Kathy Delaney-Smith

Delaney–Smith grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, one of six children. She attended Sacred Heart high school, but the school had no gym classes so she picked up her basketball skills playing on basketball courts across the street from where she lived. She played on the basketball team in high school and became the first female in Massachusetts basketball history to score 1000 points. However, she joked that this was because the coach was her mother who made her teammates passed to her.[2]

She attended college at Bridgewater State, but the school had no varsity teams for women, just a club that place more emphasis on making sure everyone received equal playing time than on winning. Delaney – Smith Did not find that competitive enough. She was a good swimmer, so wanted to compete on the swim team but the school only had a synchronized swimming team. She ended up enjoying her four years on this when team even though it wasn't competitive enough for her.[2]

After graduation, her goal was to become a swim coach. She knew that Westwood High School, a few miles to the south of Newton, had constructed a new swimming pool, so she applied for a position as teacher and swim coach. She interviewed with the school superintendent, whose daughter played on the basketball team. He mentioned the basketball team was "terrible" and asked "can you coach them and can you win?" She responded that she could.[2]

The challenge wasn't always easy. Although she played in high school, she played the six-on-six version of basketball, a very different style of basketball than five person basketball which she now had to learn how to coach. The team went 0–11 in the first season, but over the next 11 years, the teams she coached had six undefeated seasons, a 204–31 record and won a state championship.[3]

Delaney-Smith is a strong advocate of gender equity. While at Westwood she filed multiple Title IX lawsuits to help ensure that the players had sufficient resources. There were other challenges as well. In the mid-70s, she and her team played a road game. The team had changed from street clothes into uniforms in the locker room at their own school and then traveled to the game. They returned to their own gym, "tired, sweaty and eager to retrieve their belongings", but their own gym was occupied by a visiting boys team. They were told they had to wait. Delaney-Smith disagreed, and led her team past the teacher guarding the door. She remarked, "I think it was a little frenetic, to be honest." but she made her point.[4]

Due to her success as a high school coach she received numerous inquiries for a college position, but the first one she took seriously was a call from Harvard due to the commitment to gender equity demonstrated by the hiring committee. Even after being hired by Harvard, she continued to have to fight for her teams. On one occasion, when traveling to a road game, the team showed up for the pregame shoot-around but found that the men's team was using the gym.[5]

The transition to the college game mirrored, in some ways, her start as a high school coach. While they won a few games in our first three seasons, Harvard finished last in the conference in each of those years. That would change in the 1985–86 season, when the team had the first 20-game winning season, went nine and three in conference, and finished in a tie for first place, her first of many conference titles. That first conference championships is one of her fondest accomplishments, which she savors because she believed her team "outworked most opponents".[3]

Today, winning the conference means an automatic bid to the postseason NCAA tournament. However, in 1986 not all conferences had an automatic bid to the tournament. The Ivy League would be granted an automatic bid starting in 1994. While an Ivy League team could be invited to the NCAA tournament as an at-large team, it has only happened once, by Dartmouth in 1983. Harvard finished first in the Ivy League in 1986, 1988, and 1991, but did not get their first invitation to the NCAA tournament until 1996.[6]

Harvard first played in an NCAA tournament in 1996. Although they lost to Vanderbilt, they hit 16 three-point attempts in the game, setting a record for an NCAA tournament game that has been subsequently tied but not exceeded as of 2017.[6] In 1997, they again won the Ivy League, going 14–0 for their first ever undefeated conference season[7] and an invitation to the NCAA tournament, where they faced top-seeded North Carolina and lost.

In 1998, Harvard again won the conference, and had its best season ever winning 23 games, helped by the leading scorer in the nation Allison Feaster, who averaged 28.5 points per game. They were invited, as expected, to the NCAA tournament, but despite their overall performance they would receive a 16 seed. They traveled west to play number one seed Stanford Cardinal on their court. However, Stanford would be playing without two of their best players, Vanessa Nygaard who was injured in the Pac-10 final conference game while Kristin Folkl was injured shortly after in a practice. Despite the losses, the Cardinal were favorites to win the game, as a 16 seed had never beaten a number one seed. As the team walked onto the court, one of the event workers said "Welcome to real basketball".[8] Feaster delivered, scoring 35 points, but it was a teammate, Susie Miller who hit a three-pointer late in the game to secure the win, representing the first, and still the only time a 16 seed has beaten a one seed in an NCAA women's tournament game.[9] The feat has since been matched by the men, as the UMBC Retrievers upset Virginia in 2018.

In 2014, she reached another milestone when Harvard beat Yale 69–65. That represented career win 515, pushing her past Princeton's Pete Carril for the most wins by an Ivy League basketball coach.[10]