He Won A High School State Title, Now He Aims For A National Championship At MDC

Miami Dade College’s new men’s head basketball coach—Jorge Fernandez— has won a state championship at Doral Academy Preparatory School and served as an assistant coach at the University of Miami and Marshall University.

Now Fernandez enters his first season as a head coach at the college level, as he replaces Kevin Ledoux, who resigned from MDC in May for personal reasons.

“I want other teams [to] say, ‘those guys play hard. I don’t know if I want to play against them again,’” said Fernandez, who started at MDC on Aug. 2. “I just want to be a tough-minded team and you do that by your defense, rebounding, and taking care of the ball.”

The Sharks only have two players returning from last year’s squad. Wing Dashaun Joseph, who averaged 7.7 points per game last year, and point guard Alex Sanchez, who only played 11 minutes.

Fernandez has hit the recruiting trail hard in the past few weeks to fill out his roster. He expects to announce several signings soon.

“Being a Miami native and a former Division I assistant coach, he has local connections and the resources at the Division I level to be able to recruit in the community,” said MDC athletic director Alysia Dyer. 

Fernandez’s teams are known for opportunistic defense and good shot selection, a vastly different style than the Sharks have utilized under Ledoux, who favored press defense and high-volume three-point shooting.

That frenetic pace did not fare well for Run MDC, who went 57-78 the last five years. Fernandez wants to change that narrative. 

“I like to play fast, but also, I’m about taking good shots,” Fernandez said. “I like the three ball as much as anybody, but the problem is sometimes people get too happy [and] they want to shoot too many of them and it’s not about getting threes up, it’s about taking good shots.”

Fernandez is no stranger to building a successful program. Most recently, he served as the head basketball coach at Doral Academy for the past seven years, winning a state title in 2018.

“That team [the 2018 state champion] wasn’t the most talented, but it was [the] hardest working team I’ve ever been around and they all liked each other and worked together,” Fernandez said. “There was no selfishness. Everybody accepted their roles.” 

Before Doral, Fernandez had two stints as an assistant coach at the college level. In the 2011-2012 season, he served as a coach at Marshall University. Before that he was at the University of Miami for seven years in a variety of roles including as associate head coach and recruiting coordinator. 

At UM, he recruited shooting guard Jack McClinton, an American Athletic Conference first-team player in 2008 and  2009 and shooting guard Durand Scott, who made the ACC all-freshman team in 2010.

But despite the success, Fernandez also faced some criticism related to his time at the school. He was investigated by the National Collegiate Athletic Association after evidence surfaced that he bought an airline ticket for one of his players at UM, that player’s high school coach and the mother of another player. Fernandez was at Marshall during the investigation but he resigned from the school to avoid being a distraction. 

After the NCAA concluded its findings, it slapped him with a two-year “Show Cause” that put him out of coaching until he resurfaced at Doral Academy in 2014. Now he is attempting to rebuild his college coaching career at MDC. 

“I made a  mistake that changed my life in a lot of ways but I learned from it,” Fernandez said. “You have to. I paid for it but it is behind me and I’ve moved on.” 

The Sharks have open tryouts on Sept. 4, begin practicing in October and start the regular season in the first week of November. They play three of the top 25 state college teams—Chipola State College, Florida Southwestern State College and Indian River State College—in Division I, according to the final 2020-21 season rankings. 

Fernandez’s new players are confident that he can steer them in the right direction.

“It is the trust that he can do it at the [Division I] level,” Joseph said. “It can transfer to this level [junior college] and our games.’’