Red Coat recognizes Coffman’s work connecting basketball and community at PFW | Local Colleges

Jon Coffman wins basketball games.

The Purdue Fort Wayne men’s coach holds the program record for victories. Since he began leading the Mastodons in 2014, PFW has nine winning seasons in 11 campaigns, as many as any team in the Horizon League, and has won 198 total games, the most of any of the six mid-major programs in Indiana. Along the way, the Mastodons have captured two conference titles, one in the Summit League in 2016 and another in the Horizon in 2022.

All that winning, however, is not the only reason Coffman will be joining the distinguished group of individuals to receive a Mad Anthonys Red Coat tonight at Clyde Theatre. The Red Coat is a community-focused award, and while the success of Coffman’s team on the court is noteworthy, his work in weaving his program and PFW into the fabric of Fort Wayne has been just as impressive. In fact, in the coach’s mind, the victories and the community engagement go hand in hand.

“You don’t do things for awards,” Coffman said. “We’ve been successful because we’ve trusted the process. I’ve been very intentional with everything I’ve done in our organization, and I’ve never made shortcuts just to get a win.”

Coffman, 51, and his wife, Tracy, and their then-2-year-old son, Thomas – they would later have a daughter, Lucy – came to the Summit City for the 2011-12 basketball season, when he was hired to be an assistant on head coach Tony Jasick’s staff. After three seasons, capped by a 25-win campaign in 2013-14, Jasick departed to become head coach at Jacksonville and Coffman was elevated to head coach.

When Coffman arrived in Fort Wayne, he and his wife had a mantra: “Make this the place you want to be for the rest of your life.”

Early in his tenure, the coach recognized the value of the Summit City and was able to sell it to players from across the country. Players such as Jarred Godfrey (from Atlanta), John Konchar (from West Chicago, Illinois), and Bobby Planutis (from Hazleton, Pennsylvania) bought into the city and Coffman’s vision for the program as a prominent piece of Fort Wayne’s culture.

“We built this around, hey, we’re part of something bigger than ourselves, so let’s give back to the community,” Coffman said. “And the community has embraced us.

“I look at (the basketball program) as, we’re the marketing arm, we’re the front door of the university,” he added. “I love to be able to scream, hey, look at us, look at what this great university is doing to our city, look at the graduates we’re producing, invest in us.”

Coffman has always tried to make his program about more than basketball for his players. During the summers, his teams have played golf, learned ballroom dancing, taken dining etiquette lessons and participated in networking courses.

The coach has also connected players with community mentors – prominent Fort Wayne citizens – in the hopes of helping the PFW student-athletes land their first jobs after their basketball careers end.

His efforts to make Mastodons basketball a fixture in the community have been turbocharged in recent years, since the legalization of name, image and likeness payments in college basketball. Last summer, PFW basketball players earned NIL money through working with kids at Big Brothers Big Sisters, the Boys and Girls Clubs and Renaissance Pointe YMCA, logging more than 400 hours in all.

The money for those deals came from the PFW collective, Dons for Fort Wayne, which Coffman has helped elevate through ties with the city’s business community that he has worked to build and maintain.

“It’s so much more than what he does in basketball as a coach,” says PFW athletic director Kelley Hartley Hutton, who will be in attendance to see Coffman accept his Red Coat. “I don’t know how he finds all the hours in the day to do what he does because he is out in the community with the way he’s built Dons for Fort Wayne with community leaders to support Dons basketball.

“The support, the fan base, certainly the funding, is because of his hard work and the relationships he’s built. It’s one thing to raise money, it’s another thing to build relationships that support your program and the university and in my mind he’s the best ambassador our university has because he’s out there consistently.”

Coffman has long felt that the key to sustained success in the era of the transfer portal and heavy annual roster turnover is to get the players to buy in to the community around them. That idea has borne out in recent seasons as the Mastodons have by and large kept their most important players around and competed at the top of the Horizon League through uncommon roster continuity.

Now, Coffman will recognized for that success, receiving an award that has also gone to coaching luminaries such as John Wooden, Bob Knight, Gene Keady and Matt Painter.

From the coach’s perspective, however, his work in Fort Wayne remains unfinished.

“There’s another, higher level,” he said. “That’s going to be my challenge over the next five, six years is that we have to rise up together, because we have more to do. As successful as we’ve been, I’m working my tail off to get that first NCAA Tournament for our city. I am committed to that for our city.

“… We’re not changing our values. That’s because I don’t have to. I’ve been given security by my chancellor, by our university, by the community to where we’re going to recruit the same guys that are going to uphold our program. We can still build something really, really special.”

Also receiving the Red Coat this year are local philanthropists Mike and Kathy Eikenberry.