Kendra Whitehead is in her eighth season as the head coach of the Cowgirls after being hired in 2018. At HSU, she has a 146-41 record in her first seven seasons. For her career, she has a record of 213-59 in her first ten seasons as a head coach.
In 2025, Whitehead led the Cowgirl team to the ASC championship game where they finished runner-up. That year she coached the ASC freshman of the year, later named the D3Hoops.com national rookie of the year.
In 2024, the Cowgirls went 26-4 and advanced to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament. They also won the American Southwest Conference regular season and tournament titles.
In 2023, she led Hardin-Simmons to its first NCAA Tournament win since 2006 by beating Redlands in the first round in 2023. In 2022, the Cowgirls won the American Southwest Conference title.
In her first year at HSU, she orchestrated a huge turnaround. She inherited a team that went 6-20 in 2017-18 and the Cowgirls won their first seven games of the year to surpass the win total from the year before. HSU also won its first American Southwest Conference Tournament game since 2011.
She has coached three All-Americans at HSU - Natasha Blizzard, Parris Parmer and Paris Kiser. Parmer and Kiser were both selected to play in the WBCA all-star game. Kiser and Parmer have both won ASC Player of the Year honors under Whitehead and Parmer was the ASC Woman of the Year.
Whitehead came home to the Cowgirls from the University of Texas at Tyler, where she was the head coach for three seasons. She led the Patriots to the Elite Eight in 2016, when they went 30-2 and won the American Southwest Conference title. She was the ASC and South Region Coach of the Year in 2016. Whitehead had been a successful assistant coach since graduating from Hardin-Simmons, prior to getting the head job at UT-Tyler. She had coaching stops at Forney High School, Charleston Southern University, Fort Worth Paschal High School, Carroll University in Wisconsin and Abilene Christian University. She was also a graduate assistant at Oklahoma State.
The former Kendra Anderson is the most decorated player in the history of the Cowgirl program. She was also a two-time ASC female athlete of the year. She was a three-time American Southwest Conference player of the year. She earned the Wade Trophy as the top player in Division III as a senior in 2003. Was a two-time first-team all-American and a two-time academic All-American. Named the Texas Woman of the Year by the NCAA in 2003.
She has been inducted into the American Southwest Conference, Big Country and Hardin-Simmons Athletic Hall of Fames. She was named to the D3hoops.com all-decade team. As a player, she was a part of four teams that won American Southwest Conference titles and advanced to at least the Sweet 16 of four straight NCAA Tournaments. She helped lead the Cowgirls to a No. 1 national ranking for a good part of her senior season. The Cowgirls went 104-11 in her four years at HSU.
Whitehead is married HSU football offensive coordinator Jeff Whitehead in April of 2022. She has a daughter, Kaylee. She has a bachelor's degree in all-level physical education from HSU and earned a master's degree in exercise science from Oklahoma State University. She is a native of Colorado City, Texas.
| Year |
Overall |
ASC |
| 2016 |
30-2 |
15-0 |
| 2017 |
20-7 |
11-5 |
| 2018 |
17-9 |
13-5 |
| 2019 |
19-8 |
11-5 |
| 2020 |
21-7 |
13-3 |
| 2021 |
16-5 |
11-4 |
| 2022 |
21-5 |
13-4 |
| 2023 |
24-4 |
18-0 |
| 2024 |
26-4 |
14-2 |
| 2025 |
19-8 |
4-4 |
| Career |
213-59 |
123-32 |
