Dawn Plitzuweit Set To Become Next Women’s Basketball Coach At WVU

The West Virginia Mountaineers have formalized an offer to hire South Dakota head coach Dawn Plitzuweit as their next women’s basketball head coach. Plitzuweit brings 15 years of head coaching experience to West Virginia and in her 15 years she has been an extremely successful coach, winning over 73% of her games with a record of 346-128. Per EerSports.com

Plitzuweit replaces Mike Carey, who retired earlier this month after 21 seasons in charge. She spent nine other seasons as a head coach in Division II at Grand Valley State and in Division I at Northern Kentucky. In her 15 seasons as a head coach, Plitzuweit is 346-128 (.730) with one national championship and nine 20-win seasons, including five of her six seasons at Soth Dakota. That included a 30-2 mark and a perfect record in Summit League play in 2019-20, when there was no NCAA Tournament.

Plitzuweit, who is from Wisconsin, earned four all-conference honors, three all-defense team designations and back-to-back Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference player of the year awards at Michigan Tech. She began her coaching career there as an assistant and moved to the bench at Green Bay before she was named the head coach at Grand Valley State. The program reached the Division II tournament in her first year and the quarterfinals in her third and won the national championship in her fourth season in 2006. After five seasons as an assistant at Michigan, Plitzuweit was hired at Northern Kentucky in 2012 and reached the WBI in all four seasons before taking over at South Dakota in 2016.

Since taking over as the head coach at South Dakota, Plitzuweit has become even more dominant as a head coach, guiding the Coyotes to wins in 82% of their games with a record of 83-10 over the past six season. South Dakota also made the Sweet 16 this past season.