McDonnell, '03 was named the boys' varsity head coach at Norwood High School in June after leading the Braintree girls to four MIAA State Championships and over 200 wins. (PHOTO BY Jim Davis/Boston Globe) |
BY Shira Springer
ESPN.com
KRISTEN McDONNELL CALLED her first team meeting in mid-June. With all the returning players gathered in a classroom at Norwood (Massachusetts) High School, she had one pressing question.
"How do you feel about getting some f---ing wins this year?"
The boys looked around, stunned into silence. McDonnell forgot the players knew her as director of the school's guidance department, not an F-bomb-dropping coach. Then, she made a confession. "I swear a lot," she said. "You guys gonna be OK with that?" The players laughed. No problem. Next topic.
"So, elephant in the room," said McDonnell. "I'm a woman." The players laughed again. "Yes, you are," said some of them. There was no problem with that, either.
A few days earlier, McDonnell, 39, had accepted the job as the Norwood high boys' basketball coach. It was a difficult decision, especially since she made her name dynasty-building with the nearby Braintree (Massachusetts) High School girls' basketball team. Over the last six years, she had led Braintree to four state championships.
"I felt like I was cheating on the girls' game," McDonnell said. "It was like, 'Now that I can be this mentor for all these girls, after establishing something that hopefully can push them to be better, am I going to just jump ship? But it was about getting to coach a different group of people, not boys or girls. It was another big challenge. It meant coming into a [Norwood] program where they hadn't had much success in recent years. I wanted that challenge."
There's nothing new about high school teams with female head coaches, not even in the Tri-Valley League where Norwood plays. But while it's no longer a novelty, it's not normalized either. The sports world, even as we enter 2020, remains far from indifferent about gender. When women coach the opposite sex, it's always about more than the game. At least, initially. That's clear with McDonnell in Norwood. It's also obvious in the NBA where 11 women work as assistant coaches.
This summer, 25 miles away from Norwood, Kara Lawson became the Celtics' first female assistant coach. And, predictably, she generated much more interest than previous hires for the same position.
McDonnell gets why there's extra interest in her situation and Lawson's, even if she doesn't like it.
"I'm sick of talking about myself, even as I do it," McDonnell said. "I want it to be about what the team can do and how that can define us."
BEFORE THE NORWOOD job interview, McDonnell scouted the boys' team. She watched game film. Broke it down. Possession by possession. She took notes on players' strengths and weaknesses. She tracked how many passes came before shots and where outlets went after rebounds. By the end of it all, McDonnell knew exactly how she wanted to coach the team.
At her interview, McDonnell handed out a thick packet of papers. It was the final product of her film study. It was page after page of practice plans. "She separated herself from the candidate pool," Norwood High principal Hugh Galligan said. "We saw the best basketball coach in the state, some would argue the region."
McDonnell, '03 was a standout for the Stonehill women's basketball program, leading the team to a regional final her senior year |
It didn't matter that McDonnell built her coaching resume and her reputation over 10 years with the Braintree girls' program. Basketball is basketball. Coaching is coaching. A state championship is a state championship.
But McDonnell knew her decision would be viewed negatively by some in girls' basketball, like she really was cheating on the girls' game. McDonnell also knew her state titles and her record at Braintree (211-32) wouldn't impress everybody. As soon as the Norwood news broke, she received lots of advice, especially from older men.
"One I got a lot was how the pace of the game is different, how I was going to have to make quick decisions," McDonnell said. "They were well-intentioned. But it was almost like saying, 'I'm interested to see if you can keep up with the pace of the game.' That's how it would come across. I was like, 'OK, we'll see.'"
Another popular topic of conversation: the Norwood boys' locker room. "People would come up to me and say, 'How will it work when you have to talk to them in the locker room?' And I'd say to them, 'Have you ever asked a male coach how they go into a girls' locker room?'"
The pace of play and locker room logistics don't worry McDonnell. Not even a little.
Instead, when she accepted the Norwood job, she was most concerned about her Braintree players. "I wanted to throw up because I didn't want to tell the Braintree people I was leaving," McDonnell said. But she had to tell them and tell them quickly. She had to make sure they didn't hear it first from someone else.
On June 14, McDonnell emailed the news with a "very heavy heart" and "very mixed emotions."
"Hi team...I wanted to make sure you guys heard it from me before it gets out there," she wrote. "I have absolutely loved my time in Braintree, and more specifically, as the coach of such incredible people like yourselves ... I'm so sorry to put this in an email but ... I'll be at your summer league game on Monday night and look forward to being able to talk to you all in person. Much Love, Kristen."
McDonnell talked with her players at the summer league game, then there was the Braintree Day Parade a couple weeks later.
THE BRAINTREE DAY Parade is part of the town's Fourth of July celebration. Teams that win a high school state title get to take part. Last summer, McDonnell made her fourth trip down the parade route, her second in a row, and she kept it together until she reached Braintree center. That's where she saw them. The young girls in basketball gear with faces painted blue and white. Braintree High School colors, of course.
The girls would soon play for the high school's powerhouse basketball program. The one marching by, celebrating its latest title. The one McDonnell built from almost nothing.
