That was 35 years ago, but it still seems like yesterday.
Keesh Brewer was 14 years old and a talented young basketball player with a bright future. He was the best player on the Douglas Park side, often competing against the older players.
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But one night, in front of a packed gym, his coach, Cheryl Jackson-Newsome, sent him to the bench. Brewer didn’t play hard enough. He cried in front of the entire gym. Jackson Newsome held up his standards and didn’t let him return to the game.
Cheryl Jackson-Newsom and her Douglas Park team during the Dust Bowl.
“I was thinking, ‘I’m the best player on this team,'” Brewer recalled. “‘Are you really willing to lose this game?’ It broke my heart. But it also helped me grow and it was a moment I’ll never forget.”
There are generations of basketball players, boys and girls, who have learned life lessons through Jackson Newsom. Jackson-Newsome served as a manager in the Indy Parks Department for more than 30 years, mentoring and developing hundreds of young people who walked through the doors of Douglas, Thatcher and Municipal Gardens.
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“A pioneer in basketball,” Brewer said of Jackson Newsome. “A true staple in this city. She’s a legend here. I’m honored to be mentored by her and to have her in my life.”
Jackson-Newsom, 61, died on February 6 after a five-year battle with cancer. In the weeks leading up to her death, a steady stream of visitors came to visit the coach and mentor known for her tough love and relentless spirit. People of all ages who played for her, from 50-somethings to sixth-grade girls, wanted to share a few laughs and thank Jackson-Newsome for the impact she had on their lives.
“It’s a revolving door,” said her husband, Darryl Newsom. “She’s on medication. She has to take morphine. But she won’t push the button because she wants to stay alert enough to talk and laugh with the people who come to see her.”
toughness. This quality continued throughout Jackson-Newsome’s life.
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From Northwestern to junior college to Jayhawk
Cheryl Jackson Newsome and her Gardens Sparks team.
Jackson Newsome can bank shots with the best of them. Lutheran coach Remus Woods, who had worked with her at Indy Park, banned bank shots in “Horse” games.
“She could hit the glass from anywhere,” Woods said with a laugh. “anywhere. She will kill us in Mali. We finally said, ‘That’s it, no banks.’ ‘”
Before she was a coach and mentor, Cheryl Jackson was a player. A serious player. Ron Rutland Jr. was a star player for the Pike in the 1980s and a Hall of Famer at the University of Indianapolis. He remembers picking up Jackson at the last minute of a 2-on-2 tournament at the RCA Dome when they realized they could add a third player.
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“We won the game,” Rutland said. “Cheryl can play ball.”
She excelled at Northwest in her early days on the Indiana High School Athletic Association girls basketball team and earned all-city honors as a junior with the Space Pioneers in 1981-82. A 5-foot-7 guard, she averaged 13.8 points, 9.0 rebounds and 4.1 steals per game. As a senior, Jackson averaged 15.7 points and 2.9 steals per game. An informal 1982 Indy Star-Ledger poll of city and county coaches rated Jackson the best player in Indianapolis.
“She’s a great player,” Northwestern coach Jim Albright said before her senior season. “She’s fast, she jumps well and she can score. People might not think of her as that good because she’s only averaging about 15 points a game this year. But that’s because she’s so unselfish and we have a lot of good players around her.”
Jackson scored 920 points during his final three years of high school before playing at Seward County (Kan.) Community College. Jackson thrived in Liberty, Kansas, a community of 19,000 people in the southwestern corner of the state near the Oklahoma border. In the 1984-85 season, she set the school’s scoring record, averaging 21.0 points, 6 rebounds, 3 assists and 4 steals per game.
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Seward County retired her No. 11 jersey in a ceremony that left her in tears. Jackson began her career at Kansas State before transferring to Kansas State, where she played for legendary coach Marian Washington. On the 1987-88 team, the same year Danny Manning and the Miracles led KU to the national championship, Jackson averaged 5.1 points per game on a 22-win team that reached the second round of the NCAA tournament.
During her two years in Lawrence, Kansas, Jackson-Newsome made lifelong friends.
“We were roommates, teammates, best friends,” said Evette Ott, Jackson’s teammate at Kansas. “I’m from Michigan, so when we would go home, I would send her home and spend a few weeks there with her family. She was very competitive and always strived to be the best player in the class. She was a great teammate and we had a great team. We were very close. We call it the ‘Jayhawk sisterhood.'”
Many of the qualities that Jackson Newsome would later become known for as a coach and leader in Indianapolis were displayed by Washington as a player at Kansas. Loyalty is near the top of the list.
