Calling Markisha Wright a winner is like saying East High alums stick together.

Her high school basketball teams went 87-10. Her college teams were 143-10. In her first year of college coaching, that team was 28-5, a balance sheet that included a school record 22-game winning streak.

Wright led the East High girls basketball team to the state title in 2011 before going on to Notre Dame where she played in four Final Fours, advanced to the NCAA championship game three times and was named a team captain as a senior. She also made the academic honor roll in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

After she graduated with a degree in sociology in 2015, Wright came home for the summer, unsure of her next step.

“I got a call from Coach (Sam) Powell (her high school coach at East),” she recalled. “He wondered what I was up to and said Jenny (Drake women’s head coach Baranczyk) asked about me. I told him I love Jenny. She recruited me when I was in high school and she was an assistant at Colorado before coming to Drake.”

This time Wright said yes to Baranczyk and enrolled in grad school, joining the Drake coaching staff as a graduate assistant. A year later she was hired as a full-time assistant coach.

We caught up with her this week at the Knapp Center on Drake’s campus where she was working summer camps packed with young girls who dream of the success that Wright has achieved.

“I actually started out as a cheerleader when I was about seven,” she said. “But I kind of outgrew that. I got so tall that I started playing. At first, I wasn’t very good.”

Still, she enjoyed the game, so she kept at it. Now she is playing it in a different role.

“I never realized how hard the coaches work until I started coaching. I always thought the players work hard, which is true, but so do coaches, I realize.”

Before meeting with us on Thursday afternoon, for instance, she had to take a test that morning on NCAA recruiting regulations.

“I passed,” she said, smiling. Good thing, because her next assignment after the camps wind up is to hit the recruiting trail on the lookout for future Bulldogs.

“I enjoy coaching and I want to make a career of it,” Wright said, but she’s smart enough to recognize that coaches need time to develop, just like players do. Eager to get away from home after high school, she saw the pluses of returning after college to start a career.

“I have so much to learn and this is a great place for me to do that. Coach Baranczyk and the rest of the staff are great mentors.”

One of the ways she hopes to pick their brains is figuring out how to give back to the community that was the launching pad for all of her success. It’s not as simple as offering to help out Coach Powell back at East, as an example, because of her position at Drake and all of the minutiae of the NCAA rulebook.

While she feels her way into outreach activities that won’t jeopardize her job, just consider her an outstanding role model. All the way from the gym floors of Des Moines to the Final Four and a degree at Notre Dame – and back.