By BOB SHRALUKA
WZBD.com
Decatur native Gary Andrews is returning to girls basketball, announcing Monday night that he has accepted the job as head coach of the girls team at Huntington North High School.
“I didn’t think I would go back to coaching girls but Huntington made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” he said in a Facebook post. “It’s a great community that loves basketball and they have a great administration. I am looking forward to getting started.”
Andrews, who was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 2022, has spent the past seven seasons as head boys basketball coach at Fort Wayne North Side.
Andrews came to North Side after 17 years of coaching women’s college teams, including a 14-season stint at St. Francis in Fort Wayne which produced a NAIA national championship in 2014.
In May of 2015, Andrews was named head coach at another Division II school, Roberts Wesleyan. In three seasons, his teams went 70-30, winning at least 20 games in every season.
Taking the head post at Bishop Luers High School in 1992, the Bellmont High graduate racked up a record of 167-44 over nine seasons, including three consecutive state championships, a run (only three losses in 84 games) that concluded with a 28-0 mark in 2000-2001.
Huntington North, in making the announcement, noted that Andrews has 630 career wins in 33 years of coaching at the high school and collegiate level.
“I am not sure it was the right time to leave North Side, but it was just a great time to come to Huntington,” Andrews told Outsidethehuddle.net. “I have been wanting to get to a community where I could control the feeder system
“I really didn’t think I would ever go back to coaching girls, but Huntington is a big basketball community and their administration did a great job selling their school and community. It was attractive because of the feeder system, the community and I will love the teaching job I will have.”
He will teach physical education, as he did at North Side.
The new Huntington coach graduated from Saint Francis in 1997 with a bachelor’s degree in Secondary Education, then gained a master’s degree in School Administration in 2001 from IPFW.
A 1986 Bellmont grad, he played basketball for the Braves – a member of two conference championship teams and a Regional runnerup to eventual state champ Marion in 1985 – and started his coaching career here, with seventh grade girls. After two years as BHS JV coach, he got the head job at Bishop Luers in 1992.
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