Archdeacon: Victoria Jones keeps beating the odds

Seated side by side up near the front of the church were former Dunbar girls’ basketball stars Kahshan Williams and Janelle Howard and their equally accomplished Patterson Co-Op counterpart Victoria Jones, who’s now the Executive Director of Athletics for Dayton Public Schools.

It brought back memories of their two schools’ heated rivalries in the 1990s.

“Dunbar had an eight-year reign of consecutive championships, and we actually stopped it,” Jones said. “We talked about that before the funeral and how we had this love/hate relationship.

“During the games, we couldn’t stand each other, but afterwards there was a sisterhood.”

The game no one forgets was the 1997 City League championship.

Jones, the Beavers’ standout point guard, was supposed to be sidelined with torn ligaments in her ankle, but she had iced her foot day and night for a week; and had proved to her athletic trainer she could run a figure eight, albeit with a limp.

Dunbar was taken aback when she hobbled onto the court and began to score as Earley and Wolverines’ head coach Tom Montgomery urged their players to double team her. By game’s end, she had 32 points and Patterson took home the trophy.

That day, just as she has so many times in her life – and especially now that she’s led the DPS athletics program from the criticism and censure it had five years ago when she took over to recent statewide praise and even having some of her initiatives become models that other schools nationwide have copied – Victoria Jones beat the odds.

It’s become a theme of her life:

Her older brother Robert accidently shot and killed his best friend while playing with a gun and then triggered more tragedy when he shot through a door during an argument with his girlfriend in Springfield and killed her father.

Sentenced to 36 years in prison in 2005, he’s still incarcerated.

Against all that, she found a different path – “basketball was an oasis from my life at home,” she has said – and became a two-time first team All-City player at Patterson.

At just 5-foot-2 and dubbed “Little Vicky,” she went on to play college basketball at St. Catherine College in Kentucky and then the University of Dayton.

Many people thought she would never adjust, but instead she won All-America honors, was No. 2 in the nation in field goal percentage, No. 4 in three-point accuracy, was in the * Society; was the student government vice president, was a dorm supervisor and was in campus ministry.

She was chosen the Homecoming Queen and was named St. Catherine’s Student of the Year.

When she went to Patterson, she said she used to sneak into UD Arena and sit in the darkened upper reaches of the 400 section and look down at the lighted floor.

“I dreamed of just getting on that court once,” she told me in the past. “Our Patterson teams were good, but we never got far enough in the tournament to have a game at the Arena.”

Flyers’ coach Jaci Clark used her as a three-point specialist coming off the bench and she still shares the UD record for three-point accuracy in a game, going 6-for-6 from beyond the arc against UTEP.

After UD she got into coaching, leading the Cincinnati State program before serving as a Murray State assistant five years and then spending a season as the head coach at Division III Eureka College in Illinois.

That’s when new Sinclair athletics director Jeff Price convinced her to return home and join the Tartan Pride basketball program.

She managed to mend the shattered team enough that it finished 4-3 in those last seven games.

A season later her team went 23-8 and the following year it was 27-4 and finished the year No. 9 in the nation, while she was named the Ohio Community College Athletic Association Coach of the Year.

The two previous athletic directors at DPS each lasted just two seasons. Mark Baker had been reassigned after he was embroiled in two major controversies involving an alleged directive to fix a game and the failure to suspend players involved in an on-court brawl.

His replacement, Shawna Wells, came in for two years of repair work and Jones was hired in July of 2020 to stabilize the still-fractured department and try to wipe away the stain the rest of the state saw on DPS athletics.

To make matters more difficult, she was hired as the COVID pandemic laid siege to the nation and shut down all DPS schools.

Although she faced plenty of inherent sexism, magnified in some who still looked at her as Little Vicky, she showed the same grit she had when she limped onto the court against Dunbar and lit the Wolverines up for 32.

Soon she was helping orchestrate the $11 million renovation of Welcome Stadium and the $650,000 upgrades to weight rooms at the district’s six high schools and five middle schools.

She’s since helped launch new interscholastic sports – boys and girls bowling; boys volleyball; and girls flag football which has drawn crowds and can lead to college scholarships.

She’s mended bridges with the Ohio High School Athletic Association, which had sanctioned City League programs in the past while, in turn, it was sued by the DPS.

Today she appears on OHSAA-sponsored videos and panels and has had some of her efforts praised publicly by the state’s sanctioning body. The state track championships were awarded to Welcome Stadium and last fall a state semi-final football game was played here.

Most impressively she’s launched programs to inspire and guide DPS student-athletes: That includes “Who’s in the Jersey?” a festive program that features women, many in sports. who have achieved success.

Role model figures like UD women’s basketball coach Tamika Williams-Jeter; former Ohio State and pro legend Brandie Hoskins; State Rep. Desiree Tims; local entrepreneur Tae Winston and many more have been brought in.

For the boys, she and her staff developed “Success Looks Like Me,” which has featured former NBA player Norris Cole; Ohio State star and NFL vet Keith Byars; former NFL and Canadian Football League player LaVar Glover; State Senator Willis Blackshear, and others.

