Full Great Women Great Danes Interview Transcript
UAlbany's Great Women Great Danes is a new series that will be published during Women's History Month. The series will feature Great Danes, past and present, and celebrate the women of UAlbany.
Q: As a student-athlete, you were a successful basketball player for both Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Can you tell me a bit about your student-athlete experience?
A: I think being a student-athlete is a really unique experience because right when you get to college you get to be a part of a team. You have a built-in family when you’re away from your family. Being able to accomplish that dream of being able to go to college on a full scholarship and play the sport you love was a big accomplishment in itself. When I look back on my life now and I see what it was like to be a student-athlete, to have all these resources for me to be successful in the classroom just added to the value of being a student-athlete. I had coaches that pushed me and cared about me as a person and as a basketball player and, also, just to get out of my comfort zone and to learn a lot of valuable lessons for life. I knew it in the moment, like, wow this is really special, not a lot of people get to do this, but I didn’t really understand the lasting impact my coaches would have on me for my life. And my teammates; growing and competing for a goal to win games and to win a championship provided me confidence in my life that allows me to know, well, if I got through those hard times that there isn’t anything I can’t do. As a woman being able to do that and having people in my family like my mother and my aunts not having the same opportunities, it was really cool for them to be able to experience it too, through my eyes.
Q: You were named a captain of the Wildcats in your first season. What was it like to have that honor before even competing?
A: That was an amazing honor. When I transferred from Rhode Island to New Hampshire, the NCAA rules at the time said you'd have to sit out a year and redshirt. But I was so excited to have a fresh start. In my last experience at Rhode Island, although I loved the campus and I really enjoyed my decision to go to the school, the basketball wasn’t ideal. We had coaching changes and players that had left the program so it was a little just disheveled. When I had the opportunity to have a fresh start at New Hampshire, it was really exciting for me to be able to just take the knowledge that I knew from two years of being a college player and to have a whole new chance to be different. To learn from those first two years, I was already a junior but really people knew me as a freshman because I was new so I could set a standard for what I wanted to do and I just really tried to focus on being a great teammate and being supportive of my teammates. I was never going to be the most talented player on the court, but I was always gonna be the hardest working and that’s what I kind of prided myself on. I think that work ethic and that understanding of a perspective like, you know when you go into a team that only has one coach, they think things are difficult but when you’ve been in a different situation and you know there are different types of coaches, you have an appreciation and gratitude of what different situations can provide. I think that perspective and my hard work really allowed me to emerge as a leader and then my coaches looked to me as a leader. That was a huge honor for me and something I am very proud of.
Q: What made you want to coach women’s basketball?
A: I think I kind of thought about it for a long time, even when I was in high school, I thought about how cool it would be to be a high school coach or to be a college coach or just a coach in general, I’m not sure what level. When I got into college, my freshman year I had an assistant coach that I really looked up to, Dayna Smith, who is now the head coach at Cornell. She pushed me and I saw how much better I got by playing for her. I thought, wow, that is a really cool thing to do. She was a really good point guard, I was a point guard but then after that, two years of having not a very good experience at Rhode Island as a player, I thought like oh goodness I don’t know if I ever want to play basketball again. I thought when I left Rhode Island I didn't think I would play basketball, I thought maybe I'll just be a student at Rhode Island or go to UMass Lowell and just go to school and not continue my career. Luckily, I had the opportunity to go to New Hampshire. And when I had that re-found love for the game I realized that, no, I really did want to coach and this was something that I needed to do because I wanted to be a female leader that could lead and motivate young people. I truly did understand the lasting impact that a coach can have in a positive or negative way and I wanted to be one of those coaches that led my players as a coach with integrity and with respect. I wanted to be a coach that could be pushing them and challenging them in a positive way and be one less person that wasn’t doing it the right way.
Q: Can you bring us through the path that brought you here? You started at Northern Illinois as a director of basketball operations and now you're a head coach at UAlbany, how did you get here?
A: My path has been crazy because I did transfer, so I redshirted and did a fifth year at New Hampshire and right after college I tried to coach. I applied for 100 jobs; I applied to be an SID, an equipment manager, facilities, marketing intern, director of basketball operations, graduate assistant; I must've applied for over 150 jobs on NCAA.org. I would go every Monday and I would FedEx my cover letter and resume and send them out, and for a whole year, I got not one response, not one response of anything. I got an interview, right in like August, right after I graduated college, to be an assistant in Toledo, but I didn't get the job. I was devastated, then I was like, oh gosh Toledo, from Boston, I was a little nervous about that anyways. But I didn't get the job and that taught me a lot. I didn't give up my dream to do it but I just had to wait another year, so in that year I did sales. I did human resources and I worked for a year after but I was still committed to my dream of being a coach. So I started to try to go to practices. I was calling coaches that I knew; Karen Pinkos, who had recruited me to go to Northeastern, Dayna Smith, who had coached me at Rhode Island, Sue Johnson, who was my coach, and I tried to start networking.
