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Grieving her father’s death and battling lung cancer, Southern Miss coach pulled off decisive upset

James Brown

In 2017, Joye Lee-McNelis began writing her obituary.

Where she was born. In the community of Leetown, in southern Mississippi.

Predeceased by. Then a blank, not knowing if he would die before his parents.

A note of thanks to his family, the players he coached, the staff he worked with and the administrations he worked for.

McNelis had been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. As he thought about his death, he focused on how his life would be remembered. Her husband, Dennis, thought she was crazy. She assured him that she was not worried about the act of dying. “I just want to plan everything,” she told him. “There is no need for you and our children to worry about that.” She wanted it to feel like a celebration.

McNelis is now 61 years old and is in her 20th season as Southern Mississippi’s head coach. She hasn’t looked back at what she wrote. But one afternoon earlier this fall, McNelis and her father, Louis, sat outside on her patio talking about her possible funeral. Louis, 87, suffered from Parkinson’s disease and congestive heart failure. All the arteries of his heart had been bypassed. Meanwhile, McNelis was in the midst of a third bout with lung cancer. The second came at the end of 2020. After being diagnosed again in August, this time, for the first time, she was receiving chemotherapy.

They talked about tombstones. McNelis’ parents had already purchased and installed theirs. McNelis realized that she should probably buy hers too, just to be prepared.

Their conversation turned to music. When she wrote her obituary six years earlier, she wrote down the songs she wanted to sing at his funeral. “Maybe I’ll die before you and you need to know what my songs will be,” she told him. There was one on both of their lists: “What a friend we have in Jesus.”

The song is an old gospel hymn. Religion is one of the threads that runs through the McNelis. “There are two things in our family,” she says, “and that’s trusting in God and basketball.”

McNelis grew up on a farm in southern Mississippi. He learned to hitch a trailer and bottle feed the calves. Louis, who listened to the ministers every night on cassette tapes, told him that if he wanted to stop working on his land, he could learn to shoot baskets on the dirt court that the family had trampled onto the grass. But before he could jump, McNelis had to move the family’s cows off the field and shovel the manure they left behind.

On November 24, a few weeks after their conversation in the courtyard, Louis died. McNelis says, “Things went wrong” the night before. His breathing was labored until he stopped. McNelis’ father was his hero. “My first love when she was a little girl,” she says. After growing up in Leetown and starring at Southern Miss as a player, she returned to the area two decades ago to train closer to her family.

On the Monday after his death, in nearby Picayune, his funeral was held at Lee’s Chapel Baptist Church #2. His fourth chemotherapy session was scheduled for the next day. Southern Miss’ matchup against then-No. 19 Ole Miss loomed that Saturday. But his own fight and his team’s preparations could wait. She praised him and listened to his song.

Do you have tests and temptations?
Are there problems somewhere?
We must never be discouraged;
Take it to the Lord in prayer.

McNelis hopes his last chemotherapy session will be his last. To cope with his latest stage 4 episode, treatments have been carried out every three weeks since the end of September and each has lasted around two hours. The effects last much longer than that. After her first treatment, she was a “sick cat” for two weeks. She felt the impact of the second for nine days. On day 8, she started to feel better after the third. Six days after her fourth session, she finally felt like she was going to have a “good day.”

It is the nausea and fatigue that weighs her down. “When I feel like I can’t lift my head off the pillow,” she says. When she gets very tired, she sometimes vomits.

Through it all, McNelis has been resilient. She gets up every day. She says a prayer in bed and reads devotionals with her coffee. If she can, she heads to practice or the game. This is how her father would have wanted her to handle this season. Around the gym. With her team. Teaching, game planning, finding wrinkles for the Golden Eagles to attack. When McNelis missed Southern Miss’ contest against Valparaiso on Nov. 21 to visit him at Forrest General Hospital, where the roof of Reed Green Coliseum was visible from his hospital room, he repeatedly told him, “This doesn’t make sense why you ‘You’re lying in bed with me and your team is playing.’

“Dad, it’s okay, I’m where I need to be,” he said he responded.

“Many people in life think that the world cannot exist if they are not in it,” he says. “Well guess what? It can happen. My team can keep running whether I’m here or not. …I’m very grateful for the people who supported me and helped me get through it.”

