Bio

Kristen Dowling enters her eighth year as head women's basketball coach for the 2019-20 season, after leading the Athenas to the last six straight SCIAC regular season titles, as well as four SCIAC Tournament titles.

Dowling quickly put her imprint on the program, improving by 15 wins from her first season (9-16, 2012-13) to her second (24-4, 2013-14), which set a new CMS record for wins in a season. She has since matched that 24-win total on two other occasions, including this past year, when the Athenas finished 24-3, their sixth 20-win season in a row. 

Following the program's fourth straight SCIAC Tournament title in 2017, CMS defeated the University of Texas-Dallas in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. its second straight season with an NCAA Tournament win. At the end of the 2015-16 season, the Athenas won their first NCAA Tournament game since 1996 with a victory over Trinity (Tex.) in the Texas-Tyler Regional.

In the 2014-15 campaign, Dowling was named SCIAC Coach of the Year after helping the Athenas amass a perfect record (16-0) in SCIAC for the first time since the 1987-88 season. Over her first seven seasons, Dowling has compiled an impressive 146-46 record, good for a .760 winning percentage, as well as a 93-19 mark in league play (.830). In fact, if you eliminate her first season when CMS finished 5-11, her conference record is 88-8 (a .917 winning percentage). 

Prior to joining the staff at CMS, Dowling spent the 2010-12 seasons as an assistant women's basketball coach at Pepperdine University, where she helped the Waves to an 18-12 finish and a spot in the postseason Women's National Invitation Tournament in her final season. It was her second time on the Waves coaching staff, as she also served as a fulltime graduate assistant for Pepperdine from 2006-08. She spent the 2008-09 and 2009-10 seasons as an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator at CSU Bakersfield before being asked to return to Pepperdine as an assistant in June 2010.

At Cal State Bakersfield, Dowling was part of a coaching staff that guided the Roadrunners to the two best records in school history. Her 2008-09 team compiled an overall record of 19-10, and the 2009-2010 squad posted a 16-13 mark, which was tops among the seven NCAA Division-I Independent women's basketball programs, earning Bakersfield its first Division I post-season trip to the Women's Basketball Invitational.

Dowling played collegiately at the University of Redlands, where she led the Bulldogs to their second-ever Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference title in 2004, and helped the university win a Women's Basketball Coaches Association Class Act Achievement Award. Dowling graduated Phi Beta Kappa, earning her bachelor's degree in Spanish, with a minor in physical education. She went on to earn her master's in educational technology at Pepperdine, and is a graduate of Nike's "So You Want to Be a Coach" program, as well as the NCAA Women's Coaches Academy.