Chayla Cheadle enters her first season with North Alabama Women's Basketball for the 2025-26 season.
Cheadle comes to Florence with seven years of coaching experience, recently serving as the head girls basketball coach at Blue Valley Northwest High School in Overland Park, Kan.
During her tenure at Blue Valley Northwest, she led the Huskies to 26 wins in her two seasons from 2023-2025. Cheadle led the team to back-to-back sub-state championship appearances, and she was nominated for Kansas Class 6A Coach of the Year in 2024. Her experience also includes serving as a club coach for the Missouri Phenom 14U and 16U teams from 2023-2025. In 2024, her 16U team reached the Final Four at Nike Nationals.
Her initial coaching experience came from 2018-2023, serving as the varsity assistant coach in the Olathe School District of Columbia Public Schools.
She coached at Olathe North High School for the 2018-19 season before moving on to Rock Bridge High School for the 2019-20 season. Cheadle additionally served as the junior varsity head coach at Rock Bridge. She returned to Olathe North High School to coach from 2020-2023 before assuming her head coaching role at Blue Valley Northwest.
Cheadle also has the distinction of being a former collegiate and professional basketball player.
She was a four-year standout at the University of Kansas, appearing in 118 games while starting in 90 from 2014-2018.
Cheadle scored 575 points in her collegiate career, while proving to be a force on the boards with 450 rebounds. She led the team in rebounds during the 2016-17 season (4.7 per game), and she was also a three-time Academic All Big 12 selection in 2015, 2017 and 2018.
Cheadle's professional basketball experience comes in the form of a one-year stint with Portuguese basketball club S.L. Benfica. She played during the 2018-19 season, averaging 11.3 points per game and five rebounds per game. She scored in double figures seven times across the season, including a career-high 27 points against CAB Madeira on March 10, 2019.
Cheadle graduated from Kansas with a Bachelor of Science in Sociology with a minor in Applied Behavior Science in May 2018.
