Colleen Lamoreaux-Tate stepped up to the podium with fam­ily and fans crowd­ing Jim Wink Arena to for­mally accept the Ferris State women’s bas­ket­ball head coach position.

Former FSU head coach Tracey Dorrow said her good­byes to the Ferris women’s bas­ket­ball pro­gram after coach­ing for 14 years and lead­ing the Bulldogs to a Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference North Division title last sea­son. Dorrow has accepted the posi­tion of head coach for Valparaiso University (Ind.) for the new year.

Coach Lamoreaux-Tate (Lam-roe-tate) wants to take the FSU pro­gram to a whole new level.

Describing her coach­ing style as “a lit­tle bit of Pat Summit and a lit­tle bit of Mike Krzyzewski,” Colleen decided after 26 sea­sons of coach­ing high school bas­ket­ball that she was ready to make the leap to the col­le­giate level.

After more than a quar­ter cen­tury coach­ing at the high school level, Colleen left women’s high school bas­ket­ball as one of the most suc­cess­ful coaches of all time.

Previously the girls’ bas­ket­ball head coach at Grand Rapids Catholic Central High School, Lamoreaux-Tate accu­mu­lated 167 wins in the past seven years, a 2010 state cham­pi­onship and was named the Grand Rapids coach of the year three sep­a­rate times.

After hav­ing much suc­cess at the high school level, the tim­ing couldn’t be bet­ter for Lamoreaux-Tate.

“I had other chances to coach at the col­le­giate level, but there was always a player I had to stay for, and my old­est daugh­ter just grad­u­ated this past year, so I decided it was the right time,” she said.

Without a doubt, the high school game is dif­fer­ent from the col­lege game; how­ever, the change doesn’t bother her.

“I’ve always been privy to a lot of great ath­letes in high school, and now instead of hav­ing three or four col­lege level play­ers, I have 12 of them,” Lamoreaux-Tate said.

When Lamoreaux-Tate was hired as the new Bulldogs’ head coach, she called old time friend Charlette Muller who was the head coach at Grand Rapids Christian High School to offer her an assis­tant coach­ing posi­tion on the staff. Muller accepted this posi­tion and the chem­istry between these two coaches in impeccable.

“She’s amaz­ing, she reads me,” Lamoreaux-Tate said. “We com­ple­ment each other very well. If I come down a player to hard she can soften the blow and turn it into encour­age­ment. Sometimes I may be too direct, so she [Muller] can put it into words what I really am try­ing to mean.”

Lamoreaux-Tate who was a for­mer player at Lake Superior State and Aquinas College, looks to bring the women’s bas­ket­ball to new heights, even fur­ther than the his­toric sea­son the Bulldogs had in 2012.

“I want to stay num­ber one in the GLIAC, but not only that I want to win the national title,” Lamoreaux-Tate said. “My mind­set has always been I don’t only want to be the best in the area, I want to be the best
overall.”