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Head Women’s Basketball Coach | IUPUI
Kate Bruce’s first season with the Jaguars in 2022 was supposed to be a rebuilding year. Instead, she took the team that had lost the players who collectively scored 70% of the points the season before and led it to a third-place finish in the Horizon League. In hindsight, the signs were there: Bruce had left Walsh University in suburban Akron, Ohio, as the program’s all-time-winningest head coach and took the team to four consecutive NCAA tournaments. Plus, she had a sterling reputation for leading with integrity, empathy and belief. As a testament to her leadership, her assistant coach at Walsh, Josh Montello, passed up the head coaching job and followed her to Indianapolis instead. “Kate Bruce has won at every level, and winning does not just happen,” he said in her nomination. “You win by treating people right and getting them to follow you. In our business, it’s rare to find an assistant that has been with their head coach for eight years, but it is even more rare to find a leader like Kate Bruce.” Her highest goal is to create a championship culture on and off the court. Last fall, the basketball team’s average GPA was higher than the campus average.
Getting here: Bruce played Division I basketball at Florida Gulf Coast University, graduating as the program’s all-time leader in points, field goals, free throws and free throw percentage. She coached at FGCU, Youngstown State University and Ohio University before Walsh University and IUPUI.
First job: Starbucks barista
Givebacks: Volunteer, Downtown Indy and Susan G. Komen’s More Than Pink walk; reading to schoolchildren at Smokey Row Elementary
Influential moment: “I planned to stay an assistant coach forever. Too much pressure and responsibility as a head coach! My boss at the time, Bob Boldon, had a conversation with me and told me it was time to go be a head coach. He told me I was meant to be one and to lead my own team. I don’t know if I would have ever attempted to have my own program without that conversation taking place.”
Advice: “Treat every obstacle as an opportunity.”•
Check out more Forty Under 40 honorees.
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