Cece McCasland doesn’t need to hide her Texas Tech gear anymore.
The wife of new Red Raider basketball Head Coach Grant McCasland played soccer for Texas Tech a little more than 20 years ago. She’s a proud Red Raider.
But during Grant’s coaching career, he spent five years on the Baylor staff – his alma mater.
Cece was sartorially torn.
“I had to be a closet Tech fan the five years we were at Baylor,” Cece said.
She was strategic when the Tech-Baylor football game was played at AT&T Stadium in Arlington during her time in Waco.
“I would have on Texas Tech socks, a Baylor t-shirt, a Texas Tech hat and just hoped everybody had fun. But I always wanted Tech to win,” Cece said, adding it wasn’t prudent to loudly voice that support. “My youngest son is the only one who would wear Tech stuff on my behalf.”
Now all her Tech gear can come out of her closet and she can be as loud as she wants inside United Supermarkets Arena.
“It’s pretty stinking cool. I don’t even think I dreamed it. It’s not something I would have dared to dream,” she said about Grant leading her alma mater’s men’s hoops team, which opens its season Wednesday, hosting Texas A&M-Commerce.
Getting to know each other in church
Grant and Cece met through church activities and faith remains their cornerstone.
Grant’s dad took a job at Irving’s Plymouth Park Baptist Church before Grant became a sophomore at Irving High School. He hired Keith Smith – Cece’s youth pastor at a nearby Baptist church.
“He was my youth pastor. I learned everything about a personal walk with God from him,” Cece said.
Plymouth Park was a bigger church with lots of activities and Cece got involved in both churches.
“I was double dipping churches,” she said.
Grant and Cece were in the same grade, becoming friends through Bible studies and weekend church retreats. By their senior year, they were part of a group of friends.
Grant and Cece even shared limos to go to two proms – but with different dates.
“We both didn’t date a lot. I always wanted to date to marry. If I was going to date somebody, they’d have to have the qualities of a husband I wanted. And he was similar,” Cece said.
Grant went to Baylor to play basketball. Soccer player Cece went to Tech.
Cece (eventually) becomes a Red Raider
Cece went through the process to be eligible to play college soccer, but after talking to a few college coaches she decided not to play.
“I’d been praying and praying where I was supposed to go. I knew I wanted a big school with a big football team. I had total peace I was supposed to go to Tech,” she said.
Cece walked on to the soccer team her sophomore year after she said God changed her heart.
“It’s a completely non-traditional method,” she said.
Her favorite moment was when her team wrecked Texas and Texas A&M in the same weekend.
“We weren’t supposed to beat either of those teams, but we did it in the same weekend and it was awesome,” Cece said.
Her favorite football moment while a student is one shared by countless Tech fans. Freshman Cece witnessed the late pick six by Zach Thomas to beat Texas A&M, 14-7, in Lubbock.
“We jumped so hard the bleachers broke underneath us,” she said.
When Grant’s Baylor team came to Lubbock, Cece would attend the game to see her friend. Grant did the same when Tech soccer traveled to Waco.
This was before cell phones.
“It wasn’t like I could text him and say, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’” she said.
Years later, when Grant was leading the University of North Texas program, she was talking to Tech Hall of Fame quarterback Graham Harrell, then UNT’s offensive coordinator.
Cece told him she was at Jones AT&T Stadium the night Harrell hit Michael Crabtree to beat then-No. 1 Texas. Grant told her she wasn’t, she watched it on TV.
“That moment was so special for fans – when I looked back on it, it felt like I was actually there,” Cece said, laughing.
Grant picks a career, but not with Chip Gaines
Grant was an entrepreneurship and business major at Baylor and saw three possibilities for a career – coaching, business or ministry.
“I had my own janitorial cleaning service since I was in the fifth grade all the way through high school,” Grant said.
Among his clients was a preschool.
“You can imagine those are the worst toilets to clean,” he said.
Grant talked to one of his Baylor friends – Chip Gaines – about starting a laundry business.