In August, a PET scan revealed areas of activity in his left lung. His doctors were surprised when his cancer returned. For more than two years he believed he was in remission. All of his scans had come back clean, until they weren’t.


McNelis led Southern Miss to a program- and career-defining defeat of Ole Miss. (Courtesy of Miss Southern Athletics)

As she had been in the past, this summer McNelis was open with her team about her diagnosis. “The only thing I can promise you is that I will give you my best. “I don’t know what my best effort is, but I will give them my best,” she said. During the 2020-21 season, that sometimes meant training while he was hooked up to a portable oxygen concentrator. He has missed several shootarounds this year to conserve his energy and get as much sleep as he can.

“We see coach fight every day,” says senior guard Dominique Davis. “She is fighting for her life and, while she does it, she continues to fight to be with us every day.”

McNelis feels called to stay on the sidelines. Through basketball he seeks to teach his players about sacrifice. About assertiveness. “To help them understand what it takes to live a dream,” he says. “It’s our responsibility to help them see a path.”

And he adds: “You have the option to be positive or to be negative, and that happens every day you wake up. “God is giving you the opportunity to wake up and have another day.” She quotes Lynn Anderson’s song interpretation of another scripture.

I never promised you a rose garden.
Together with the sun,
At some point it will have to rain a little.

On Saturday, Southern Miss hosted in-state rival Ole Miss in its lung cancer awareness game. McNelis’ oncologist, Dr. Bo Hrom, served as an honorary coach of the Golden Eagles. Before the start, McNelis’ thoughts about his father were interspersed with questions related to the contest: the most important of which was: How are we going to score?

Davis, one of two senior captains, said she came in really wanting to win. For McNelis. For the lady from the South. “With all this going on, why not try harder?” Davis says.

The Rebels led by four points after the first quarter and tied their opponent in the second. Ole Miss extended its lead to 11 midway through the third, but the Golden Eagles rallied and trailed by just five heading into the final 10 minutes. Southern Miss’ defense stiffened in the fourth quarter, allowing just 10 points. Davis finished with a game-high 25 points, including an acrobatic layup with 15 seconds left to provide a three-point lead that Southern Miss would not relinquish. The victory kept the Golden Eagles’ undefeated season alive and marked their first victory over a ranked opponent since the 1999-2000 season.

In the locker room, the players doused themselves with water. They jumped into euphoria. But the celebration remained emotionally difficult for McNelis. After each game, he called his parents. McNelis FaceTimed his mother, Nell, who watched the victory on television, as soon as she picked up the phone from her. But he couldn’t tell his father about Davis’ last basketball game, or about freshman guard Morgan Sieper’s four 3-pointers, or about junior guard Nyla Jean’s steal to seal the victory.

The result remained in McNelis’ mind when he woke up at 7 the next morning. She immediately asked her husband, “Is this real?”

“Yes, it’s real,” he responded.

“It was a historic victory and my week was a whirlwind of emotions,” he says.

She looked around her house and saw countless bouquets that had been left at her father’s wake earlier in the week. Like her father, McNelis likes flowers. One stood out, a cypress plant that had been a gift, already decorated with Christmas decorations. She thought about how when she was a child, she and her two younger brothers would go into the woods with her parents to look for a Christmas tree.

This fall, although McNelis received cancer treatment for the third time, other members of the basketball community have been a source of support. DePaul women’s basketball players and staff signed a sign that read, “In this battle, no one fights alone.”

Texas coach Vic Schaefer had #McNelisStrong t-shirts made for his program. Kentucky men’s basketball coach John Calipari, who coached in Memphis while McNelis led the Tigers’ women’s program, recorded a video endorsing the move. So did Yolett McPhee-McCuin of Ole Miss.

These are just some of the small but meaningful gestures. With the school’s support, he is raising money for Forrest General’s Inpatient Navigation Program to help other cancer patients in need. “I have truly been blessed,” she says. “There are a lot of people who have been kind to me.”

McNelis still takes medication. At the end of the month, she will undergo a scan to see if she needs additional chemotherapy and, if not, how it will be processed. But she said that she is not afraid of death. She thinks about the celebration. And about the hymns she wants played at her funeral.

I will cherish the old rugged cross,
Until I finally go to bed with my trophies;
I will cling to the old rugged cross,
And exchange it one day for a crown.

(Top photo by Joye Lee-McNelis: Courtesy of Southern Miss Athletics)

By James Brown

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