University of Tennessee at Martin head basketball coach Jeremy Shulman has elevated assistant coacg Jawaan Holmes to the position of General Manager, and hired Drew Kelly as an assistant.
Shulman described Holmes as the perfect fit for the newly appointed position, which will specialize in a number of roles including roster management/evaluation, retention, scouting, fundraising and statistical analysis in addition to coaching.
“Jawaan’s passion and energy for our program was evident last season,” Shulman said. “Adding a general manager to our staff was a necessary move for us to keep up with the ongoing trend in collegiate athletics. We’re so excited as Jawaan is a tireless worker who will literally be involved in every facet of our program in this new role.”
Last season with Holmes on the coaching staff, the Skyhawks won an OVC Tournament game for the eighth time in their last 11 appearances in the field. UT Martin led NCAA Division I men’s basketball with 16 newcomers and navigated through the entire season without a single minute of playing time from a returner. The Skyhawks wound up ranking in the top-20 in NCAA Division I men’s basketball in offensive rebounding per game (13.73, 12th), bench points per game (29.73, 17th), rebounds per game (39.42, 19th) and three-point field goal attempts per game (28.8, 20th). UT Martin also topped the OVC in three-point field goals made (9.1 per contest) and offensive rebounding (13.1 per outing) in league play.
The Skyhawks posted 14 victories last season against a brutal schedule that included five postseason participants (three of which took part in the NCAA Tournament) and nine games against eventual 20-win teams. UT Martin went 3-1 against the OVC regular season champion (1-1 against Southeast Missouri) and tournament champion (2-0 against SIUE) while also defeating CollegeBasketballInsider.com champion Illinois State.
Holmes owns previous coaching experience at the professional, collegiate and high school levels as the Shepherdstown, W.Va. native graduated cum laude with a degree in business administration and management from Fairmont State in 2008.
Kelly brings 28 years of collegiate coaching experience to the Skyhawk program, spending the last three seasons (2022-25) at Northern Illinois after serving as both the head coach and athletic director at Harcum College from 2005-22. He also served as head coach at Bucks County Community College (2002-04) as well as stints as an assistant coach at The College of New Jersey (2000-02) and Haverford College (1997-2000).
“We are thrilled to bring in a coach of Drew’s caliber,” said Shulman, who wrapped up his first season in charge of the UT Martin program in 2024-25. “Drew brings valuable experience as he has spent the last three years in the Mid-American Conference and was one of the best head coaches in the junior college ranks for nearly two decades. He will be an immediate asset to our roster as we continue to build the program back to the top of the Ohio Valley Conference.”
Kelly got his first full-time NCAA Division I experience at Northern Illinois, overseeing four All-MAC postseason honorees (including just the program’s fourth player to score 1,000 career points in just two seasons) and four Academic All-MAC recipients in his tenure in Dekalb.
In Kelly’s first season with the Huskies, the team reeled off their longest road winning streak in 20 years (all in conference play) while also tacking on impressive victories against MAC champion and 28-win Kent State (snapping the nation’s third-longest winning streak in the process) and an eventual 23-win Indiana State squad out of the Missouri Valley Conference. Northern Illinois showed a four-game improvement in the MAC standings and finished in the top-three in league play in field goal percentage (.480), three-point field goal percentage (.368), field goal percentage defense (.445), three-point field goal percentage defense (.325) and assists (13.8 per outing).
The Huskies boasted their best start to a season since 2015-16 after beginning the 2023-24 campaign with a 5-1 record, knocking off Sun Belt Conference regular season champion Appalachian State and DePaul for the first time since 2005. Northern Illinois knocked down 227 three-pointers that season, which ranked fourth in the program’s single-season record book. Two Huskies were named Academic All-MAC, marking the first time that the program received multiple winners of that award since the 1999-2000 campaign.
Kelly built the Harcum basketball program from scratch, accounting for a 429-102 record (.808 winning percentage) since the program’s inception in 2005 until 2022. He won at least 20 games in 16 of his 17 seasons with the lone exception being a 17-1 record during the 2020-21 COVID-19 shortened season. His 2021-22 team went 32-3 and took part in the NJCAA Elite Eight, tying the school record for victories with his 2013-14 squad that also won 32 games and advanced to the NJCAA Final Four. He also led the school to the NJCAA Tournament during the 2015-16 season and reached No. 1 in the NJCAA Division I poll for the first time in program history in 2009-10, winning 25 straight decisions to become the first Region XIX program to top the poll since 1974.
Overall, Harcum had a pair of top-five national finishes and five top-10 national finishes after transforming the Bears from almost 90 years as an all-female private junior college with no athletic department to a NJCAA Division I powerhouse. Individually, Kelly sent 46 student-athletes to the NCAA Division I level during his time in Bryn Mawr, Pa.
Kelly went 22-19 in his head coaching career at Bucks County Community College in Newtown, Pa., making it to the Eastern Pennsylvania Collegiate Conference semifinals in his first season as a head coach. He worked as an assistant under John Castaldo at The College of New Jersey before assisting Michael Mucci at Haverford in Pennsylvania.
A Liberty Corner, NJ native, Kelly was a student assistant under head coach Steve Lappas for four seasons at Villanova before graduating with a degree in geography in 1997. Kelly also earned a Master’s degree in counseling from the College of New Jersey in 2002.
