Clover High School hires Shakkia Walker as its next girls basketball coach
Clover High School didn’t have to look far.
Shakkia Walker, a former Blue Eagle basketball player and a longtime Clover assistant coach, has been named as the school’s next head girls basketball coach.
Walker takes over for Sherer Hopkins, the all-time winningest coach in Clover girls basketball history who stepped away from the program at the end of March.
“It’s very exciting,” Walker told The Herald in a phone interview Wednesday afternoon. “Sometimes you just sit there and think, ‘Will this moment ever happen?’ And then here it is, here I am, being able to become the head coach at Clover High School.
“I had great leadership and great mentorship from Coach Hopkins, and I’m just very excited to see what happens next.”
Walker said that she met with Clover basketball returning players Wednesday to inform them that she’ll be their coach next year. She’s already mapped out the month of June’s summer basketball activities, she said, and plans to meet and introduce herself to the district’s middle school basketball players in the coming weeks.
“We are taking off,” she said.
Walker grew up in Clover and graduated from Clover High in 2001. She was a player on the girls basketball team that made the state finals in 2000 — which at the time marked the deepest run in program history — and she was also an assistant on the 2021 team that delivered Clover girls basketball its first state championship.
After graduating, she went on to Claflin University before returning to Clover and joining the high school’s coaching staff in 2011.
“Shakkia has been part of the two most successful runs in Clover girls’ basketball history, first as a player and then as an assistant coach,” Clover athletic director Bailey Jackson said in a statement. “She has been an integral part of our latest success and was the overwhelming choice of our interview committee. She is ready to lead our program, and I look forward to working with her in her new role.”
This is Walker’s first head-coaching job, but there’s plenty of reason to believe that she’ll run the program much like her predecessor did for over two decades.
And her predecessor ended on quite the high note. Clover finished 18-6 overall and went 8-0 in Region 3-5A in 2021-22 — earning its third consecutive region championship and its fourth consecutive year with a playoff win.
“It truly means a lot to follow in Coach Hopkins’ footsteps,” Walker said. “She’s been with me since I’ve been in eighth grade, so she had to watch me grow as a person and has helped me out on my journey.”
Walker added: “She was there for 22 years, so that foundation is set. It’s for me to take what I’ve learned from her and to make it grow and expand it even more.”
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