Then, with a random letter to FedEx, I had applied to be the director of basketball operations in Northern Illinois. That’s in DeKalb, Illinois, which is 60 miles west of Chicago, or 80 miles west of Chicago, in the middle of corn country…very different from where I grew up, but the head coach was from Lee, Mass. She saw Mass. and she was like 'oh wow a Massachusetts girl,' she called me up on the phone and gave me a phone interview. I was so excited, I had waited a year. They brought me to an interview on campus, it was between me and three people. I remember thinking from my previous interview in Toledo, why didn't I get the job? They said well we really didn’t know that you wanted it, I guess they could tell it was Toledo and I was a little nervous about moving out there, but I never asked for the job. I made sure that I told Carol Hammerle that I want the job - please hire me, I will do anything that you ask, I will work tirelessly to do this job the best I can, I want the job, please give me the job. I asked for the job and I got the job. I packed my Pathfinder, I moved out to DeKalb, Illinois and with tornado warnings the first day I moved in, I was petrified. I had never been in a tornado before. I learned a ton, we had a great staff. Unfortunately, that year her contract did not get renewed so we all lost our jobs. I was on contract ‘til June and I lost my job.
So, I ended up getting fired from my first job, I had to pack my Pathfinder up and drive it back to Chelmsford. Luckily, Karen Pinkos, who was the assistant at Northeastern, was the head coach at Southern New Hampshire at the time, recruited me and hired me in kind of a part-time role that turned into a full-time role. I didn’t have health insurance, the whole nine yards. I commuted from my parents’ house an hour. That was a really great experience, I did Division II, in which you do everything, you wear every hat. We started a camp, we had a golf outing, I was recruiting, I was scouting, I was live-scouting, I mean everything. You have to work really hard and you have to understand everything. I was the director of basketball operations, kind of the low-man on the totem pole at the Division I level. Understanding what all goes into a program and I’m a Division II assistant for two years and then I had the opportunity to go and work for Lehigh University. I worked for Sue Train, which was amazing. I was there for a year; we had a great year - I was a Division I assistant so I had my hand in a lot of different stuff there. Then, I got out of coaching for a year. I didn’t coach for a whole year after that because my now-wife, Lauren, got a job in Connecticut so I decided to step away from coaching and I worked as a pharmaceutical representative for a year.
I never wanted to stop coaching so I got back into it the next year. I was offered a job at LIU Brooklyn and was there for two years. We had a very successful run there. Then, from LIU Brooklyn, I got the Army job. As soon as I got the Army job, that really… things changed in my life. I was at a high academic institution, I was working for an extremely well-respected coach who had a lot of success on the men’s and women’s side. Dave Magarity, he was a tremendous mentor to me. I got to recruit very high-level student-athletes and nationally recruit. That really changed the kind of pile I was in. We had some tremendous success. I recruited an ESPN Mid-Major Player of the Year, on her coattails we had success, and I had success. We had a terrific team, we had almost 100 wins in four years. Six straight, 20-win seasons - really unprecedented success that opened the door for me to become considered to be a head coach. I had my first head coaching interview in 2014, then in 2015 with a different school became a finalist for the head coaching job but I didn't get either one. Fast forward to 2018, I was a finalist again for the same school as in 2015 didn’t get it. Again, involved with jobs and people hearing my name, involved with jobs and then the UAlbany job opened, and there had been so much success there. They had seven straight postseason appearances, and they had gone to the final game in their most recent year. Coach Abe had created this into a mid-major powerhouse, winning games in the NCAA tournament. I was kind of like wow that's a really attractive Division I job to get. But it’s really difficult to take over a really good program with a lot of turnover. With people graduating and even after I got the job, players transferring that were supposed to be here. But having the opportunity, I applied for the job, I got an interview, and somehow I got the job. I had to fail a lot, I had to be a bridesmaid a lot and fail a lot before I was able to get this job.
Q: How does it feel this year to be here, as a head coach? You fulfilled your dream and you just completed a 20-win regular season.
