Anna Nimz enters her fifth season at the helm of the Northwestern State women's basketball program in 2024-25. She is the 10th full-time head coach in program history, joining a list with six others whose first Division I success started at Northwestern State.
Nimz and her staff faced the challenge of the 2020-21 COVID season, her first season in Natchitoches, head on as they began to build NSU women's basketball back to a perennial contender in the Southland Conference.
The first fruits of that labor showed itself during the 2021-22 campaign.
The Demons had the largest single-season win improvement (11) in program, one of the largest scoring increases (17.1 ppg) in the country, produced six Southland Conference Players of the Weeks, the most of any one team during the season, and won three consecutive non-conference road games for the first time in 33 years.
Three newcomers in the 21-22 season were named all-conference players including NSU's first all-defensive player selection since such honors were distributed following the 2012-13 season.
One of those newcomers, Candice Parramore, who was named Southland Newcomer of the Year in 2021-22, helped continue the program's path to resurgence by earning first-team all-conference honors following the 2022-23 season, the first first-teamer under Nimz's tutelage and the first for the program since 2016-17. She was also the first player to earn consecutive all-confernece honors since Janelle Perez in 2014-16.
Paramore was second in the Southland in scoring during the 22-23 conference season reaching double-figures in 13 of the 14 games in which she played. She also set the NSU career free throw percentage record by converting on 85 percent of her more than 280 career attempts. Parramore was the first player to make 100 or more free throws in consecutive seasons since in 30 years. She scored more than 700 points for NSU in her two seasons with the Demons.
Nimz has coached the Demons to three straight Southland tournament appearances, the first time NSU reached back-to-back-to-back tournaments since a string of five straight trips between 2012-17.
A two-year letterwinner and team captain at Pittsburg State, Nimz served as the associate head coach at UTRGV in the two seasons prior to coming to Natchitoches. She helped the Vaqueros reach the 2019 Western Athletic Conference Tournament championship game and earn a 2019 Women's Basketball Invitational berth.
With Nimz on staff, the Vaqueros led the WAC in scoring defense in 2018-19, produced five All-WAC selections and tallied the most WAC wins (10) in program history.
Nimz arrived at UTRGV after eight years as a junior college head coach, spending five seasons at Labette Community College in Parsons, Kansas, before coaching three years at Kilgore College in Texas.
Nimz took over the Labette program at 25 years old, giving her ample opportunities to grow in an on-the-job atmosphere.
That approach helped Nimz recruit three all-conference and three all-region players at Labette while five of her student-athletes earned scholarships to NCAA institutions.
From Labette, Nimz was hired to rebuild a once-proud Kilgore College program that had fallen to seven wins in 2013-14. Hired in June 2014, Nimz took the standing Kilgore roster and improved from seven wins to 16 in her first season.
She followed with consecutive 21-win seasons, marking the first time in 21 years Kilgore College had won at least 20 games in consecutive seasons. In three seasons at Kilgore, Nimz posted a 58-36 overall record, reaching a pair of NJCAA Region 14 championship games.
Nimz credited her time at both junior college programs for giving her insight into the totality of running a college basketball program, something that was evident in her two seasons at UTRGV.
In addition to averaging 10.9 points and 3.1 assists per game in her two seasons at Pittsburg State, Nimz was named the Pittsburg State Outstanding Student-Athlete of the Year for 2006-07 and was a named Student Major of the Year in Health, Human Performance and Recreation. A two-time Pittsburg State graduate, Nimz was the 2008-09 Graduate Student of the Year in Health, Human Performance and Recreation.
She was Kilgore College's Employee of the Year in 2016-17.
Nimz began her coaching career at Pittsburg State as a graduate assistant, helping lead the Gorillas to their first 20-win season in 14 years while recruiting and coaching eight All-Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association honorees.
Nimz joins Pat Nolen Pierson, James Smith, Jennifer Graf, Brooke and Scott Stoehr, Jordan Dupuy and Bilderback as coaches whose first Division I job came at Northwestern State.
