Joe Ciampi was, by his own estimation, a pretty good cook. The grandson of Italian immigrants, he was well versed in the cultural staples and knew, like most, that you didn’t mess with the traditional recipes. But desperate times called for desperate measures.

After all, he was in the middle of Alabama. Who on earth sold capicola there?

So he picked up some Virginia baked ham and returned home to get ready to put together a stromboli; a bread with meats, cheeses and vegetables wrapped inside. A dish that, as he served it to some of the best high school women’s basketball players in the country, managed to always drive home the family atmosphere and women’s basketball program that he was building at Auburn. It was his signature counter to Pat Summitt, Andy Landers, Van Chancellor and the other elite coaches of the SEC on the recruiting trail.

A dish that powered three straight national title games and, for a time, flipped the sport on its head.

So how did Joe Ciampi, dyed-in-the-wool Pennsylvania Italian-American, end up in the deep south coaching for one of the cornerstone schools of the SEC? It all can be traced back to a hurricane.

“School was gonna be delayed by a month because of the damage by the flood through the Susquehanna River,” he remembers.

Hurricane Agnes made its second landfall in 1972, devastating portions of the northeast United States and particularly the Wilkes-Barre area where Ciampi had lived most of his life. He was coaching at Nanticoke High School at the time and, with some time to kill before the repairs were complete, entertained the idea of doing something new.

A former college classmate told him about a boys basketball program at Marlboro High School in New York, about sixty miles north of the city. And, rather quickly, Joe and his wife decided to take a chance.

“He invited me up to see the situation and the opportunity and I really liked being 60 miles outside of New York City and my wife enjoyed it,” he says. “So we took an opportunity to go to Marlboro and partake in another adventure.”

His team won 16 straight games in their first season.

“I had a group of all paesan with me,” jokes Ciampi, “Dennis Pesavento, Johnny De Santis, Mike Moriello, Jimmy Pagano and Frank Taddeo!”

That group won plenty of games over the next handful of years, even earning Ciampi Coach of the Year honors in 1973. But as much as he enjoyed coaching players, he was still teaching in schools too. Initially, Joe had given himself ten years in the system before figuring out what to do next.

As it happened, an unlikely idea came from an unlikely source.

“There was a great sports writer in the area named Bo Gill, of the Newburgh Free-Press,” Ciampi remembers. “He liked me and the success we had and when the West Point job came open, he had lobbied for me.”

But this wasn’t the men’s basketball job. That was already taken by a 30 year old former cadet with a long and hard to pronounce last name. It wasn’t even to be an assistant on the staff. Gill was advocating for Ciampi to take the women’s basketball job, effectively becoming the programs first Division I head coach.

Under most circumstances for men of that era, this would, at best, be a non-starter that one politely declines. At worst, it was an insult. But the longtime sports writer knew that Ciampi wasn’t wired like most coaches of the era.

“I remember [St. John’s] Coach [Lou] Carnesecca saying to me, ‘Giuseppe, if you go from the guys to the girls, I don’t think you can ever come back.’”

The Hall-of-Fame coach was right but not in the way he might have originally intended. Almost immediately, Ciampi’s cadets bought into his defensive system and found success. Over his two years there, he went 39-10 and just missed out on the regional AIAW Tournament in 1979.

It was a brief but memorable basketball renaissance at the U.S. Military Academy as Ciampi and his counterpart, the young and ambitious Mike Krzyzewski, stacked 20 win seasons on top of each other before going to their next destination.

“We were neighbors and we’re still to this day good friends,” Ciampi says of Coach K.

But both realized the same thing at similar times: the ability to win a national championship at Army was next to impossible. If they wanted to compete on a bigger stage, they’d have to leave a place they cared about deeply. Ciampi’s father, as well as his six uncles on that side alone, all served in the military during World War II and had grown to love the opportunity to come up and see games.

“They were very disappointed,” he remembers. “We weren’t going to be at West Point anymore and have all the pomp and circumstance.”

Complicating matters further was the enduring legacy of the south in a place like New York, even in the late 1970’s. While the smoldering embers of civil rights lingered, walking reminders of the fight to maintain segregation at schools like Auburn persisted in substantial positions of power.

