Matteo Venieri
venam@bu.edu
Walking into Marisa Moseley’s office can be a pretty humbling experience. On the walls, there are two framed basketball jerseys, an Emmy Award in one corner, and on a table an Olympic medal, a Coach of the Year award and five championship rings. With the exception of Bill Belichick, perhaps no other coach in town can proudly display such an impressive collection of championship hardware in their workplace. Yet, her demeanor suggests that her most important victories can’t be put in a glass case.
After graduating from Boston University (CAS ’04), Moseley worked for ESPN alongside the late Stuart Scott for a little less than one year. But the basketball sirens kept singing an irresistible melody in her ear. She spent the following 13 years as an assistant coach, notably nine of them at the University of Connecticut under Hall of Famer Geno Auriemma.
During her near decade in Storrs, the Huskies went 331-14, built a 126-game win streak and won five NCAA championships. “For nine years of your life you were just going and into games with the expectation you’re gonna win,” she says. “And anytime there was just one loss, it was like, what’s going on here?”
At first, the big leap from assistant to head coach was full of doubts and second-guessing. During her first month at BU, she remembers calling coach Auriemma, crying. “I think I made a mistake. Can I come back?” On the other side of the phone, her mentor calmly replied, “Marisa, every first-time coach feels that way. As much as I’d love for you to come back, that’s not how this works.” Auriemma told her that it was time for her to cut her teeth at BU, and that her alma mater was a great opportunity to learn, grow and make mistakes.
“And I thought, that’s excellent advice to me,” she recalls. “ And so I did that and I think it was the best decision I could’ve made, to be honest.”
BU endured a disappointing 2017-18 campaign that led to the firing of the former women’s basketball coach. When Moseley returned to campus, she knew that no one had high hopes for her team. In fact, the Terriers were projected to finish ninth out of the ten teams in the Patriot League, something that the Springfield, Mass. native made sure everyone took note of.
She printed out the preseason poll and highlighted BU’s spot in the rankings, giving her team a clear message: “We’re better than ninth.” And her players proved her right, finishing in fourth place with their first winning record (15-14) since 2013.
While a winning record was a reason to celebrate, it also clearly indicated that she had to recalibrate her expectations and find new ways to define success. Losing 14 games was definitely uncharted territory for Moseley. In one season, she amassed the same amount of losses that she had witnessed in the previous nine years combined.
As a BU player and team captain, she took a lot of pride in her competitive nature and her disdain for limits. In her four years in scarlet and white, she led her team in shots blocked and steals, while helping the Terriers make their one and only NCAA tournament appearance in 2003.
Now, as a coach, she wants to instill that same mentality in her players, making sure they have an expectation of excellence in everything they do – on and off the court. Even when this doesn’t translate into a win in the standings, Moseley knows that this modus operandi will accompany them when the ball eventually stops bouncing.
When she talks to her players, Moseley said the message is always the same, “I want to help you develop into the best woman that you can possibly be. So, what are some of the things that we’re going to need to do to help grow you as a woman? I think as a female coach I have a unique ability to do that. And then as a female coach of color, there’s another layer to that.”
The early exit polls suggest that she’s on the right track. After her first year at BU, not only did she win the Patriot League Coach of the Year award, but also – and perhaps more importantly – she received many letters from some of her players, and their parents or relatives, thanking her for what she did for their daughters and the impact that she had had on them in that one year. “And so to me,” she says, “that helped me redefine what success versus failure was.”
“But don’t get me wrong,” she adds, “I want to win.”
With last season serving as a stepping stone, Moseley’s Terriers are ready to take another step in that direction. Entering her second season as BU’s head coach, she knows that the bar is going to be higher. When this year’s preseason poll was published last week, BU was projected to finish fourth in the conference.
Again, Moseley printed out the sheet, highlighted the team’s ranking and set a different standard for her team. “I think we’re better than fourth,” she said.“So for my team, we talk about winning a Patriot League championship and going to the NCAA tournament. Whether people picked us or not, these are our goals and we don’t feel like that’s a pipe dream. We feel like that’s a reality.
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