Matthew Reichert ’28
Staff Writer
In 2023, Maureen Magarity coached the Holy Cross Women’s Basketball team to their first NCAA tournament appearance in over fifteen years. The next year, she won the conference regular season championship, she won the conference tournament, and she brought her team back to the NCAA tourney. The year after that, she was no longer coaching—she had resigned.
The statement Magarity made explaining this resignation said, in part, “While I know the timing is not ideal, after much thought I’ve decided to prioritize and focus on my family… I feel excited to be more present for my daughters.”
While this sounds like the sort of familiar thing an embattled coach reads to appear enthused about a not so voluntary resignation, there was no scandal, there was no pressure to leave. The statement was true. Maureen Magarity was putting her family first.
In 2019 Coach Magarity began a relationship with John Becker who, if you live near the University of Vermont and follow the men’s basketball team, you may know as Coach Becker. In 2023, they became engaged, but they were still coaching separate programs at schools that were over a three-hour drive apart.
Each had kids of their own and three hours apart is no way to raise a family together. So, Maureen Magarity resigned. She moved herself and her kids to Burlington. She became the director of major athletic gifts at UVM but, for the first time since she graduated college, she would not be a coach.
This is a choice very few other coaches would be able to make. In the world of high-level athletics, families are often sacrificed at the altar of excellence. Pitcher Early Wynn was once asked if he would throw at his mother on Mother’s Day and he said, “I would if she was crowding the plate.”
In reality, the choice is seldom whether or not to bean mom because she’s toeing the diamond. It is whether to be at home with the family or on the road scouting, at dinner in the dining room or at dinner with a recruit. Maureen Magarity had to make the ultimate choice: have her team or have her family.
She chose her family and it was a decision she lived with happily. Then, on April 11th of this year, the University of Vermont’s Women’s Basketball coach Alisa Kresge (Magarity’s best friend) took the head coaching job at Richmond.
On April 13th, Maureen Magarity was named the head coach of the UVM women’s basketball team. As if a karmic reward for her commitment to her family, she was given a near impossible-to-imagine opportunity.
Maureen Magarity and John Becker would become only the second married couple ever to lead Division I basketball programs at the same school (Lewis Jackson and Freda Freeman-Jackson of Alabama State were the first). They could be coaches, and they could be together.
The challenges do not evaporate simply because Maureen Magarity and her husband work at the same university. There are still the recruiting dinners, still the money to be raised. Now there is even the gym time to bicker over.
Still, Coach Magarity is uniquely blessed. Few people get to do what they love and, since her early days raised by Dave Magarity (former Marist Men’s and Army Women’s head coach) she has loved basketball.
A minuscule few get to do it so close to whom they love and, since she has taken her office, Coach Maureen Magarity is only ten doors down from Coach John Becker. They share a home and a complex. They share a school and a family. If they are successful, if their programs meet their potential, their teams may share a place in the rafters as conference champions. No victory, for either coach, could be more special.
Featured image courtesy of Holy Cross Athletics
Leave a Reply