George Wallace, whose ‘Stand in the Schoolhouse Door’ put a face on institutional segregation, had again won the Governorship of Alabama in the early 1970’s on the heels of what President Jimmy Carter called ‘one of the most racist campaigns in modern southern political history.’ For a lifelong northeastern native moving to Auburn, the only frame of reference was, more-or-less, the not-so-distant echoes of ‘segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.’

Just as he trusted Jack O’Donnell with bringing him to Marlboro and Dr. James Peterson at Army, Joe Ciampi had to trust Joanna ‘Jody’ Davenport. A visiting professor to West Point from Auburn, she was appointed the Women’s Athletic Director in 1976. After all, Davenport was from Marblehead, Massachusetts and had made her home in the plains of Alabama.

“All us carpet baggers were going down there,” Ciampi says with a laugh. “But I trusted her and I needed to work with someone that I could trust and believe in and have them believe in me.”

After two days visiting the campus and interviewing with members of the athletic department, the Ciampi’s decided to pack their car and go on another adventure.

The key to Auburn’s early success, from Joe Ciampi’s perspective, was Becky Jackson. A 6’4 recruit out of Franklin, Louisiana, she was an immediate starter and the kind of player that could change the trajectory of the program.

“She started every game of her freshman year,” he remembers, “Averaged around 18 points a game. That first year with her, we went 26-7.”

It was a somewhat forgotten season because Auburn didn’t go to the postseason AIAW Tournament. But once the governance of women’s college basketball was changed, going from the AIAW to NCAA, and the NCAA Tournament became an option, Jackson’s success took Auburn to completely new heights.

In 1983, the Tigers made their first Sweet Sixteen and finished the season tied for first in the SEC. Jackson made history in a number of ways but, perhaps most notably, was a trailblazer as part of the 1984 Kodak All-American team. Packed with Hall-of-Famers like Cheryl Miller and Janice Lawrence, Jackson was also a headliner on the first all-Black All-American team in the history of the sport. Something that, mind you, has only ever happened four times (1984, 2006, 2007, 2008).

“I was proud to see our picture in Jet magazine,” Jackson told Andscape in 2024. “Being the first all-Black All-America team meant that we got recognized as players and that it felt good to be on that team with all Black women.”

While Auburn missed out on the NCAA Tournament that year, Jackson’s arrival set the stage for the next decade of success on the plains. Suddenly, Ciampi found that he was able to go into homes on the east coast around Washington D.C. and Virginia and people knew about Tiger women’s basketball.

“We were building a program of players that bought into the system defensively,” he says. “They knew they would win through their defensive efforts and they would get playing time. And everyone wants playing time.”

What made things hard for Ciampi was that every other coach in the SEC wanted the players he was after too. By the mid 1980’s, Tennessee was already a national brand under Pat Summit, making three Final Fours and one national championship game between 1982 and 1986. Andy Landers at Georgia had won the SEC three times in a row while Van Chancellor at Ole Miss was coming off back-to-back Elite Eight trips.

Even the middle tier of the conference was loaded with coaching talent from Sue Gunter at LSU to Phil Lee at Vanderbilt.

In short, recruiting was a dogfight. And that’s before you factored in other strong programs like USC, Maryland, Louisiana Tech and Old Dominion.

“Pat was determined,” Ciampi says. “Andy was a great recruiter and Van would give you that country [charm].”

What Auburn had was a one-two punch of southern hospitality and Italian-American cuisine.

Carol Ross was in her mid 20’s when she arrived in Auburn from Behlaven University in Jackson, Mississippi. A former star guard at Ole Miss under Van Chancellor, Ross owns the program’s single season steals record, one that has yet to be broken.

After one season as a volunteer coach at Behlaven, she became a graduate assistant under Ciampi. Ross proved over the next seven years to be an excellent recruiter and a primary recruiter of Mississippi players.

It’s how a highly touted high school player named MaeOla Bolton ended up at the Ciampi’s house in Alabama one night, eating a homemade stromboli and getting ready to be the next star to commit to the program.

MaeOla Bolton was one year older than her sister, Ruthie, the daughters of the Reverend Linwood Bolton. They grew up in a family of 20 — 12 girls and 8 boys — and so naturally there were enough kids to play basketball with one another.

In their backyard were four Pecan trees that may have served as effective places to nail on a hoop if not for a storm that uprooted them when the Bolton girls were kids. Instead, they found the old oak tree, sturdy and stable, and nailed a bicycle rim to it.

