DAVIDSON, NC — When Curt Cignetti was hired at Indiana as the school’s head football coach two years ago from James Madison, he famously said at his introductory press conference, “It’s pretty simple. I win. Google me.”
If she wanted to, George Mason women’s basketball coach Vanessa Blair-Lewis could make the same declaration.
Last Wednesday, her Patriots defeated Davidson 62-51, notching their second win ever at the Wildcats’ Belk Arena. The Patriots then picked up a 66-51 home win on Saturday over Saint Louis, and these victories extended their win streak to nine games and improved their record in the Atlantic 10 to 10-0 — the best start in program history.
With 27 years of experience, Blair-Lewis is the longest tenured Black female head coach in Division I women’s college basketball. She guided her alma mater Mount St. Mary’s to a pair of regular season championships, won the MEAC five times at Bethune-Cookman and got George Mason into the NCAA Tournament for the first time last season. She’s won more than 400 games and captured championships at places where doing so is incredibly rare.
Blair-Lewis has accomplished all of this not by cooking up a unique defensive scheme or imaginative actions on offense, but by always putting her people first.
“For us, it’s always been the player inside the jersey. We really care about our young women,” Blair-Lewis told USA Today Sports. “I care about them in the leaders that they are growing in to be. And make no mistake about it, I coach leaders. I want these women to know that they can — they have the ability to lead.
“I want basketball to be a place, a sacred place, where you can come to know that, no matter what happened during the day — no matter how hard classes were, or the outside world or social media, or whatever pressures you feel — that you can come here and this can be a place where you can just feel cared about. You can feel loved.”
Blair-Lewis’ career planning had never involved coaching. After playing for her father Robert Blair at Largo High School in Prince George’s County, Maryland, she went to the state’s northern border and starred at Mount St. Mary’s where she was twice named Northeast Conference Player of the Year. She played professionally for two years in Sweden, then came home to try out for the Washington Mystics in the infancy of the WNBA. After getting cut, her plan was to go to law school. Instead, her father and her college coach, Bill Sheahan, talked her into giving coaching a try.
As her third season as an assistant coach at Mount St. Mary’s was beginning, a 24-year-old Blair-Lewis was still thinking about law school. And then, two months before the season was going to start, Sheahan walked into her office to deliver some news: He was retiring, effective immediately, and the press conference to introduce her as the next head coach was scheduled.
Stunned, Blair-Lewis closed the door and called her dad.
“Dad,” she said, “I don’t want to do this.”
“You don’t know you don’t want to do this yet,” he told her, “but you’re going to be great.”
“Yeah, but Dad, I wanted to go to law school.”
“Yeah, we make our plans, and God laughs, this is what you’re going to do.”
Coaching came naturally. Mount St. Mary’s enjoyed three consecutive winning seasons in her first few years at the helm. After nine years leading her alma mater, she resigned in 2007 to spend time with her family, but ultimately couldn’t resist the pull of the basketball court.
A year later, she was hired at Bethune-Cookman, an HBCU in Daytona Beach, Florida, and built the program into one that won five consecutive conference championships from 2016 through 2020. She was named the conference’s Coach of the Year four times.
The staff that helped Blair-Lewis transform Bethune-Cookman into a powerhouse in the MEAC came with her when she was hired in 2021 to revive a George Mason program that went 0-14 in Atlantic 10 play in the year before she arrived.
One of the first things Blair-Lewis did when she arrived was have a banner made for the Patriots’ practice facility. There was a big one in there to honor the historic run to the 2006 Final Four by George Mason’s men’s team, but none existed for the women because they had no conference titles or March Madness appearances. Blair-Lewis quickly hung a banner that said “FUTURE ATLANTIC-10 CHAMPIONS.”
“When we took the job, our motto was ‘believe big.’ And the girls were like, ‘Believe in what? There’s nothing here,’” Blair-Lewis recalls. “Isn’t that what faith is all about, believing in something that you can’t see? And so that’s when I hung the banner in the practice facility. I wanted them to see this every single day of who they were aspiring to be, not what they were.”
Last season, the Patriots got to replace that inspirational symbol with something real. Across three days in Henrico, Virginia, George Mason won three games — all by double figures — to capture its first conference championship and punch its ticket to the NCAA Tournament.
To find similar success this season, Blair-Lewis knew she needed to challenge her team early. She put together a non-conference schedule that featured matchups against Maryland and Ole Miss and consistently strong mid-major programs that have played in the NCAA Tournament in recent years, including Liberty, James Madison, Murray State, Florida Gulf Coast and Princeton. The Patriots finished that non-conference slate with at 5-6 — with three losses by two possessions or less — but Blair-Lewis learned a lot about her team and made adjustments for the A-10, which could get multiple NCAA Tournament bids for the second straight season.
“It was definitely intentional,” Blair-Lewis said of the makeup of the Patriots’ non-conference schedule. “Last year, I don’t think it was until we got to the conference that we really started learning about our team. And it’s a tough way to learn some lessons, once you’re in the heat of battle. So, I knew that this year we wanted to go into the conference knowing as much as we could about our team, even if it meant that we wouldn’t go in with as many victories. You saw the resilience. The team didn’t let it break them. They got back up the next day and we just kept fighting.”
Blair-Lewis tweaked the team motto just a bit, adding a No. 2 in parentheses like a mathematical equation: Believe Big Squared.
“It’s exponential growth in the right direction of doing better than what we’ve done before, and squaring ourselves to do it,” Blair-Lewis explains.
One of the players who has taken a leap forward for George Mason is Zahirah Walton, who has raised her scoring average by four points and improved her field goal percentage. She’s one of 18 players nationally averaging at least 19 points, five rebounds, one assist and one steal per game.
Collectively, George Mason’s strength has been its defense. The Patriots rank fourth in the nation in defending the 3-pointer, allowing their opponents to shoot 24.4% from behind the arc. Passing through the Patriots’ defense has proven to be difficult too, as opponents have an average 0.56 assist-turnover ratio against them, which ranks 31st nationally.
Nearly 30 years after she first became a head coach, Blair-Lewis often thinks about Sheahan’s surprise retirement and the phone call she had with her dad.
“He wasn’t wrong,” she says. “I don’t believe I was great alone and I’m not. I was great because I have really great people in my life.”