There have been cheerleading competitions; All Star basketball games; and there’s an ongoing heavy social media presence that promotes DPS accomplishments and includes the popular Candid Camera-type clips called “Caught Being Great.”

At a recent national convention, school districts around the nation gleaned all they could from Jones about her “Who’s in the Jersey?” program and athletic departments in three states have now copied it.

All this led to Jones and the DPS receiving the prestigious 2024 Bruce Brown Award which recognizes schools and their athletic departments that demonstrate intentional and continuous efforts to shift the culture of school-based sport programs while demonstrating best practices and nationally accepted standards.

It is awarded annually by the Ohio Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association.

And that brings us back to Anna Earley, who Jones said she visited not long before her death:

“Her last words to me were ‘I’m proud of you. I see what you’re doing.’”

‘I wanted better’

As she sat in her new office off James H. McGee Boulevard the other afternoon – a series of colorful posters trumpeting “Who’s in the Jersey?” and “Success Looks Like Me” and some of her other initiatives all propped against the wall waiting to be hung up – Jones was asked something that made her pause:

Why did her path in life and the one her brother Robert, who’s four years older, took go in opposite directions?

“That’s a good question,” she said with quiet reflection. “I’m different than all of my siblings (she also has a younger sister Robin and younger brother John.)

“I had the same parents, grew up in the same neighborhood, had the same resources, ate the same food. The same church van for summer vacation bible school pulled up at the house for all of us…but I’m the one who got on it.

“I believe I just understood the environment I was in, and I wanted better.”

She started playing basketball against the boys at the Linden Center and after a while the sport afforded her the opportunity to travel and gain other experiences.

At Patterson, where she became a varsity starter as a freshman, a science teacher befriended her and took her along to Canaan Missionary Baptist Church on Hoover Avenue.

There she met Becky Burrell, who worked at the Boonshoft Museum, and eventually invited her to live in a spare room at her home.

For the first time Jones had stability and eventually that helped her blossom at St. Catherine and then make an impression at UD.

Clark ended up naming her the Flyers’ “Most Inspirational Player.”

Loretta Williams, the former Alter and Trotwood coach who became an advisor at Central State and embraced Jones, once told me:

“She experienced poverty, a broken home, and other things. Put another person in that kind of environment and they would have crumpled.”

One of Jones’ biggest supporters is her high school coach, Grant Clark, who once explained how unimportant she was to DPS girls:

“Girls in the city here can look at her and see a life that exemplifies what theirs should be. She shows you what you can do no matter what obstacles are in front of you.”

When she coached at Sinclair, Jones also worked as a substitute teacher in Trotwood and then had a fulltime middle school teaching job at Richard Allen Academy. She also ran Sinclair’s educational program at the Dayton Correctional Institution, the high-security women’s state prison off Germantown Pike.

I went with her on her rounds there one day and saw the empathy, the enthusiasm, and the tough love she gave inmates.

The accomplishment that especially struck a chord with her was the bond she finally formed with her mom, Joyce Jones, who had developed Stage III lung cancer.

“In her dying days,” Jones said in half whisper as her eyes filled with tears, “I was there for her.”

Wrapped around his finger

Now she’s there for DPS students.

“My focus will always be the kids,” she said. “I understand the mission I have.

“I want to get that dark light away from them. I want kids to feel valued. I want them to be able to shine and look to the future.”

That’s why she started “Who’s in the Jersey?” and “Success Looks Like Me.”

It’s why she draws on people who grew up in Dayton like her longtime friend Williams-Jeter, whose parents were DPS teachers, and Cole, who was the salutatorian of his Dunbar class.

Although she’s had many successful ventures as the athletics director of DPS schools, she admitted she’s still learning things.

One set of lessons came last month when one of her former Sinclair players, Shirneal Burnside, married Drew Herrell.

The couple already had their two-year -old son Uriel, who everyone calls Uri, and they asked if Jones would watch him while they went on their honeymoon to the Dominican Republic.

“I’m like Shirneal’s surrogate mom,” said the 47-year-old Jones, who is not married and has no kids.

And while she calls Uri her grandson, she had some things to figure out during the eight days she cared for him.

“That little boy had her wrapped around his finger,” laughed her aide, Mauryce Neal, who has a 13-year-old son of her own.

Jones took Uri to Dunbar’s football camp and brought him along when she visited other schools.

“I had the time of my life with him and that baby was the star,” she said. “I tried to keep him entertained and make him happy, but I ended up having to buy Netflix.

“Believe it or not, but I didn’t have it. I’m so busy, I don’t have time to watch TV. But Uri’s into dinosaurs and Netflix has them.

“And that’s when life got better for him…and for me. And we watched his dinosaurs as much as we could.”

Once again Victoria Jones showed she understood the mission.

While so much of it for her has been preparing kids for the future, there are times when you must help them embrace the distant past.

Sometimes “Success Looks Like Me.”

Sometimes it looks like a dinosaur.