Coach Gary Bays is no stranger to college basketball having spent 27 seasons patrolling the sidelines, the first 22 as a men’s coach and the last 5 with the women. He has amassed 424 wins during his career and has taken four different teams to the NAIA National Tournament. Six conference Coach of the Year awards are among his accomplishments. His career includes stops at four different colleges, and in each case, he was responsible for taking a bad situation and making it better. After spending the first eight years out of college at two different high schools in Montana, Bays started his college career at Warner Pacific College in Portland, Oregon, where he spent 12 years building a competitive program in a tough conference. Next up was a nine year stint at Warner Southern College in Lake Wales, Florida, where he introduced that program to the NAIA and helped start the Florida Sun Conference. He then moved on to Montana State-Billings, an NCAA II school, for a four -year tenure, where he cleaned up a program that had image problems and advanced to the conference playoffs. Bays then returned to Florida and Warner Southern, where his 1998 team advanced to the NAIA National Tournament and the Sweet Sixteen. He took on the challenge of building the women’s program, which had never won more than 12 games in a season and took three straight teams to the NAIA National Tournament.
When the opportunity to start a new program at Brenau came up, he jumped at the chance to build another winner in a great conference. In the first season of competition, the Golden Tigers won 10 games and served notice that they were well on the way to respectability in the SSAC. Although this year’s team is still young and inexperienced, the future looks bright and the pieces are in place for a run at a berth in the conference playoffs.
Rae Anne and Coach Bays first met when the coach recruited her out of Navarre, FL high school to play for him at Warner Southern. During her freshman season at Warner, Boothe suffered her third ACL injury and missed the year doing rehab. At the start of her sophomore year, another ACL tear ended her playing career. Bays immediately asked Rae to become a student assistant coach, knowing that her career path was headed for coaching upon graduation. She then spent two years helping coach teams that advanced to the NAIA National Tournament. When Coach Bays took the job at Brenau, she decided to join him for the exciting challenge of building a new program. She will finish her undergraduate work next year, and then plans to stay on and complete her graduate degree at Brenau.
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Coach Gary Bays
email: gbays@brenau.edu
Phone:
770.538.4443
Assistant Coach
Rae Anne Boothe
email rboothe@brenau.edu
Phone:
770.531.2048
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