By DOUG DONNELLY

Blissfield Advance

OTTAWA LAKE – Mirandia Green has packed a lot of experience in her five years out of college.

Green has coached travel basketball, been an assistant varsity athletic director, middle school athletic director and varsity girls basketball coach. She’s also earned her Master of Business Administration degree.

Green’s next step on her career ladder officially started this week as the next Whiteford High School athletic director.

“I’ve heard so many great things about how the community and how it is so tight-knit,” Green said. “I want to get to know people. Plus, playing against Whiteford the last couple of years I noticed there is a lot of competitive kids. I’m excited to work with everyone.”

Green was hired by the Whiteford Board of Education Monday. She replaces Marcus Luzier who stepped down from the job in July. In accepting the job, she resigned as the Clinton varsity girls basketball coach.

“This is what I want to do,” Green said. “I’m excited to be here.”

Green is from Toledo. She graduated from Whitmer in 2017 and played college basketball at Lourdes University in Sylvania. While there she played with two former Whiteford athletes, Baylee Baldwin and Erin Manley. She got her undergraduate degree from Lourdes.

Soon after she started coaching travel basketball with the Michigan Cobras, a rapidly growing AAU basketball program in the Lenawee County area, run by former Siena Heights University men’s basketball player Jon Hovermale. It was while coaching some girls from Tecumseh who played for the Cobra’s that Green met Jon and Kristy Zajac. Jon is the athletic director at Tecumseh and Kristy is the girls varsity basketball coach.

 “I loved working with the Tecumseh girls,” Green said. “Jon and Kristy invited me to coach JV at Tecumseh and I said, ‘sure, this is what I had been wanting to do.”

She also became Tecumseh’s assistant athletic director, getting into game management and scheduling.

“I decided I wanted to make this my career,” Green said.

She got her MBA from Tiffin University. Last year she was hired as the middle school athletic director and youth coordinator at Clinton. She also was named varsity basketball coach, which had been a goal of hers.

“If you ask some of my old coaches, I was always trying to be a coach on the floor,” she said. “I’ve had some really great experience and some coaches that I connected with and some that I didn’t so much connect with. I really wanted to be the coach who could connect with my kids, get them some good experiences and have fun and still learn in the process.”

Being a head coach, she said, gave her good perspective in her new role as athletic director.

“It’s good for me to be a coach and AD because I get to see things from both the coach’s side and the AD side,” she said. “As a coach, I know there is a lot that goes into the administrative side – the game prep, talking to parents. As a AD, I know what its like to be a head coach.”

Green still lives in Sylvania, which puts her within a few minutes of Whiteford.

“I’m excited for the (short) commute,” she said. “Plus, I feel it makes me more accessible. I can be more present.”