Kristen Gillespie is an American college basketball coach who is currently the head coach of the Illinois State Redbirds women's basketball team. She was previously the head coach of the women's basketball teams at Lewis University and Benedictine University. She played basketball for North Carolina State University between 1996 and 1999.
Career Gillespie was born in Illinois; her father Mike and grandfather Gordie were both sports coaches. She moved to Florida when her father began coaching the Tallahassee Community College men's basketball team. Gillespie played high school basketball for Maclay School in Tallahassee, where she was named an All-American. She began her college basketball career at Auburn in 1994 but transferred to North Carolina State after her freshman year. In her junior year at NC State, she started at point guard for a squad that made the Final Four of the 1998 NCAA Division I women's basketball tournament.
Gillespie began her basketball coaching career as an assistant coach at UCF, followed by a stint as assistant coach at UC Santa Barbara. She then served as a graduate assistant at North Carolina State, the head coach at Maclay School, and an assistant coach at UIC. In 2011, she became the head coach of the Benedictine University women's basketball team, which she led for four years. Division II Lewis University hired her to coach their women's basketball team in 2015.
Gillespie was hired to be the head coach at Illinois State in 2017. In 2021, she led the team to the Women's National Invitation Tournament (WNIT), its first postseason appearance of any kind since 2013. The next year, the team made the NCAA Division I women's basketball tournament for the first time since 2008; it lost to Iowa in the first round. Illinois State returned to the WNIT in every season from 2023 to 2026.
Personal life Gillespie and her wife Brittany have two children.
Head coaching record
References