“It’s still out there after all these years,” says Ruthie over the phone. “So basketball became that sport. That was it. And you go walking down the street dribbling a basketball, you’re gonna find somewhere [to play].”

MaeOla was the star of the two coming out of high school and it reflected in how many coaches were showing up to McLain, Mississippi, a town of less than 700 people in the 1980’s, to see the elder Bolton sister play.

“I had 100 [or so] scholarships and it was stressful because I didn’t really have no one in my family that had gone through that process,” MaeOla explains. “Tennessee was there. Ole Miss, Louisiana Tech, USC, UCLA.”

Just one year behind her and no less important to McLain’s three improbable Mississippi high school state championship runs, Ruthie was barely recruited at all. Maybe some coaches believed she would go where MaeOla went regardless, and maybe others just doubted the 5’8 guard and just how good she would be at the next level.

While Ruthie slid under the radar, Joe Ciampi and Carol Ross rolled out the red carpet for her older sister. MaeOla wasn’t sure what to expect when she went to the head coach’s house for dinner but knew she might be in for a surprise of some kind.

“You knew his name was not American so he had something unique about him,” she recalls. “The outside [of their house] was very homey and welcoming. But the main thing I think I remember was the food more so than anything.”

Joe’s wife, Laureen, as is the case in many Italian-American households of the time, could sometimes be considered the brains of the operation, never mind being the chef of the house.

“She made sure that we were happy and had everything we needed,” MaeOla said.

It made an impression so significant that when MaeOla did eventually commit to Auburn, she’d always request a stromboli any time she went to the Ciampi’s house for a team dinner.

While her older sister was given stromboli and plane rides to Alabama to get her career started, Ruthie had no such pomp and circumstance. She went under recruited again her senior year and opted to walk-on at Auburn.

“They actually thought I was crazy,” Ruthie says of the Auburn staff at the time. “When someone don’t call, you gotta call them or you gotta ride a bus. You gotta ride a bus eight hours to a trial.”

Despite the looming fear that this was a massive and life altering mistake, her father’s teachings kept her afloat as she sat on that bus in 1985 ready to prove her doubters wrong.

“God dealt the hands with her where her talent was more transparent,” Ruthie explains. “She could jump higher. She’s got longer arms. But [my father] said, ‘What you do with what he’s giving you is going to be key to your destiny. So don’t worry about what he’s done for her. You use what he’s given you.’”

She tried to reiterate that to herself as she passed every mile marker on the road to Auburn. Sometimes it worked, other times she would wonder if she was crazy. If the conventional wisdom is to not put all the eggs into one basket, so to speak, Ruthie was loading everything into this one chance.

“I had a good fear,” she says of her time on that bus. “I was scared for greatness. The fear of not playing was more fearful than the fear of [not making it].”

When Ruthie got on campus, she found a fully functioning SEC women’s basketball machine. Ciampi was tough. Fair, but tough. The Tigers were just coming off a Sweet Sixteen run and were starting to draw more fans every game. It helped that their star men’s basketball player, Charles Barkley, would show up and support his hoop counterparts.

“[Charles said], ‘Coach, if Coach Smith worked me as hard as you worked these girls, I wouldn’t be here anymore!’” jokes Ciampi. “He was a great player but, you know, practice wasn’t his main thing.”

“And he actually helped us,” Ciampi continues, “Because he would be present at our games and you’d see him there and cheering.”

But he wasn’t even the most fanatic of the fellow student-athletes showing up at games. The Auburn swim team was reportedly so tough on opposing coaches that they would rope off the first ten rows behind the opposing teams and force the swimmers and divers to sit in the eleventh row to keep them from the benches.

What Barkley saw, but fans did not, was the intensity with which Ciampi ran his teams. They played a system defense and if you didn’t perform, you didn’t play.

“Coach Ciampi almost kicked me off the team my freshman year,” says Chantel Tremitiere, who joined the team in 1987 on the heels of a 31-2 SEC title winning season in which Auburn went to the Elite Eight. “I should’ve been ready to be a college athlete. And I wanted Auburn to conform to me instead of fitting into the system.”

Tremitiere, one of a family of 15 in central Pennsylvania, jumped on the Tigers radar late in the game. She’d been recruited by Temple but a bad game led to them taking her official visit away. But her mother knew someone that knew Coach Ciampi, who made the trip to Harrisburg to see Chantel play in a pair of all star games.

