Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
Before she was the Hoops Whisperer, she was a couch listener.
Long before Trina Merriweather became the oft-honored head coach of the Wright State women’s basketball team, she was simply known as Willie Merriweather’s little granddaughter.
He was a basketball pioneer who had starred alongside Oscar Robertson in the backcourt of the famed 1955 Crispus Attucks High School team in Indianapolis that became the first all-Black team in the nation to win a state championship.
He was a star on that team, averaging 20 points and 20 rebounds a game, while shooting 70 percent from the floor and 94 percent from the free throw line. He went to Purdue and became the Boilermakers’ first Black All-American.
He ended up being inducted in both the Purdue Athletics Hall of Fame and the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame.
Although drafted by the NBA, he opted to become a high school educator and he joined forces with well-known sports agent, Dr. Charles Tucker.
Merriweather’s resume gave him currency with players coming out of college and when he went to talk to them about signing with him, he’d sometimes have his young granddaughter with him.
“I remember sitting there on the couch in the living room, just watching and listening as my grandfather tried to close the deal with Alan Henderson who played for IU,” Trina said. “It was like out of Blue Chips. It was pretty cool.”
