Sean C. Morgan
Sweet Home’s new high school girls basketball coach will focus on fundamentals and building a youth program to help bolster the high school level.
Michelle Knight, who has been involved in the program at different levels for years, is the new coach, succeeding Dave McNeil.
Knight, 47, lived in Sweet Home from the third grade through junior high school, when she moved to Lebanon. She graduated from Lebanon High School in 1989. She attended Linn-Benton Community College.
“We moved back to Sweet Home when Josie (her daughter) was a baby,” she said. That was about 20 years ago.
She worked part-time at a variety of jobs, including The New Era and State Farm, while raising her three children, Spencer, 23; Josie, 21; and Caden, 18, with her husband, Don Knight, who is youth pastor at Community Chapel and announcer at high school events, and a regular coach at the junior high.
She went to work at SHHS in 2014 and today works in the career center with Kristin Adams, working with high-risk students and decreasing chronic absenteeism.
Since she came to Sweet Home, she has been involved in coaching at the Boys and Girls Club level. She joined the high school program in 2008 when John Barnes was the head coach. She also is the junior varsity coach in volleyball and softball.
After getting involved in high school basketball, she began coached a traveling team at the junior high level. She has gone back and forth between the junior high and high school programs since then.
“I’ve had my hand in girls basketball for a long time,” Knight said.
“My goal is to build a program from little kids up. To do that, it’s going to take a village.”
Parents will need to be included and start coaching local and traveling teams, she said.
At the high school level, “we’re working really hard, working on the fundamentals.”