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“Going to college isn’t just about being an athlete for Coach Washington,” Ott said. “We consistently had one of the highest graduation rates. She would call players and offer them another year or two so they could get their master’s degree. She was a fierce woman and a leader by example. Everything she taught us were life lessons learned through basketball.”
Ott remained close to Jackson Newsome long after his career ended. Jackson-Newsome often told her how much she enjoyed tutoring and teaching children.
“It’s tough love, but it’s also love,” Ott said of Jackson-Newsome’s style. “Coach Washington, too. Cheryl loves them, but she can be tough and stern when she needs to be. She’s a great woman who truly loves what she does. She’s passionate about it.”
Cheryl Jackson Newsome shows off her ball-handling skills in front of children at Municipal Gardens.
Ott said many of her Kansas teammates plan to attend a celebration of life on Feb. 27 at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church. Washington, 79, won 560 games in 31 seasons at Kansas. Washington called Jackson-Newsom “the kind of player every coach wants and the kind of guy every community needs.”
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“Cheryl is an outstanding athlete – competitive, focused and determined,” Washington wrote in a text message. “But what made her truly special was not just the way she played. It was the way she lived her life. She always had a smile…that steady, uplifting presence. She encouraged her teammates. She believed in people. She made people better, not just as players but as people.”
Washington wrote that Jackson Newsom’s family — husband Darryl and children Jalen and Cherel — “were her pride and purpose. Her family was her champions.”
“Cancer may have challenged her body, but it never touched her spirit,” Washington wrote. “She fought with courage. She fought with grace. Through it all, she never gave up on her faith. God was always present in her life, not just in words, but in what she lived, what she endured and what she trusted. What Cheryl built in this world cannot be taken away. Her legacy will continue to live on in her children, her family, her teammates and every life she touched.”
“Definitely left her mark”
Jalen Newsome (left), Kalin Irving, Mark Zachary and Cherel Newsome (back).
Darryl Newsom married Cheryl on June 1, 1996. He also entered the coaching world that day because of Cheryl.
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“I entered by default,” Daryl said. “She would run the home league for the community center and she would have a team and the rest of the staff would have a team. I could always tell that to the players who played for her. They had this calmness and leadership and they played together. You wouldn’t see a lot of selfishness in her players.”
The 2017 Ben Davis and Crispus Attucks state championship team was packed with kids who played for Cheryl, including her son Jalen, who plays for the Giants, and teammates Josh Brewer, Datrion Harper and Kyle Finch. Nike Sibande, Alex Cooley and Derrick Briscoe are all former Jackson-Newsom players for the Attucks.
Mark Zachary IV and Davande Jones were two of her other players who went on to become double stars on the Ben Davis football and basketball teams.
“Mrs. Cheryl had a huge impact on my basketball career, teaching me how to play while also challenging me and pushing me to improve,” Zachary said. “From the age of 6 to about 10, I went to evening practices at the Municipal Gardens. She always saw potential in the players she coached, especially me. She would tell me to come at different times during the older kids’ practices, which helped me improve my game and fundamentals faster.”
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Zachary said the confidence he built as he entered high school began with those drills.
“She helped shape my confidence as an athlete by teaching me the fundamentals and encouraging me not to shy away from these moments,” he said. “I was able to compete on varsity in two sports as a freshman because of the lessons she instilled in me, and I can confidently say that a major source of success came from the training she put me through.”
Jackson-Newsom also coaches at the high school level. She worked for several years as an assistant to the Ben Davis daughters under Joe Lenz and Stan Benge. Prior to that, she served as an assistant at Arlington, a three-year head coach at Metropolitan University and the head coach at Lynhurst High School.
In 2021, Jackson Newsome was diagnosed with kidney cancer. One of her kidneys was removed. However, the cancer returned in her liver. In recent months, it had spread to the sides of her stomach. On the first Sunday in February, her hospital room was filled with friends and family because she was able to receive Holy Communion.
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“She really left her mark,” Daryl said.
Kish Brewer is living proof. He is the dean of students at Phelan College and has been a tutor for 25 years. At a time when he needed a strong voice in his life, Jackson Newsome was there for him and many others.
“She was like a second mom to me,” said Brewer, a standout player for Cathedral. “She helped me define who I am, and there are a lot of people like me who feel the same way. She was truly an icon in this city — and it’s a huge loss because of who she was. They need to build a statue in her honor.”
Call Star Tribune reporter Kyle Neddenriep at (317) 444-6649. Get IndyStar’s high school coverage delivered right to your inbox with the high school sports newsletter. Be sure to subscribe to our new IndyStarTV: Preps YouTube channel.
This article originally appeared in the Indianapolis Star: Cheryl Jackson-Newsom is a coach and mentor in the city’s basketball community