WEST HARTFORD – Wendy Davis was putting shingles on a roof when she got a call about the women’s basketball coaching job at the University of Saint Joseph.
Davis, who helped the UConn women’s team to its first Final Four in 1991, didn’t really want to coach anymore. But she got down off the roof and called then-athletic director Bill Cardarelli back. It was a week before the season started and his coach had just left.
She agreed to do it for a year, then maybe he could find somebody else.
Davis is in her seventh season now. On Saturday, her Blue Jays won their first Great Northeast Athletic Conference championship since 1998, beating St. Joseph’s College of Maine, 66-59, in Standish, Maine, and they are headed to their first-ever NCAA Tournament.
She’s still climbing ladders, only this time it’s to cut down the net.
“Being from UConn, she knows how to win,” said USJ graduate student Jordan Ouellette, the conference tournament MVP. “She knows how to get teams to win. She has confidence in us, she knows how to prepare us.”
The Blue Jays (19-9) found out Monday that they will play Johns Hopkins in the Div. III NCAA Tournament first round on Friday in Baltimore (7:15 p.m.).
USJ lost to St. Joseph’s College last year in the conference championship game in Maine. Even though the Blue Jays had a 24-4 record, they didn’t get an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament.
So Davis upgraded the non-conference schedule and made sure the players were ready this year.
“We weren’t ready last year,” she said. “This year we went there again, but now we’re not rookies, now we’re veterans, now we know. It was their chance for a redo. And they did it.”
Ouellette, a Bristol Eastern graduate, led fourth-seeded USJ with 18 points. She and another graduate student, E.O. Smith graduate Taylor Verboven, played all 40 minutes in the championship game. Verboven scored 15 points and had eight rebounds.
“We had a different energy when we went up there,” Verboven said. “We were confident. We had a better practice before the championship this year. We were locked in all week. We had three really tough games and every game, we brought the same energy.”
Davis, who coached at Western New England College for six years and Trinity College for 11 before coming to USJ, said she stayed because she loved it, even though her first USJ team only won three games. She had met her players for the first time on the first day of practice.
She wasn’t planning on coaching anymore after she left Trinity. She had started working for a contractor and remodeled houses. Then Cardarelli, who coached the last USJ women’s team to the last conference championship in 1998 (the team did not go to the NCAA Tournament then), called.
“Thank God,” she said. “Had I not (gone to USJ), I would have spent the rest of my life having a bitter taste in my mouth about coaching. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I was remodeling houses, that’s why I was on the roof. I built decks. It was fun. I enjoy that kind of labor.
“By the same token, I’m afraid of heights. When Bill called, I’m thinking, ‘How many more years can I do this?’”
Cardarelli’s assistant in 1998 was Debbie Fiske, formerly Debbie Baer, Davis’ teammate on the 1991 Final Four team.
They’re all on a texting chain – Kerry Bascom, Fiske, Kris Lamb and others from the 1991 team – and Davis’ phone blew up when she left the gym.
“I’m the type of person, I can’t have that red number on my text,” she said. “And I got on the bus and I had like 88 (texts) and I went into panic mode. I started answering them, I got to 50 something and I’d respond, and they’d respond back.
“I wanted to enjoy the moment. So at one point, I put my phone down. And I enjoyed the moment with my team.”
On Sunday, UConn coach Geno Auriemma was asked about Davis and her team’s accomplishments.
“None of that surprises me,” he said. “You talk about a kid who was so independent, so self-sufficient – as a student, all she needed in September, ‘Give me the syllabus and I’ll see you for finals.’ In basketball, it was ‘Let me play, coach me and I’ll do the rest.’
“She did it all without any fanfare. I was always amazed watching her play – her attention to detail was second to none. I’m sure she carries that over to her coaching and it’s no surprise everywhere she’s coached, they have tremendous success.”
