2023 MDCC HOF Burnadette McDonald

Burnadette McDonald - MDCC Women's Basketball Coach 1999 - 2019

She learned hard work from her mother. That work ethic helped make her a high school star, a scholarship basketball player at Delta State University and a National Champion Assistant Coach there as well after her playing days.

After working for Lloyd Clark at Delta State, McDonald got the opportunity to become a head coach for the Mississippi Delta Community College Lady Trojans beginning in 1999. For the next 20 years, she put into practice all that she learned as a player and coach to teach and mold young girls into young women who excelled on and off the basketball court. Again, she attributes her mother with her success.

"She was our rock and she led by example. She worked two jobs to make sure we had clothes and shoes for the seven of us. She was beautiful and she was our everything," Coach McDonald said. "Hard work and doing your best and treating people the way they are supposed to be treated are the principles that she taught us and we all still try to live by those today."

In looking at her coaching career, she calls out her team winning the state championship in 2005 as a highlight. But it was always more than just winning on the court.

"My coaching experience as a whole has been wonderful. Having the opportunity to touch young lives. Hopefully, they left me better than they came. I tried to instill a lot in them. I've been blessed as a player and a coach. God has really blessed me.?

Coach Clark and others were so impressed by McDonald, in 2020 they worked to endow a scholarship in her name at MDCC. Coach Clark knows there's no better coach and player to honor with the scholarship.

"You endow that name and it's always going to be there into perpetuity," he said. "And that Burnadette scholarship will be at Mississippi Delta Community College forever. She deserves every bit of it too. She's a wonderful human being when you get right down to it."

Coach McDonald's Achievements include:

- 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2014 Coach of the Year award by Mississippi Community Colleges

- 2005 Women's Basketball State Champions

- Most Wins for MDCC Women's Basketball Coach

- Two Time MACJC All Star Game North Division Coach