The Legendarium: A Monarchy In Virginia, Part 2
Our 'Legends of March' series comes to a close as the college season is at an end. This installment of The Legendarium wraps up Old Dominion's run of greatness and the legacy they still leave today.
Wendy Larry couldn’t believe it when she heard the news that Marianne Stanley was leaving Old Dominion. But she understood, on some level. The call of home, that desire to have your kids around their extended family is important and that’s what drove Marianne’s bold choice.
So while some couldn’t fathom leaving a dominant program two years removed from an NCAA championship to take over a mid-tier Ivy League program, Wendy got it. Moreover, she was interested in who Old Dominion would hire in Marianne’s place, given that it was now one of the best jobs in women’s basketball under one of the most forward thinking athletic directors in college sports.
What Wendy Larry didn’t expect, two years into a program building job at the University of Arizona, was that Jim Jarrett would be calling her.
Wendy’s Way Back
When Stanley left Old Dominion, Jarrett knew that he would have to ace the next hire to continue the Monarchs run alongside Louisiana Tech as the best mid-major program in women’s basketball. His strategy of ‘selective excellence’ — identifying sports where ODU could become a perennial power — had paid dividends as national titles in several women’s sports started to adorn the athletic department’s trophy cabinets.
So Jim Jarrett’s first phone call was to the University of Iowa’s C. Vivian Stringer.
“Stringer was the number one pick,” Wendy says. “And the reason that didn’t transpire was that, at the time, our medical facilities did not cater to Vivian’s daughter.”
Back at square one, he decided to return to a winning formula. After the 1985 championship, Wendy was given the chance to build up the University of Arizona’s program. Her first year was a success in the PacWest, going 19-9 and tying for second in the league. But the next season, the Wildcats were folded into the Pac-10 and the level of competition increased substantially. Undeterred, Larry knew there would be ebbs and flows in trying to turn around a historically below .500 program.
Furthest from her mind was the Old Dominion job, as she didn’t even think she would be under consideration to succeed Marianne.
“If it was meant to be, it was meant to be at some point,” she explains, “other than me just getting out there and getting settled in and starting to make inroads in the Pac. So I was very surprised when I got the call.”
That phone call led to an interview, which was a closely guarded secret among everyone. Wendy was effectively sworn to secrecy and brought out to Norfolk for a clandestine tour of some new facilities and a meeting with ODU’s President, Dr. Harold Marshall.
“I wasn’t even allowed to tell my family that I was on the east coast or my friends that were right in Norfolk and Virginia Beach,” recalls Wendy. “So it was weird but, you know, as God will have it, I was given that opportunity and Jim gave me the chance of a lifetime.”
Monarchy & Diplomacy
Continuing to take up the mantle for Marianne wasn’t going to be easy and Wendy knew it. From 1987-1990, the Monarchs won the Sun Belt but weren’t finding the same level of overwhelming national success. They were good enough to make the NCAA Tournament as a 5 or 6 seed but were falling to major powers of the time like Auburn or Ole Miss.
After a 5-21 season in 1991, the first sub .500 season since 1972-1973, Wendy knew a rebuild was in order. Old Dominion left the Sun Belt after that season and joined the Colonial Athletic Association as the Monarchs decided to make forward Celeste Hill as the focal point of the offense. Within a year, they were right back in the NCAA Tournament and prepared to own their new league the way they had the Sun Belt.
That summer Dartmouth graduate Allison Greene stepped on ODU’s campus, preparing to write a thesis.
“It was on diplomatic communications and how the internet changed how we do diplomacy,” she explains.
Greene was a former college basketball player herself, having been recruited by Wendy Larry when Allison was a high school prospect out of New Jersey. She ended up going to Dartmouth where she excelled on and off the floor, eventually playing a year of professional basketball in Portugal. It was there that Greene was exposed to a teenage sensation from the coastal city of Figueira De Foz.
“It was an exhibition against the [Portugal] national team,” Greene remembers. “And she was doing behind the back passes through the legs, these fakes, these incredible moves with her handle. And I said to my team, ‘how old is she?!’ and they’re like ‘she just turned 16’.”
After the game Allison Greene walked over to Ticha Penicheiro, who had just turned 16 a week earlier, and asked if she would be interested in playing college basketball in the United States.
“Her eyes got as big as saucers and she’s like, ‘that’s my dream’,” explains Greene.
She planned to go back to Portugal to play another year of pro ball but her club lost its’ sponsorship. So Greene, at her college coach’s suggestion, decided to coach for a year or two, get a masters degree and then maybe return to the game. Her choices as a graduate assistant were at Old Dominion and USC, where former Monarchs head coach Marianne Stanley was the head coach. ODU was right in the shadow of NATO’s North American headquarters in Norfolk. The school had a great international population and a renowned international studies program. What Greene may not have expected was to put her diplomatic skills to use almost immediately.