Immediately, he knew that would be his starting point guard for the 1987-1988 season.

“I always tell Coach Ciampi,” she says, “One of his biggest mistakes that he made as a coach was to go to the media and tell them that Chantel Tremitiere would be his first freshman starting point guard. I usually don’t read the newspaper but when that was shown to me, I believed it and got a little cocky.”

Her ‘welcome to college basketball’ moment came courtesy of her own teammate.

“I tried to run the mile and a half with Ruthie Bolton,” Chantel continues, “And she was the most in shape person in the world that year. I went out with her so fast lap, when we got to the second lap, I faked a hamstring injury. But the problem is I didn’t know how to fake a hamstring injury. So they knew right there, ‘she’s a bullshiter.’

While Chantel got used to playing SEC college basketball her freshman year, the rest of the team was on a mission to win a title. Ruthie’s long bus ride may have been the biggest stroke of luck for Auburn as she merged as a legitimate star.

During her freshman season, she finished an early season game against South Alabama with 25 points, eight rebounds and six steals.

“That’s the moment I became ‘The Mighty Ruthie Bolton’,” she recalls. “I moved out of [MaeOla’s] shadow in a way where I sort of found my own and it was just a beautiful space.”

With the Bolton sisters leading the way alongside center Vickie Orr, a three time Kodak All-American herself, Auburn opened the 1987-1988 season ranked third in the nation. It turned out to be one of the greatest seasons in Tiger basketball, men’s or women’s, history. They ended the regular season 26-1 and a perfect 9-0 in conference play, even beating No. 4 Tennessee in Knoxville.

But the Lady Vols returned the favor in the 1988 SEC Tournament Championship game, pushing the Tigers down to a 3 seed for the NCAA Tournament. The revenge tour was sweet, as they dominated Penn State, avoided an upset from Georgia in Athens, toppling Maryland and Long Beach State before seeing a Teresa Weatherspoon-led Louisiana Tech.

“I wanted the kids to feel that they belonged,” Ciampi says. “I wanted the players to embrace it.”

And for 40 minutes, they belonged on the floor with the venerated Lady Techsters program. But over time, the Tigers got broken down offensively and had trouble in the second half. On the surface, it looked like a bad game for Ruthie Bolton but Chantel Tremitiere sees it differently.

“I always blame myself for us losing the national championship that first year,” she explains. “They had to play Ruthie at point guard, and so I didn’t get a lot of playing time my freshman year, and we’re playing the national championship and Ruthie’s tired. She had 16 points in the first half but she was tired. And Coach Ciampi didn’t have enough faith in me to spell Ruthie for two minutes. And I look back it now, I think that moment would have been too big for me anyways.”

The Lady Techsters went small in the second half and went at Bolton and the backcourt. Auburn would lose 56-54.

It was a learning experience for the group and they resolved to be back the following year and win the title. MaeOla graduated and Carolyn Jones (now Carolyn Jones-Young) stepped into a more prominent role as the strength of Auburn now moved to its guards.

It paid immediate dividends as the Tigers knocked off No. 1 Tennessee in the regular season again, amplifying an already heated rivalry. Once again, the Lady Vols returned the favor in the SEC title game.

“It was just so intense,” says Ciampi. “You look at Coach Summitt, she coached with intensity. She lived with intensity and that competitive spirit she had was the hallmark of being on a team that was always playing for a championship.”

Naturally, it only fit that Auburn’s reward for defeating Louisiana Tech in the 1988 Final Four, avenging the prior years title loss, would be Tennessee a third time.

“Ever lose your dog or get hit by a car?” Ciampi told reporters on the podium after being asked to compare the feelings after the 1987 and 1988 title losses.

Bridgette Gordon once again won the battle inside and the Lady Vols started to run away with the game towards the end of the second half.

“God Bless her,” Ciampi continued in that postgame presser. “Graduate her and get her out of Tennessee. Seriously, though, that is what wins championships. When they needed a lift, they would go to Bridgette and she would work to get the ball and usually scored.”

So, once again, Auburn would go home empty handed. Ruthie and Vickie graduated, leaving the reins of the program to Chantel and Carolyn.

