Couch: For new coach Alayne Ingram, LCC basketball is hallowed ground

There is deep affection in Alayne Ingram’s voice when she talks about Lansing Community College basketball. When she looks around the gymnasium on the second floor of the college’s Gannon Building, there is a warmth in her expression. This is hallowed ground.

She grew up here. She’s been a sobbing 6-year-old on this court, too young to take part in her father’s basketball camps — her tears eventually leading him to relent and let her join in with older kids.

She’s played thousands of pickup games here, taken hundreds of thousands of shots, listened in on countless conversations about basketball, about winning, about the game.

“LCC means everything to me,” she said early this week. “And that’s because this is the gym where I learned how to play basketball. … I love this gym.”

She’s done most of it with her father nearby. Now her office will be one door away.

Alayne Ingram is LCC’s new women’s basketball coach, taking over for Ervin Brunson who retired in March after 24 years. Alayne’s father, Mike, just finished his 27th season as the head coach of LCC’s men’s basketball program, after several more as an assistant.

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There is an uncanny resemblance between the two that goes beyond appearance, and there was mutual admiration and excitement as they exchanged stories and glances during a photo shoot for this column on Tuesday morning. They tell the same stories. Like the time Alayne finally beat her father one-on-one in the driveway.

“It took her awhile,” Mike said.

“I was 15,” Alayne chimed in, remembering the details.

Or when her younger brother Justin scored on her in front of 80 or so LCC summer campers and was carried off on the shoulders of other kids. Alayne responded by beating him “50 to 3” in the driveway later that afternoon.

Alayne, like her father — especially in the early years — is fiery and demanding. She loves the game. Respects it. She wants players who do the same, even if they don’t quite share her obsession.

“Remember my dad back in the day — it was not a weird thing to see him bust through that door and call somebody a … I’m at that point in my life right now,” Alayne, 36, said.

“I like to teach and motivate. I’m not really good with nonsense. I’m all involved. I’m going to storm the sideline. I’m talking you through the defense. I’m talking you through the offense. It’s going to be organized. I don’t like unorganized basketball.”

Alayne’s life has prepared her for this. She starred at Lansing’s Waverly High School in the late 1990s and then at the University of Michigan. She was selected in the WNBA draft, but cut quickly, regretting that she didn’t play her game, instead trying to conform to what she thought the team wanted.

She spent a year as the director of basketball operations for Virginia Tech’s program, a couple years helping out her father at LCC, then time as an assistant at a small college in Los Angeles, and a few years in public relations and marketing for the WNBA’s LA Sparks.

But the coaching jobs that made her ready for this came later — three years coaching girls in grades 3 through 11 for the All Iowa Attack AAU program in Ames, Iowa, and then, from 2013 to 2015, the Lansing Sexton High School varsity girls.

“The way I was brought up with my dad, with the tough (love), if you want something you’ve got to work at it. It takes time, it takes repetition, it takes fundamentals,” Alayne said.

“When you start with a third-grader and you see them as a sixth-grader and they’ve become mini versions of you, with the toughness and the spirit and the attitude, or you take a sixth-grader to a ninth-grader, who ends up making varsity … those are the moments.”

At Sexton, she took over a program that had fallen on hard times, with players who often faced real-life hardships.

“I had a player disappear for year,” Alayne said. “She had to get a job to support her family. The challenges in the Lansing School District are just different.”

She saw her kids gain confidence, improve from one win to four in their second year. The high point was an overtime win in a game Alayne was tossed from for picking up a second technical foul.

“They got better,” she said. “I look back at Sexton as a really, really great time. I went to my kids’ (graduation) open houses even though I wasn’t there anymore, because I care for them. They were great kids. Unfortunately, basketball didn’t start for some of them until they met me — fundamental, the real teaching of basketball.”

At LCC, she’ll be able to pick her own players and start them on the right track. She is also an associate dean at LCC, overseeing five departments — including academic advising, career employment services and testing services.

“Since I’ve had advising, I’ve been working on a plan for all the student-athletes,” Alayne said.

She’s scheduled to meet with returning players this week, hire an assistant or two shortly and begin recruiting — almost entirely in the Lansing area. She had already received a text from an interested parent Tuesday. She couldn’t hide the thrill.

“We’re Lansing Community College. And I believe there’s enough girls around here to fill a team, so that their hometown comes to watch them play, so that their parents can watch them play,” Alayne said. “Basketball here is going to turn into basketball people love.”

Mike Ingram is just as psyched. He had begun to think about retirement. He’ll hold off for a bit now.

“She told me she was applying for the job, and I said, ‘If you get the job, I’m going to stick around a couple more years so we can ride on the bus together and do things like that.’” Mike said. “Not necessarily get her started, but I always loved hanging around Alayne."

LCC has been the central part of his adult life. For Alayne, it’s been central to nearly her entire life. She’s hoping it stays that way.

“This is a great college and a great atmosphere and basketball here is good,” she said. “I think for the players in Lansing who love the game, who maybe aren’t ready to go (Division) I or D-II right away, this is the place, and that’s what I’m going to give them.

“I’m going to do this until I’m … I’m going to do this until. That’s what I mean about the dream. I don’t have to go anywhere else. I don’t want to. I want to be where it matters to me.”

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.