“I was a restricted earnings coach for the first seven of ten years [coaching],” Greene says. “So I couldn’t travel and I did all of my recruiting over the phone. I spoke Portuguese and French and the untapped market of those two colonial languages in Africa were French and Portuguese speaking. So nobody else was recruiting.”
Sometimes, she would serve as a translator over the phone for Wendy and Anne Donovan. When the latter two would travel to Europe or Africa to recruit the players in person, former contacts or teammates of Greene’s would serve as the go-between. The first two talents Old Dominion identified was Ticha Penicheiro, the teenage prodigy, and a teammate of hers: Clarisse Machanguana.
“Ticha recommended that we watch [Clarisse] play as well,” Greene adds, “which was a no brainer to bring her together.”
The results were almost immediate. Old Dominion posted their best record under Wendy Larry during the 1993-1994 season and only improved from there. A full-on international pipeline, far ahead of its’ time in women’s basketball, was established in Norfolk. Soon, another recommendation came to the Monarch’s coaching staff.
Mery Andrade was a year younger than Ticha and actually played on the same club team Allison Greene did although they never were on the floor together. But the Cape Verdean forward’s reputation preceded her. Old Dominion’s international success started to attract other teams and Andrade found herself hotly pursued by Purdue and their head coach Lin Dunn.
“I called Ticha,” Mery remembers. “I was like ‘I got this call and I think I’m going to Purdue. And she was like ‘No, no. Don’t sign anything! Coach Larry’s gonna call you!”
While she didn’t think that the Monarchs were interested in her, it turned out that they wanted her badly. So Andrade joined her fellow Portuguese expats and the melting pot of ODU women’s basketball really started to boil.
As the coaches tried to learn about cultural customs and standards, the language of basketball was a unifier for everyone. Coach Greene’s office became a consistent stop for the international players who needed a place to decompress and speak to someone who understood the language. They were, after all, a long way from home.
Some learned English by virtue of being around American classmates or teammates, others watched TV. But Ticha, a prolific connoisseur of American R&B, learned through music.
“We were watching the same programs like Martin,” says Nyree Roberts, a New Jersey native who was in the same recruiting class with Penicheiro, “[we were] watching a lot of the same shows, listening to the same movies. I enjoyed it.”
In many ways it was a lesson in cultural competency for everyone, from American to foreign born players to the coaching staff themselves.
“What was crazy was watching Coach Greene be able to switch in and out and coach in different languages,” Nyree adds, “And I thought ‘man, oh man, this is impressive.”
Heading into the fall of 1996, the team chemistry coalesced into something special. Wendy Larry knew she had a deep and talented roster, far beyond what the average CAA team was capable of putting on the floor. The Monarchs opened the year ranked No. 7 in the country. They went 2-1 against Top 15 teams in their first seven games (the loss coming to regular nemesis NC State) before hosting No. 1 Stanford in the ODU Fieldhouse.
“The Stanford game in ‘96 was insane,” recalls Felecia Allen, a manager for the team during that time. “That’s when I knew this was something different. We beat them in the Field House and that was the first time where I was like ‘whoa, this is big’. They stormed the court, we’re just trying to get to the locker room. It was insane.”
The Monarchs of old returned, harkening back to the 1979, 1980 and 1985 seasons. They defeated No. 9 Tennessee in the Norfolk Scope, the city venue usually only reserved for the biggest of games, before dominating the entire CAA to cruise to a 26-1 regular season record.
But Wendy Larry didn’t realize the nature of how special the team was until the 1997 NCAA Tournament, during a practice in the ODU Fieldhouse after the Monarchs narrowly escaped an upset at the hands of Purdue.
“Mery walks off the court,” Larry remembers. “She goes over to the water cart and said ‘I’m going home. I can’t play with these people anymore. They don’t care enough about us winning.’”
“To me, as soon as [it’s] practice time, we’re here,” Mery says, “There’s no bullshit. That was one of those moments.”
“I called the captains — Ticha, Stacy [Himes], Clarisse — and I said, ‘Mery has something she wants to tell you’,” explains Wendy. “She said ‘I’m going home. I don’t think you guys care enough about winning’. And I said ‘okay so here’s the problem: you have a sophomore that doesn’t think you are playing hard enough or care enough. We’re going to leave until this gets straightened out and then we’ll come back’.”
Old Dominion left for West Lafayette to play in the NCAA Regional the next morning and, secretly, Wendy was hoping the matter would be resolved soon. Turns out it only took a matter of minutes.
“We weren’t even down the steps of the field house when Ticha came running out and said, ‘We’re straight. Mery’s staying. We’re ready to win a national championship,” she says.