“I didn’t just want to start,” says Chantel, “I wanted to be a captain. So at the beginning of the year, I don’t think [Coach Ciampi] trusted me yet. He says he did, but I don’t think he did.”

After a freshman meeting in which Ciampi told Tremitiere to get right or get gone, the point guard turned the tables on her head coach two years later.

“I said, ‘Look, Coach, you’re holding on the reins too hard with me,’” she recalls. “I said, ‘Give me the reins a little bit. Let me be the point guard on the court. And I promise you, we’re going back to the Final Four.’”

And Auburn did once again. In spite of a good-but-not-great regular season, Auburn went to the SEC Tournament in March of 1990 and beat Tennessee in the championship game at last. A two seed in their NCAA Tournament region, the Tigers made it through Tennessee Tech and Vanderbilt before defeating Washington and Louisiana Tech to advance to the title game.

Sitting opposite them wasn’t Tennessee but instead, a relative newcomer to the national scene: the Stanford Cardinal and their head coach Tara Vanderveer.

Stanford ended up winning the 1990 NCAA national championship, beating Auburn 88-81. They were tied 41-41 at halftime but the Cardinal, led by Sonja Henning, Katy Steding and Jennifer Azzi, hit the Tigers with a flurry of late buckets in the fourth quarter to win the title.

It was the third title game loss in a row for the Tigers and, while they didn’t know it yet, would be the last time they would be playing in that game.

Ciampi’s team would make the 1991 Elite Eight and have sporadic success throughout the late 1990’s and early 2000’s before the ball coach hung it up in 2004.

“We’d all love to win that last game that we played in,” Ciampi says reflectively. “But aren’t we better people? We made a name. We carry a banner. We’re very proud of our accomplishments. And we can hold hands with one another and be proud of who we were for that period of time.”

In those four seasons from 1986-1990, Auburn won the SEC three times and went to the Elite Eight and three national title games in that span. From ‘86-89, they went 95-7 and 27-1 in SEC play.

“There needs to be an award,” says Ruthie. “There needs to be the [best] team that never won it but was there. It would be Auburn.”

While everyone on the team still reminisces about past title games and what they could’ve done differently, Ciampi has grown to accept what-is and what-isn’t when it comes to that period of his career.

“If you ask me, if I would have won, how would I feel if I won three of them? I’d be the same way,” he explains. “I’d still be drinking my favorite beverage, eating my chicken parm. I’d be the same person.”

That period of sustained success and adversity helped his Auburn players grow into talents in their adult lives as well. Ruthie went on to the WNBA and became the face of the Sacramento Monarchs franchise alongside Ticha Penicheiro and Yolanda Griffith. She also represented Team USA in the 1996 and 2000 Olympics, where she won Gold medals both times.

MaeOla is now a motivational speaker, artist and both sisters have also spent their own time helping women who are survivors of sexual assault and domestic abuse.

Chantel is one of the most visible former players, working with current WNBA athletes like A’ja Wilson on their brands while carrying a sizable social media following of her own. While waxing poetic about those Auburn teams and her time on them, she stopped to make sure one person in particular got her flowers.

“I still get the stromboli from [Laureen Ciampi],” she says. “Let’s get it straight. Joe didn’t cook a piece of stromboli. She cooked and her stromboli was amazing. Playing it off like it was him. We knew!”

And while that group of Auburn players, from Tremitiere to the Boltons to Vickie Orr, Carolyn Jones-Young and on and on, are known in the historical archives of the sport, there is a desire to be more involved with the program again.

“I’m actually in the process of trying to get back to Auburn,” says Ruthie, “I’ve been trying the last couple years but I’m about to put a full court press on them. I want to be in some capacity part of this.”

New head coach Larry Vickers is in the process of building the Tigers back into a program of significance and just earned his first statement win at the helm: an upset over a top 25-ranked Ole Miss team.

For the first time in a long time, there’s optimism on the plains that the spirit of those late 80’s and early 90’s teams can be reborn at Auburn.

“Our legacy was playing the game with purpose,” Ciampi says. “Playing it together as a team and everybody playing a role on offense for us to win.”

“At the time, I didn’t want to have nothing to do with that second place ring,” Ruthie says. “Everybody talks like ‘We won a championship, the second place team doesn’t matter.’ But how we did it, one team that could have won three years in a row, there’s something magical about that.”