South Plains promotes assistant to succeed Hall of Fame coach

South Plains College announced Tuesday that Hayden Sowers has been promoted to men's head basketball coach, succeeding Steve Green, who led the Texans to three NJCAA championships over the past 22 seasons.

Sowers, 30, joined the South Plains staff before last season after four years as an assistant at Pearl River Community College in Poplarville, Mississippi. He was a graduate assistant at Mississippi from 2013-16.

The Texans went 21-12 this past season, won the NJCAA Region V tournament title and reached the round of 16 in the NJCAA Tournament. Green, a member of the NJCAA Men's Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame, resigned 2 1/2 weeks ago to become a Texas Tech assistant coach under Mark Adams.

"Every young coach has a dream to one day be a head coach, and I've been preparing for this moment since I was a graduate assistant at Ole Miss," Sowers said in South Plains' announcement. "It's a great honor to get an opportunity to be the head coach at one of the top junior colleges in the country.

"South Plains College is an elite place with elite people, and we're going to try to be an extension of that with the men's basketball program."

Pearl River went 90-11 during Sowers' four seasons on that staff. The Wildcats were 28-0 and seeded No. 1 for the NJCAA Tournament in 2020 that was canceled shortly after the COVID-19 outbreak.

Pearl River won the Mississippi Association of Community Colleges Conference in 2018, 2019 and 2021 and won the NJCAA Region 23 title in 2019 and 2020.

Green went 706-195 as a junior-college coach, including 552-152 at South Plains. His teams won the Western Junior College Athletic Conference 10 times, the Region V championship 10 times and made 12 appearances at the national tournament, winning it in 2008, 2012 and 2018.

"Coach Steve Green is the greatest men's junior college basketball coach of all time, and when you look at the program that he built and all the former players he coached, you have to use that to your advantage," Sowers said. "It makes it easier for current guys to see the success that players in the past have had and utilize the South Plains College platform to advance their careers.

"The success this program has had in the past allows for current and future players to realize what is possible when you buy into something bigger than yourself."

Sowers said his team is "going to play fast, aggressive, smart, and unselfish."

"One thing I'm really proud of," he said, "is when the news broke that coach Green was going to Texas Tech, we had no defections from any of our current guys or any of the guys we have signed, and that meant a lot to me and our staff."

Sowers' time as an Ole Miss graduate assistant under Andy Kennedy lasted from 2013-16. He then was an assistant at Massanutten Military Academy in Woodstock, Virginia, on teams that went 56-11 over two seasons.

He earned degrees in 2016 from Ole Miss and in 2020 from William Carey, a university in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: College basketball: South Plains promotes assistant Hayden Sowers to succeed Hall of Fame coach