Two teams, two new head coaches, two different journeys but one goal — make the 2021-22 season great.
The definition of “great” can be relative, though. At defending Northeast Conference champion Mount St. Mary’s, 32-year-old Bethesda, Md., native Antoine White was promoted to his first head job, taking over a team favored to win the league again. Back in Baltimore at Loyola, basketball lifer Danielle O’Banion gets another shot as head coach, inheriting a Greyhound team that has chased its own tail in recent years.
Both coaches face challenges, but neither is daunted. Excited may be the better description.
“Am I lucky? Yeah, I am, but I also believe I earned this position,” said White, who was on Maria Marchesano’s staff before she left for the head job at Purdue Fort Wayne last March. “I’m excited to continue to put in the hard work and be the leader of this program.”
O’Banion, hired last April, has the tougher task ahead getting the Greyhounds back on track. Loyola was 0-13 and has had one winning season among the last 14. O’Banion isn’t used to results like that after several successful seasons in two stints as an assistant at Minnesota. Overall, she has 10 postseason appearances in her 20 years of coaching at Minnesota, Memphis, Kent State and Harvard.
“We have all the resources available to compete for championships in the Patriot League, and that was something that was important to me,” said O’Banion, last a head coach at Kent State from 2012-2016. “I was not actively looking to leave Minnesota. They’re about to sign a top-10 recruiting class. … So a lot of what we identified as areas of opportunity [at Loyola] during the interview process we’ve set about addressing.”
Job One, based on her assessment of tape from last season, was fitness and conditioning. For the time ever in the history of the Loyola women’s basketball program, O’Banion assembled her team for eight weeks of summer school and workouts.
“All of our returners, on average, added 20 pounds to their Olympic [lifting] maxes after the work,” the coach said.
That’ll likely lead to improvements in areas like rebounding, where Loyola was ninth in the 10-team Patriot League (-6.3 margin), field-goal percentage (last at .327) and defensive field-goal percentage (ninth at .443 allowed).
The extra time this summer also allowed for the squad to improve team chemistry, another area O’Banion saw suffering, even on tape.
“The time for food and fellowship, eating together twice a day, helped,” O’Banion said. “And every Wednesday we reserved for ‘team time’ where we didn’t touch a basketball. We sat in a room and talked about what our core values are and what it means to exemplify those. We learned how to communicate with each other.”
Loyola senior Laryn Edwards liked the results as the Greyhounds raced toward their season opener Nov. 9 at Niagara.
“I’m very excited for this year because our team bond is better,” she said. “Everyone has the same goal. We really don’t have anything to lose after last year. We know what we have to do to be the team that we want to be.”
The new-and-improved Greyhounds have four starters back, including McDonogh product Taleah Dixon, a team leader along with fellow seniors Edwards and Devyn Newman.
“Taleah has really established herself as one of our more reliable ‘Big Three,’ and she’s playing like a senior,” O’Banion said. “She provides a certain level of poise and composure you only learn after you cut your teeth for a few years.”
The 5-foot-10 Dixon averaged 8.1 points per game last year and she was on the Patriot League All-Rookie Team in 2019. She’ll be joined in the backcourt by junior Bri Rozzi, who has the tools to run the offense faster, another part of O’Banion’s plan.
“We’re excited about having some veteran guard play because teams that I’ve been around that have played into the postseason have always had that,” the coach added.
Mounting A Charge
At The Mount, White, who began there as an intern in 2016, is tweaking the offense a little to take advantage of a talented roster that features 2021 NEC Player and Defensive Player of the Year Kendall Bresee. The 5-foot-10 Bresee led the Mountaineers in points (13.7 points), rebounds (8.5) and assists (4.2).
White’s calling card in his rapid rise has been based in building relationships.
“For me it’s just important to continue to do what got me into this position and that’s to continue to build my relationship with our players, continue to work hard for them,” White said. “It would be kind of foolish to try to switch up anything I’ve been doing the last couple of years.”
New Mountaineer Tess Borgosz, a graduate transfer from Towson, agreed.
“I felt ‘Toine was very genuine,” she remembered of her experience in the transfer portal. “This wasn’t my first rodeo. The staff that recruited me at Towson left before I played there and my impression of [White] was that he wasn’t trying to B.S. me or anything like that. Obviously, he’s new and he’s young but he knew what steps he wanted to take going forward.”
White has been taking those steps rapidly. After graduating from Walt Whitman High School, White’s playing career at Chesapeake Junior College ended quickly, felled by a knee injury just six minutes into his first game. He dropped out, began coaching recreation basketball in Bethesda, ultimately becoming junior varsity girls’ coach at Whitman under head coach Pete Kenah.
White was coaxed back to the hardwood by another Bethesda native, Mount men’s coach Dan Englestad, who recruited him to play for Division III Southern Vermont. (Englestad was the head coach at SVC at the time.) A three-year captain, White finished as SVC’s career assists leader and then took that internship at The Mount.
“The Mount has been good to me, and now to be taking over after Maria decided to go back home, it’s a special place for me and a really good feeling,” he said.
White has eight letterwinners, including the top three scorers back off last year’s 17-7 championship team that was bounced by Maryland in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. The Mountaineers open Nov. 9 at Seton Hall.
O’Banion Sees Bigger Picture
As for Loyola, O’Banion has some experience all over the roster and five newcomers to add the energy that comes with youth. One of the newcomers, 6-foot-1 Lex Therien, is the third Therien sister to play at Loyola. Isabella is a 2021 graduate who led the team in scoring (12.6 points) and rebounding (7.1) last season. Ava is a senior this season after sitting out last year. They’re all daughters of former Philadelphia Flyers standout Chris Therien.
Appropriately, O’Banion is changing her program on the fly.
“We’ll play faster than they have in the past,” O’Banion said. “We’re asking them to make decisions faster than they’ve been used to, so it will be a mix of being opportunistic in transition, a mix of zone and player-to-player defense. We’ll need to be judicious in the half court, running offenses that will allow everyone to touch the ball, which I think is the way most players want to play.”
O’Banion noted marked improvement from the Greyhounds’ first scrimmage to their second. She has a plan in place as she has moved seamlessly into her new role.
“I’ve seen ‘fit’ work and I’ve seen fit not work,” the veteran coach added. “And being at Loyola University is a great fit for me.”
Truth be told, O’Banion not only brings all that experience to bear on the basketball court, but in life. She is a lymphoma cancer survivor and beat it back into remission sixth months after her original diagnosis in 2015. O’Banion was presented the U.S. Basketball Writers Association Pat Summit Most Courageous Award at the 2016 Final Four.
Taking over a struggling program doesn’t seem such a big ordeal with that experience on her resume.
Photo Credits: Courtesy of University of Minnesota Communications and Mount St. Mary’s Athletics