That Chip Gaines – who with wife Joanna turned home remodeling into a multi-million-dollar Waco-based business empire.
“We’ve been friends for a long time since we were in college,” Grant said. The laundry service idea turned into University Laundry run by another friend. It was bought out by Tide Cleaners and still operates.
Grant had an opportunity to be a community pastor at University Baptist Church, which he attended as a Baylor student.
David Crowder, a successful contemporary Christian musician, led worship at the church back then.
“Ultimately, I wasn’t done being part of a team. I loved being a part of a team and I love basketball,” Grant said. He’d miss the competitiveness and team camaraderie – especially at the major college level.
“The intensity required and investment of giving everything you have to a group and making it bigger than yourself is something I enjoyed the most. I wasn’t ready to be done with that,” he said.
While playing at Baylor, Billy Gillespie was on the basketball staff – the same Billy Gillespie who resigned amid controversy from Tech in 2012. Gillespie put the Bears through six weeks of what Grant called “the most excruciating, difficult preseason workouts I’d ever been through.”
He respected the process.
“I had a lot of respect for him because of how hard he pushed us,” Grant said.
One day, Gillespie asked Grant what he planned to do for a living. Grant wasn’t sure. Gillespie told Grant he could be a good coach.
“His compliments were few and far between,” Grant said.
“I always had a better feel for what we should do than what I could actually do as a player when you’re limited in size, athleticism and ability,” Grant said about his 5-10 height and modest playing career.
His first step to a coaching career started at Texas Tech when he became Director of Operations for Coach James Dickey.
Grant came to work at a Tech summer basketball camp, knowing there might be a staff opportunity.
When camp finished, Dickey asked Grant if he’d be interested in the Director of Basketball Operations job, being created for the upcoming season but not yet approved. Grant said yes.
Grant went back to the Metroplex. While waiting to hear from Dickey, he interviewed for jobs, accepting one as an assistant coach at Sam Houston State.
Before he could move to Huntsville, Dickey called, told Grant the job was approved, paid $9,000 and would love for him to join his staff.
Grant said yes, then called Sam Houston coach Bob Marlin, telling him he was going to Lubbock.
“That was the first tough conversation I had in this profession because he didn’t take too kindly to that, but we’ve become friends,” Grant said, adding it was hard to pass up a job on a Big 12 Conference squad.
There was another reason for Grant to head to West Texas – Cece.
Because she didn’t play her freshman year, Cece was playing her final season of Tech soccer.
Texas Tech has announced the hiring of North Texas head coach Grant McCasland as its 19th men’s basketball head coach, confirming similar reports that followed the Mean Green’s NIT Championship win over UAB Thursday night. He will be signed to a six-year contract worth $18 million, which was first reported by CBS’s Matt Norlander.
McCasland is Tech’s third head coach in the last four years and replaces Mark Adams, who stepped down from the position on March 8 amidst an inquiry into a controversial interaction with a student-athlete.
In five years in Denton, McCasland accumulated a record of 135-65, the second-most wins by a head coach in program history. The Mean Green are coming off their most successful season of the McCasland era, going 31-7 and capping the year with the program’s first NIT title.
McCasland notably led UNT to its first NCAA Tournament win in 2021, when the 13th-seeded Mean Green upset fourth-seeded Purdue, 78-69, in the Round of 64.
Notable pit stops on McCasland’s journey include his alma mater Baylor University, where he took on an assistant role under Scott Drew from 2011-2016. Following his time in Waco, McCasland slowly climbed the head coaching ladder, spending two seasons as Arkansas State’s head coach before being hired by North Texas in March of 2017.
With deep ties to Texas Tech, McCasland’s name has been associated with the position since it opened following Adams’ resignation. McCasland earned his masters degree from Tech in 2001, where he also served men’s basketball’s Director of Operations from 1999-2001. He met his wife Cece, a former Tech soccer, during this time.
McCasland will be tasked to bring the Red Raiders back to national prominence, as the program is fresh off its worst season record-wise (16-16) since 2014-15 and missed the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2016-17, aside from the COVID-shortened 2019-20 season.