The Monarchs would beat LSU and then Florida to advance to the Final Four where they saw Stanford again with a trip to the national title on the line. Down 15, Clarisse Machanguana scored 18 second half points to lead the team to overtime. Ticha hit a runner with 1:28 left on the clock to tie the game and then hitting the winning free throw to win in the extra frame.
“It was one of the finest games the Final Four’s ever seen,” says Larry, “Really, tremendous game.”
But the win came at a price, as the overtime thriller meant tired legs in the national title against a Tennessee team angling for some regular season payback. Old Dominion tried to pack the paint and stop the Vols budding sophomore superstar, Chamique Holdsclaw. It didn’t help that the title game was in Cincinnati, less than four hours from Knoxville and the University of Tennessee’s campus.
“I’d never been in a gym where I couldn’t hear Ticha call out the plays,” Roberts says. “I couldn’t hear Coach Larry call out the plays. We had to use sign language. There were just so many Tennessee fans.”
The Lady Vols would indeed get their revenge, bouncing back from a 10-6 start to the season to win another national title under Pat Summitt. Old Dominion, while coming up short like their mid-major running mate Louisiana Tech did in 1994, garnered praise and another generation of fans to follow them. For the next three seasons, they would make the Sweet Sixteen although the senior swansong in 1998 was spoiled by that longtime nemesis, NC State.
But the graduating class of Penicheiro, Roberts and Manchanguana didn’t mean the international pipeline would stop or slow down. In fact, it became a fundamental component of the next five years of ODU’s dominance on the national stage.
Changing Dominions
Hamchetou Maiga-Ba grew up playing basketball in Mali, learning from her mother who used to be a professional. Growing up in a developing nation with a large traditionally Muslim family, she considered herself lucky to be in an environment where a girl playing sports was accepted and cultivated.
“The only condition was to study,” she says. “But not many definitely had that privilege [of playing].”
As her career took off in Africa, she started to look across the Atlantic to schools in the United States. Amie Kane, a Senegalese player that Hamchetou looked up to, was going to play at a JUCO called Midland College. Old Dominion, while somewhat known in basketball circles abroad, wasn’t known to Maiga-Ba at all. But they were her only two scholarship offers. Allison Greene sent the young Hamchetou a media guide, curated by the now-legendary Debbie White, to give the Malian star an idea of what the Monarchs program was about.
“I loved everything they had in the book,” Hamchetou says. “Then there was a picture of Coach Larry sitting with a towel on her, and the intensity in her eyes drew me to that. I’m like, ‘I would love for her to coach me.’”
While she still was interested in playing with Amie Kane, she realized that the Midland coach hadn’t actually seen her play whereas the Old Dominion coaches had. Kane recommended that Maiga-Ba go to ODU since it was a Division I school, a term she didn’t know at the time but trusted off the word of her friend.
When she arrived, ODU was already well suited to the needs of international students but still had some things to learn. Mery Andrade was the senior presence on the team while the African contingent now had three players: Hamchetou, Lucienne Berthieu and Mamissa Mwenetanda. The group typically hung together but would also get opportunities to be exposed to activities they had never heard of.
“I had my [first] Halloween when we went to Coach Larry’s house,” Hamchetou remembers with a chuckle. “I didn’t even know what was Halloween. [We] had so many team activities that we never felt alone.”
The proactive nature of the coaches also helped. Wendy Larry and Anne Donovan would learn certain customs their players had. Maiga-Ba remembers a situation in which she had to tell the coaches that in Mali, crossing arms when listening to an elder is a sign in respect. Here in the United States, it’s seen the opposite way, especially on a basketball court.
“I wrote a letter to [Coach Larry],” she says, “And explained to her some of the cultural things. And after that, she got a better understanding of my culture in that sense. But if I look at the big picture, I’ve had so many coaches. She was by far the best coach I had in my career.”
Old Dominion continued to dominate the CAA, going undefeated in conference play from the 1995-1996 season until the 1999-2000 season (a record of 80-0). But amid the Sweet Sixteen runs, Top 5 victories and CAA titles, there were other components that stick out to players and coaches as fundamental memories.
Hamchetou and some other teammates would observe Ramadan, fasting and refraining from drinking water between sunrise and sundown. Initially, during practice water breaks, she would go shoot free throws while the team hydrated. Eventually, her teammates joined her and didn’t take water breaks. So the coaches started to have practices before sunrise or after sundown. On road trips, they would stop the bus so she could conclude her Maghrib prayer — the traditional prayer towards the Kabaa in Mecca that is observed five times a day — before continuing on to their destination.
“It was one of the best years,” Hamchetou remembers. “It was a family.”
