Lengthy travel, busy schedule doesn’t keep Jen Greeny from Inland Northwest Sports Hall of Fame induction ceremony

It was going to be old home week, err, more like 30 hours or so, when Jen Greeny (Stinson) returned to her Eastern Washington roots for induction Tuesday into the Inland Northwest Sports Hall of Fame.

Greeny, the former Davenport High and Washington State University standout athlete and highly successful Cougar volleyball coach now at West Virginia, is quite familiar with several members of the 2024 Hall of Fame class.

Greeny was AAU teammates back in the day with Stacy Clinesmith, a Mead High standout who became the first Spokane native to play in the WNBA. Isaac Fontaine’s WSU basketball career in the 1990s partially overlapped with Greeny’s. Bud Nameck was among media members that chronicled Greeny’s three-sport feats at Davenport.

Early in her coaching career, Greeny’s Pullman High volleyball teams matched up against Colfax and legendary coach Sue Doering.

“It’s quite a collection of six degrees of separation for me,” said Greeny, who guided the Cougars to the last eight NCAA Tournaments before taking over West Virginia’s program. “Our AAU was pretty good. I’m the only one that ended up not playing basketball (she actually played one season of hoops at WSU as a senior). We eventually had girls that played at Stanford and Notre Dame.

“Isaac is a little older than me, but I got to know him a little bit at school and probably more so after we finished. I coached against Sue. I taught at Colfax when I was coaching at Pullman. I was her longtime sub when she had cancer.”

When coaching, travel and induction into the Hall of Fame collide, you see an itinerary like Greeny’s from Huntington, West Virginia, to Spokane and back. After the Mountaineers lost in five sets to visiting Kansas State on Sunday, Greeny caught a 6:30 a.m. EST flight Monday and arrived in Spokane at about 2:30 PST after roughly 2,000 air miles.

That gave her a chance to spend some time with friends and family, including dad Jim Stinson, who coached Davenport to a pair of State B titles while Jen was becoming the state’s all-classifications career scoring leader (2,881 points) for boys and girls, a record that stood for 25 years. Jim Stinson is in the Hall of Fame as a Scroll of Honor recipient.

Hall of Fame festivities begin at 4 p.m. Tuesday. Greeny has a 7 p.m. flight out of Spokane and she’ll be in West Virginia by Wednesday morning for a home match vs. Central Florida that evening. Assistant coaches, including her husband and former WSU pitcher Burdette Greeny, are handling practices while she’s out of town.

“I actually have to leave early from the ceremony to be able to catch a redeye flight back,” Greeny said. “I asked if I could go first.”

It’s a number of hoops to jump through, but well worth it.

“It’s such a great honor,” said Greeny, who was inducted into the WIAA Hall of Fame in 2023. “Obviously I’ve been in the Inland Northwest most of my life and watched so many people in the Hall of Fame or I know them. It’s something very special with my ties to the area, not only at Washington State, but Davenport High, LCSC and Pullman. It’s kind of exciting and neat for me to realize how many places I’ve impacted.”

At Davenport, Greeny led the volleyball team to a state title and won three state high-jumping titles – her personal best was 5-8 – in addition to her accomplishments on the basketball court.

At one point, she talked to WSU track coaches about the possibility of high jumping.

“But I thought, you know what, I’m not a good volleyball player yet, maybe I should focus on that,” Greeny recalled.

She was first-team All-Pac-10 volleyball in 1997 and Pac-10 first-team All-Freshman in 1995. She also earned Pac-10 All-Academic honors three times.

Greeny coached Pullman High to a state championship in 2005 and led LCSC to a 112-24 record and four NAIA Tournament appearances in four seasons before being hired as WSU’s head coach.

Greeny was part of most of WSU’s greatest volleyball seasons as a player (1995-98), assistant coach (2000-04) and head coach (2011-2023). In the Pac-12’s final season before 10 schools bolted for other conferences, Greeny’s 2023 squad climbed to a program-record No. 4 ranking and reached the Sweet 16 before finishing at No. 11.

“Just lots of unknowns, we graduated so many players and (daughter) Leah was in eighth grade,” Greeny said. “I feel like we’d accomplished great things at Washington State and the recruiting was pretty tough. It was almost impossible to find the caliber of players that we wanted to sustain that type of program. It was kind of the perfect storm and maybe time to try something new.

WSU was 0-18 in conference the year before Greeny took over. She led the Cougars to six 20-win in her final eight years (WSU played just 16 matches in COVID-shortened 2020 season).

She faces another sizable challenge at West Virginia, which was 2-32 in the Big 12 in the two seasons before Greeny’s arrival.

“At Washington State, there had been success before when Cindy Fredrick was there,” Greeny said. “It’s definitely not rebuilding, it’s building, but the girls are great and they’ve bought in. They’re a good group, good students and our fans are very supportive.”