McDonnell had known the face-painted girls since first grade. She had coached them in basketball clinics and summer camps. She had shown up to their games whenever she could. She had seen their development as critical to the high school's long-term success. But now, she wouldn't be part of that future. She never expected that. McDonnell began bawling. "I was like a puddle, a mess," she said. In the middle of her final parade, her Braintree High players started hugging her, consoling her.
McDonnell appreciated all the support. But the role reversal made her uncomfortable.
"At my core, I think coaches play a very positive part in a team," McDonnell said. "You can help with the culture and in-game strategies. But the kids are the ones that should be the total focus and, at so many points, we get away from that."
McDonnell, '03 (second from left) pictured here with former Director of Athletics Brendan Sullivan, former player and fellow Stonehill women's basketball alum Paige Marshall, '16 and women's basketball head coach Trisha Brown, was inducted into the Stonehill Athletic Hall of Fame in 2013. |
McDonnell was talking about coaches in general. But it's especially true when women coach the opposite sex. Exhibit 1 of many: The fact that McDonnell made local headlines when she took the Norwood job. When Braintree replaced McDonnell with a man who had never coached a high school girls' team before this season, that news didn't receive any notable coverage.
McDonnell made headlines again when she coached her first Norwood game on Dec. 13. There were stories in both Boston papers. The headline in The Boston Globe: "Kristen McDonnell a winner in her debut coaching Norwood boys' basketball team." Arguably, the bigger story was that Norwood defeated Dover-Sherborn, the defending Division 3 state champions, to get that win. Norwood (3-1) opened the season with three straight wins before a one-point loss to Canton on Dec. 28.
Her focus never strays from her team, not now, not when she starred on the court at Boston Latin (Massachusetts) High School and Stonehill College.
BY THE TIME McDonnell entered her junior year at Division II Stonehill College, she had undergone seven knee surgeries. "I would pull her out of drills just to rest her," Stonehill coach Trisha Brown said. "We needed her for games. But I would turn my back after I pulled her out of a full-court drill and she would jump back in. That's who she is." Before her senior year, McDonnell talked to Brown about practice. "I can't sit out drills," McDonnell said. "I know you want me playing in March, but I have to do this my way."
That season, Brown didn't pull her star point guard from any practice drills. And McDonnell and her bad knees played in March. "She actually threw us on her back and brought us to the regional final," said Brown. "She's that talented, an unbelievable shooter, old-school, knows the game."
The quality McDonnell values most in her players is hustle. "The only time I ever go off on my team is when we're getting outworked or getting out-hustled," McDonnell said. "Those are the ones you can't sleep about." Former Braintree player Rachel Norton explained that McDonnell created a "Burn Board" every year. It charted how many times each player dived onto the floor in practice. On the board, each dive after a loose ball got a Band-Aid next to the floor-burned player's name.
For game days, McDonnell gave Braintree players a detailed itinerary. It included a one-page scouting report and life lessons. "She would always be super prepared for anyone we were facing," Norton said. "We had a bio on each [opposing] player, stat lines, what defenses to expect. It was up there with what colleges do." When it came to the life lessons, the season always started with Lesson No. 1: Enjoy the Ride.
And the Braintree Wamps did.
"Our team chemistry was always off the charts," said Norton, 24, a freshman point guard on McDonnell's first Braintree team. "There was a lot of focus on being good teammates as well as good players, a lot of focus on doing the right thing, even when it's hard."
But during the 2016-17 season, that proved especially challenging for McDonnell. While the team finished one win shy of another state championship, a few disgruntled parents attacked McDonnell's character in emails. She was hurt, frustrated and fed up given how much she had invested in the program. "This wasn't about basketball anymore," McDonnell said. "This was way deeper. That's where I lost my mind on it." In April 2017, McDonnell resigned from her position as Braintree head coach.
That move made headlines, too. So did her return to the Braintree bench three months later. Then came two more state championships. The life lesson learned from all that?
"You can't separate it all on the court," McDonnell said. "If a parent or a student-athlete doesn't love what you're doing on the court, then that's going to go against your character in some way. I always thought you'd be able to separate those two ... Now that I've lived that, everything kind of rolls off my back. I don't take anything personally anymore. You just stick to what you believe in and stay true to who you are."
McDonnell brings that perspective to Norwood. And she believes she's a better coach because of it.
SIX MONTHS REMOVED from the F-bomb and the elephant-in-the-room introduction, senior Stephen Reen has a different memory from that first team meeting.
"What I really liked is how she spoke about watching film on us," Reen said. "She was saying what we need to do better and pointing out the good things we do. It was great to see she put work into our season that's months away. She was already setting an example for work ethic."
The Reens are a basketball family. All six kids play. The two oldest girls competed for the local AAU program where McDonnell also coaches. Stephen Reen is captain of the Norwood boys' team this season. "When my older sisters heard the news, they called right away," Stephen said. "They said I was lucky, very lucky, to have her for my senior year."
When McDonnell took over the Braintree program, it was barely competitive. That first season, life lesson No. 18 was "Nobody likes a Goliath." Now, that lesson fits her new team. From what McDonnell saw during film study, she believes Norwood is much better than last year's 6-14 record. Maybe even a playoff team.
A promising sign for the program's future: Nearly 60 boys went to a preseason team meeting in early November. A few nights later, 40 boys showed up for open gym. Impressive in a Boston suburb that's always been more of a hockey and baseball town.
The toughest part now for McDonnell: Getting basketball back to being just about basketball.