A: It’s very exciting. It has been a long road but it has been a fun road because it’s taught me so much. In times when things are really difficult and stressful is when you really grow and learn and you really figure out what you’re made of. My first couple of years just trying to figure out being a coach. I mean coaching is practically impossible anyways, it isn’t an exact science, you can’t possibly be perfect at it. There are 20 different ways, more than that, of what you can do in any given situation but when I first got the job here I focused on building relationships. Building relationships with the administration and building relationships with the players, although we did not choose each other, they didn't choose me, I chose them. I chose to come here and to coach them. I tried to get them to buy into that, we wanted to help them to grow as people. Most importantly, I wanted them to graduate and I wanted them to be successful in the classroom, all the while trying to make them better as basketball players. Slowly, you start recruiting your own players and you start recruiting into your own system and just your culture. Now being able, four years later, I think even with COVID, we probably would have had more marked success last year had we had more practices and not such really difficult situations with our pauses. I think we did learn a lot and get closer that has helped our culture now. I mean all these players that we had recruited, my staff has worked tirelessly to internationally recruit to try to get high-level players but at the end of the day we have recruited really good people. These student-athletes are really kind to one another, they're good teammates, they're unselfish, they celebrate each other and that kind of culture lets you have sustained success. We knew as coaches that we could try to go to the transfer portal quickly or we could get the highest level player but not really know them as a person. That could only be a quick fix and it could be a disaster. We really tried to do it slowly, the right way to make it to this point and have 20 wins. When I started off my career 1-9, banging my head against the wall, questioning myself, questioning if this was the right decision; knowing I just kind of had to stick to it, I think everyone kind of questions themselves and just wonders can you really do this? Can you really have that kind of stick-to-itiveness, just putting one foot in front of the other, and trying to make the right decisions, trying to work as hard as you can, trying to be a good boss to your assistants? I want them to move on and continue to grow as professionals, but I know that they are really bought into what we did together here and what we wanted to build. To be able to do that in four years and to go from where we were to where we are now, I have a lot of pride in that for my staff; for our hard work but more importantly, it is the players. If you don't have good players, I could be the best coach in the world and if I don't have good players, you can’t win. I have to give them all the credit for their hard work and what they have done to get us to this point.
Q: Ahead of the 2021-22 season, you were named Women’s Basketball Speaker for Coaches Powering Forward, can you tell me about this program and how you got involved?
A: Coaches Powering Forward is a program that two NCAA coaches started. Both of their sons are on the spectrum and they decided that they wanted to use their platform to raise awareness. So they got their national men’s basketball association to get involved with autism awareness. They approached them to say hey listen and if we could just get our coaches to wear this pin, especially the high-level coaches, when they have all their national-level TV games; the weekends of February when the big games take place with the famous coaches. People are asking about the pin and then people will be asking about autism. We all know that when you raise awareness and when you talk about things, for instance, autism, there is just more acceptance and more understanding when people are different. There is a sense that when things are different you want to not accept them. It is scary when you don’t know when people are different. So I got involved with it two years ago. When my boys were diagnosed, I saw that there was this game that you could do, Coaches Powering Forward, so we registered and we wore the pins. Binghamton actually participated with us the year before COVID. That meant a lot to me. They sent us the pins and it was really something big on the men's side but a couple of teams were doing it on the women’s side, mostly following the men’s programs.
Mark Benson is good friends with Pat Skerry, the head coach at Towson and one of Coaches Powering Forward's founders, and when my boys were diagnosed on the spectrum he gave me Pat’s number. So I called up Pat. When this all happened I was pretty much telling everybody in the world. Like everyone became my best friend, if you knew something about autism because I just needed help, I needed reassurance. I needed to know what was happening, there wasn’t a lot of literature, there were no support groups. My wife and I felt very lost and out of control, like what was going to happen with our boys, what did we need to do, where do they need to go? So, Mark set me up with Pat. I called Pat, he talked to me and connected me with his wife. I talked to his wife continuously during this process when my boys were getting diagnosed. Pat was the catalyst for me getting involved in Coaches Powering Forward and trying to push it over to the women’s side.
Q: You have had all this success in your career, what does it mean, and/or how does it feel that young women look up to you because of it?
A: It feels like an amazing opportunity but it also feels like a big responsibility. It really does. It’s so important and part of my philosophy, or my core values, is to help promote women. I think especially in this industry, in the sports industry, especially in women’s basketball we’re losing female coaches, we’re losing women in the profession. It has to start at a young, young age to fall in love with basketball, to fall in love with sports. Sports build self-confidence, self-worth, better grades, resiliency, just amazing qualities as you get older. For women to be involved in sports, they number one need the opportunity but they also need the role models. For me, that’s why I hire all women on my staff. Men are great coaches; I worked for a great coach, but we need more women. I need my assistant coaches to see me as a leader, see me as a coach that has a family and that can do everything that I want to do as a woman. So that they can see themselves and my players can see themselves, so that the high school kids can see themselves and so forth and so on. If you can’t visualize it and have a model for what you wanna do, how can you aspire to be it? I think that’s my number one goal, is to feel like I have the opportunity to be a role model and I take it seriously. It really feels good to be able to do that and I just wanna do the best for them and try to show them that. Also, it’s okay to make a mistake, it’s okay to be vulnerable, it’s okay to not be perfect. Just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean you have to be perfect all the time; you can still make mistakes and you can still say sorry for them. Or, that you can still be vulnerable and still be a leader. I think that is kind of sometimes what women feel, especially young girls, like they don’t want to fail. They don’t want to put themselves out there but you have to. Failure is the best part because then you can grow from it.