As the millennium turned, the major conference powers started to distance themselves from mid-majors. Powered by television revenue that came primarily from sports like football or media deals done by the “power five”, it started to become harder for programs like Louisiana Tech and Old Dominion to remain contenders.
But in Hamchetou’s final season, in tandem with Lucienne Berthieu and sophomore Monique Coker, the Monarchs made one final charge. As a 7th seed in the NCAA Tournament, they beat Georgia before upsetting second seeded Purdue and third seeded Kansas State. They would fall in the Elite Eight to the future national champion, UConn, who was flush with future hall-of-famers from Sue Bird to Diana Taurasi to Swin Cash. It would be the last time ODU would make a regional final.
Although they made one more Sweet Sixteen run in 2008, the changing business model of collegiate sports was making it harder for women’s basketball programs to sustain themselves at the mid-major level. While certain men’s teams had the capability, the NCAA’s decision to not add revenue shares to the women’s tournament meant you couldn’t build a sustainable model as a ‘women’s basketball school’.
In 2010, Dr. Jim Jarrett, the architect of selective excellence and the longtime advocate of Monarchs women’s basketball retired. One year later, Wendy Larry would hang it up as well.
“The leadership you have, it falls from the top,” she says. “You see it in some programs that existed at a very high level. There’s a leadership change, there’s a commitment change, there’s a philosophy change.”
The Queens of Old & A Monarchy’s Legacy
Jim Jarrett, according to Wendy Larry, was weary of bringing the football program back. But a unanimous vote by the Board of Regents in 2005 left him with few options. He hired Bobby Wilder in 2007 and the program played at the Division FCS, for the first time since World War II, in 2009.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the funding required for the football team had a ripple effect on other sports. The legendary Old Dominion field hockey team, who had won nine national titles between 1982 and 2000, was moved away from Foreman Field to the Powhatan Sports Complex.
Karen Barefoot took over the Lady Monarchs program and made a few WNIT’s before resigning after the 2017 season. Old Dominion moved to Conference USA, reuniting with former league rival Western Kentucky, but the luster of the games had worn off as dominant powers took over the women’s game. Nikki McCray Penson joined ODU to rebuild the program, achieving a 24-6 record before COVID shuttered all postseason opportunities. That season, she left for Mississippi State before resigning after a year citing health reasons and a long term battle with cancer. She sadly passed away in 2023.
In the time since, former Florida star DeLisha Milton-Jones has been leading the program, regularly guiding the Monarchs to Top 5 finishes in C-USA and then the Sun Belt where the program now resides.
“They’ve carried the banner,” says Marianne Stanley, the three time national champion head coach that build the ODU program. “Obviously, the larger schools with bigger budgets have crashed the party. But we made our mark by making a decision when it wasn’t popular in a lot of places.”
The ethos was simple, yet effective: If you build it, they will come.
Dr. Jim Jarrett, who is still around at the age of 86, is widely credited with having the vision and foresight to see what women’s basketball would become.
“His daughter was a great tennis player,” Greene explains, “And he was like ‘she should be able to get a scholarship,’ and there was nothing for her. So he said, ‘that’s not okay. I need to do something.’”
Over the years, Old Dominion has continued to fight an uphill battle as a mid-major hoping to reclaim some of its’ former glory. Former players and coaches appreciate some of the outreach done by the University but lament the lack of participation or invitation that has occurred from past coaches or administrators.
“We’re not around the team as much as [the 80’s teams] were around us,” Nyree Roberts adds. “And I think it’s a miss, not because we don’t live in Norfolk, but there’s a little bit of a disconnect.”
But to women’s basketball fans and those within the game, the 30-plus year legacy of the program is unimpeachable. Ticha Penicheiro is now an agent, helping guide athletes to opportunities to play at the next level. Mery Andrade is a coach with the NBA’s Toronto Raptors, continuing a legacy of opening doors for women’s coaches in the men’s game. Nancy Lieberman has regularly been an outspoken advocate for the sport and is still a fixture in sports media. Wendy Larry went on to become the associate commissioner of the Atlantic 10 conference. And that’s just a few of the names of influence that still have close ties to women’s basketball.
“I am who I am today because of all this,” Mery says. “It was just building character and coming to a place that gave me a chance, you know?”
“They were one of the first programs to give that pathway to international players to come be welcomed and be a part of a winning culture,” adds Hamchetou.
And the hope, from the earliest founders of the program to the new age stars of the new millennium, is that Old Dominion can return to its’ place of greatness. To reclaim a monarchy that were once Queens of the court.
“It may again for the university a sense of pride,” concludes Lieberman. “A statue is not about me. It’s about all the women that went there in the history. You got to have great teammates and we’ve had great teammates, great women and I’m as proud of them today as I was when I was there.”