By Baylen Hite
News Now Warsaw
AKRON — A familiar face will return to Tippecanoe Valley in the fall.
Not as a player, not as an assistant or even referee, but this time as a head coach,
On Tuesday morning Tippecanoe Valley School Board confirmed Rebekah Parker as their new girls basketball coach effective immediately.
Parker was instrumental as a player at TVHS, as well as assistant coach before stepping away from coaching to spend time with her family but feels the time is right to return home.
“This has always been an end goal for me, when the job became available I didn’t have to think twice about it,” Parker said after Tuesday’s announcement while speaking in the same gym where she scored 1,418 career points as a player.
A native of Silver Lake, Parker had a storied hall of fame career for the Vikings. As a player she lead the Vikings to a 73-21 record, and helped secure the first 3 sectional championships in program history under head coach Gary Teel.
Capping off her senior season in 2004 with an Indiana All-Star nod. Parker hopes to bring a lot of the same style from her playing days under coach Teel.
She recalled a time when she went to watch coach Teel, who was then coaching at Argos, run the same system, same plays, all the way to a state finals run. Those same things that were successful but did not end with the same results in her time at Valley.
“What I took from that was it’s not what you do, it’s the effort you put into and the buy-in that it takes and that’s what I hope to instill in our players,” she said.
After her prep career Parker played collegiately at Evansville, where she started all 120 games in 4 seasons, and All-Missouri Valley Conference honors three times. After Evansville, she played professionally in Finland and Germany.
As for the vision of what a program under a TVHS athletic Hall of famer might look like, Parker relayed the same things that made her the player she was and coach has become.
“The first thing that always comes to mind is hard work, and I know that kind of cliche and everyone wants to say that but for me as an individual that’s the only thing I know, and I think that is going to show through them on the court,” she said.
Parker takes over a team who graduated five seniors and finished with a 19-4 record before falling in the sectional championship to Bremen.
