make a big difference. She and her staff always stepped up for us.”

Her journey to provide for others and transcend a program has come with a heavy heart. Blair-Lewis’s father is currently in hospice care as he battles the devastating effects of dementia.

“I’m where I am today because he orchestrated so many things in my life,” said Blair-Lewis, who in 2019 entered the Largo High School Hall of Fame alongside her father. “He’s not just my dad, he’s my coach.

“Dementia is devastating; he repeats himself, asking the same question three or four times,” she added. “Now it’s not so much hearing from him, it’s just me seeing him. I know what he thinks about me and I know how proud he is of us.”

As George Mason entered the A-10 tournament earlier this month as the league’s No. 2 seed, Blair-Lewis had three speeches prepared in anticipation of the three games needed to win the title.

But each time she walked into the locker room to deliver her presentation, she realized the words she had prepared were unnecessary.

“They were looking at me like, ‘Coach, just get out of the way,’ ” Blair-Lewis said. “Like they were thinking, ‘We got this.’ ”

So she kept her lengthy inspirationals pocketed, opting to be more succinct in her words before each tournament game. 

For Games 1 and 2: Be faithful with these 40 minutes and we get one more day.

And for the tournament championship game against Saint Joseph: Be faithful with this 40, and be champions.

The players held up their end with a 73-58 win, advancing to the school’s first ever NCAA tournament behind a complete team effort led by a game-high 23 points from senior Paula  Suárez.

“It’s just really exciting seeing where the program was and how quick it had changed and over the past few years we’ve been on the top,”  Suárez said after the game. “So it’s just really exciting seeing where we are right now.” 

And Blair-Lewis delivered on her audacious prediction she made upon her hiring when she promised to “hang banners.”

“There was no evidence of that happening at that time,” Blair-Lewis said. “And I remember those players looking at me like, ‘Maybe that’s just what you say when you take over a new job.’ ”

The progression to becoming tournament champions under Blair-Lewis was gradual: double-digit wins (10) her first season; a winning record (16-15) her second season and among the league’s top teams (23-8, 14-4 in A-10 play) her third year.

In each of those years, the banner that hung from the ceiling of their practice gym — FUTURE WOMEN’S ATLANTIC 10 CHAMPIONS — was a constant reminder to dream big.

Those dreams have been answered.

When Blair-Lewis first told the facilities manager in 2021 that she needed the banner, he told her that it would cost a lot of money.

“Why don’t you wait until you do it?” he said. 

When the team returned from the Henrico Sports and Events Center with the title, the championship trophy was brought to the practice gym for a photo opp in front of the banner that’s reached the end of its life expectancy.

A new banner, we’re told — a new championship banner — is on order.