Q: How did the women around you make you the athlete and woman you are today?
A: I have some amazing women that I grew up with, not just coaches, but family members, specifically two people - my mother and my aunt.
My mother has had the same job for over 50 years at the same place. She’s a pediatric nurse. I think it’s unbelievable. She went to nursing school at 18 years old. She raised two kids. She’s been there on that unit except for six months, she was on the intermediate, and then she got the pediatrics job and she has done that job ever since. I remember when she would work evenings and nights, and still make ends meet. Me saying ‘oh, you know can you just call out sick?’ And she would always say, ‘no, who’s going to take care of the sick kids?’ Just showing me what hard work looked like, commitment and dedication. She never complained about her job. Ever. She just had this amazing work ethic, you know a really present mom. That gave me a working mom example, a really good example of what I could do … that hard work pays off … that being committed to something is really important.
My aunt, Gail, was the first female officer in my town. There were no women in the 80s in the police force. My uncle was in the police force. Hearing her stories of like graduating from the police academy and being the only woman and having to wear the boots and getting hazed, then just watching her career while she broke barriers and broke ceilings and became the first female sergeant, the first female lieutenant, the only female lieutenant who has ever been there. And retire from the PD after thirty years. Her confidence, her ability to go against the grain, her wherewithal to withstand adversity. And to have a job that most people didn’t think a woman could have, or a woman wanted to have because it was so uncomfortable. She did it and that was a really good example for me. That I could do anything I could set my mind to.
My grandmother always said it to me, you don’t settle. My dad has always said that to me. My dad is like a major girl-dad. He’s always cheering for me and he’s like don’t settle, don’t just be this. Be great. Dream. Have lofty goals. Try to go for it, don’t be scared. It’s OK. Fail, fail, fail, just be great. Just keep trying … don’t limit yourself. I think having people around me that encourage me to do that sometimes it was a little bit difficult to see at a time where you want to stay safe or say maybe I’ll go to Hollywood and be a movie star - no, that's probably not going to happen. I think just feeling like, okay you can. Or, you just have people in your life that give you confidence that you could do it. It is amazing.
Then I think about being in a college basketball environment and being around strong women. I’ve always had female coaches. I had a female high school coach, I had a female AAU coach, three female college coaches and they’re powerful women. That’s a role model. That was a way that I could envision myself doing something and knowing that more women need to try to really do this, and have this really, it’s a hard job.
Q: What does women’s history month mean to you?
A: I think women’s history month means … it has a significant impact on me because I think of it on so many different levels. I think of it so often - I think about when my grandmother was born in 1919. When women got the power to vote and that’s the year she was born - women’s suffrage in 1919. It’s really not that long ago when Title IX was passed. How things change for even current coaches that lived through the Title IX era. In the 80s, Billie Jean King broke down glass ceilings and became the first female tennis player to get endorsements. All of that just when you’re younger it seems like so far along ago, so far away ago. It’s like that happened many many many years ago. But it’s not … it’s not that far removed. To think about my mother, born in the 50s, all she could do is be a nurse, a teacher, or a secretary/bookkeeper. All they had … they had field hockey to play and that’s it. Things have changed so much. But they haven’t changed completely, we still have a long way to go. It’s for all the women that fought for our rights; for our reproductive rights, for so many things that we now take for granted. The people in our recent history, my parents’ age, that fought for what we have. But we have to keep fighting. We have to follow suit. We have to be courageous. We can’t just settle for what is in front of us. We have to be better for the generations behind us. That’s about encouraging women, that’s about being role models, that’s about striving for equality and we have come a long way, but we have a long way to go. It’s an appreciation for all those people before that didn’t even get to reap the rewards that we get to reap and they fought for them and they didn’t really get to experience those. But just to not take it for granted and to keep fighting and to keep working towards feeling like there’s an equal playing field and equal levels in all areas. In the government and politics, job hiring, athletics… across the board.
For more interviews from the Women's History Month #GreatWomenGreatDanes series, click here.
