Photo courtesy of Texas State Athletics
BELTON — After turning to the Division I ranks for its men’s basketball head coach last spring, Mary Hardin-Baylor has tabbed another former Division I coach to lead the women’s basketball program into the future.
The school announced Friday afternoon that Zenarae Antoine has been named head women’s basketball coach after a 15-year run as the head coach at Division I Texas State. Antoine went 225-232 in San Marcos, becoming the program’s all-time winningest coach, and led the Bobcats to the 2023 Sun Belt Conference regular season title.
A Colorado State alum, Antoine’s entire coaching career to this point has been spent in Division I, starting with her stint as a graduate assistant at Ohio University. She then made stops as an assistant at Charleston, Ohio, Louisville, and Arkansas before moving to the Lone Star State as Texas State’s head coach in 2011.
She led the Bobcats to four postseason appearances in her first five years—three WBI trips and a WNIT bid in 2018—finishing in the Top 4 in the Sun Belt four times in that span. After four seasons with Texas State in the middle of the pack in the league, Antoine put together her best season in San Marcos, going 23-10 with a 13-5 league record in 2022-23.
Texas State, however, dipped below .500 for three consecutive seasons in the aftermath, and Antoine stepped down from her position on March 9 of this year. The school recently hired Chris Kielsmeier, who led Howard Payne to the 2008 D-III national title, and later found success in Division I at Cleveland State.
During her time at Texas State, per UMHB’s release, Antoine “has coached 16 all-conference student-athletes, including the Sun Belt Player of the Year, with 17 1,000-point scorers and multiple student-athletes that have gone on to play professionally during her head coaching tenure.”
She takes over a UMHB program that has been in the title mix within the American Southwest Conference in recent years. The Cru has reached the NCAA Tournament four times since 2019, the most recent appearance coming in 2024 under Katie Novak-Lenoir. Prior to this past season, when UMHB went 8-18 overall, The Cru had recorded eight consecutive seasons of at least 17 wins.
With Friday’s announcement, Antoine becomes the sixth coach in program history dating back to UMHB’s move to NCAA D-III in 1999.
