Former Collegiate Basketball Head Coach
Kathi Bennett is a former collegiate basketball head coach. In 1996, while at UW Oshkosh, Bennett lead her team to win the National title going 31-0, after losing in the National Championship game the previous year. After UW Oshkosh, Bennett went to the University of Evansville and took over a program that had won 5 games in the last 3 years. In 1999, they won the Missouri Valley Championship and went on to the NCAA Tournament. This was the era of when Jackie Stiles played at Southwest Missouri St. Back then crowds were 5-10,000. Following UE, she got the job at Indiana University, where she won the Big Ten Conference Tournament title and advanced to the NCAA in 2002. In the summer of 2003, she was an assistant coach in the Pan American Games and where they won a Silver Medal, alongside an awesome team and head coach was Debbie Ryan, a legend in women’s game. Bennett got out of coaching in 2005 after suffering an awful car accident, where she broke her neck. Very lucky to be alive, she stepped away from the coaching world to focus of taking care of herself. She got back into coaching as an assistant at Wisconsin in 2007 and where she coached alongside head coach, Lisa Stone. The team got to the NCAA tourney the second year she was there. Bennett got the job at Northern Illinois after that, where she stayed until she retired from coaching in 2015. Kathi Bennett is in the Hall of fame at UW Oshkosh for coaching, the WBCA for coaching, and at University of Evansville for coaching.
