Prairie View A&M athletic director Ashley Robinson announced that Ravon Justice was hired to be the next head coach of the Lady Panthers women’s basketball coach. She is the seventh head coach of the Lady Panthers since the start of the NCAA’s women’s basketball era in 1981.
Justice arrives at “The Hill” after seven seasons with the University of Houston women’s basketball team. She served as recruiting coordinator for the Cougars for the previous five years.
“I am very excited about the hiring of Coach Justice,” Robinson said. “She has a high basketball IQ and is someone who is going to bring a positive culture to the program.”
One area in which Justice is expected to make an immediate impact is in the area of in-state recruiting. A native of Atlanta, Texas in the northeast corner of the state, Justice spent more than a decade as a top assistant collegiate coach in Houston, and played her sophomore basketball season in Clarendon College, located in the southern part of the Texas Panhandle.
“She is a great recruiter. There are few people in the coaching profession who have as much recruiting experience throughout the entire state of Texas as she does.” [easyazon_infoblock align=”right” cart=”y” identifier=”B00UJ3K7D8″ locale=”US” tag=”hbcusports-20″]
In Justice’s first year at Houston in 2010-11, the Cougars enjoyed one of their finest seasons in program history, posting a 26-6 overall record and returning to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since the 2004-05 season.
With Justice’s guidance, Houston point guard Porsche Landry earned Conference USA First Team honors and became only the fourth player in Cougars’ women’s basketball history to tally more than 1,000 points and 300 assists during her career.
Justice also made an immediate impact on the recruiting trail after taking over those duties following the 2010-11 season, as various recruiting services ranked the early six-player class that signed in November of 2011 among the nation’s top-40 recruiting hauls, including Dan Olson’s Collegiate Girls Basketball Report (No. 22) and ESPN HoopGurlz (No. 39).
Justice joined the University of Houston staff after five seasons as an assistant at Houston Baptist. Before helping the Huskies team transition from the NAIA to the NCAA’s Division I classification, Justice was a part of the 2005-06 team that completed an undefeated run to the Red River Athletic Conference’s regular season and tournament championships; HBU repeated as tournament champions the following season.
The Huskies would also make two trips to the NAIA Division I tournament during Justice’s tenure with the team, including a trip to the quarterfinals in 2007.
During her own collegiate playing career, Justice attended Nicholls State for one year before transferring to Clarendon College. As a Lady Bulldog, she was named a junior college All-American in addition to receiving Western Junior College Athletic Conference Player of the Year honors.
Following her time at Clarendon, Justice played one season at Washington State before finishing her college career at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma in Chickasha.
As a senior at USAO, Justice averaged 19.3 points per game and captured All-Sooner Athletic Conference honors. She tallied the third-most points (521) in a single season in school history during the 2003-04 campaign, while setting school records in free throws (133) and free-throw attempts (214).
Justice earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology from USAO in 2004 and received her master’s degree in liberal arts from HBU in 2009.
Courtesy: PV Athletics
