Former St. Francis Coach Dave Magarity and daughter Maureen square off on the court today in historic matchup after years of avoiding it: Army vs. Holy Cross
… something the father — and mother — wanted to avoid
Today, it seems ironical that when his daughter Maureen was born almost 40 years ago, Dave Magarity missed it because he was coaching a post-season basketball game.
March 4, 1981, may seem like a long time ago for the elder Magarity, who today will face off against his daughter, whom he tutored as a player and a coach, on the court in West Point, New York, where he is the head women’s basketball coach.
When Magarity was hired as the head coach of the men’s basketball program at St. Francis in 1978, succeeding Pete Lonergan, he was the youngest Div. I basketball coach in the country, just 28-years-old.
The father who will battle his daughter today is now 71, and he did not want this day to happen. However, when Maureen was hired to coach at Holy Cross earlier this year after they fired their coach, she entered the Patriot Conference, and now, that means that father and daughter will face each other four times this year.
From coach to mentor but always dad
When Maureen Magarity was a high school player, her father was the men’s coach at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Nevertheless, he saw her as a promising player and gave her tutelage and direction.
Then, when he took over the Army women’s program 15 years ago, he hired her as his assistant. It has been an interesting odyssey, as this story on the Army website earlier this week indicates,
Basketball has always been a family affair for the Magaritys. However, this weekend it will be a family feud.
Army West Point women’s basketball head coach Dave Magarity will square off against his daughter Maureen Magarity’s Holy Cross team in the first of two home-and-home series slated between the two programs. Saturday’s game is believed to be the first of its kind at the Division-I level with a father coaching opposite his daughter.
With Dave currently in his 15th season coaching on the women’s side and Maureen in her 11th overall season as a head coach and first at Holy Cross, it is reasonable to presume that this matchup has been in the making for years.
However, it is a contest that the father-daughter duo has been avoiding since Maureen left her father’s staff to take the head coaching position at New Hampshire over a decade ago. This avoidance was a decision they arrived at with some help from Rita Magarity, Dave’s wife and Maureen’s mother.
“People laughed and joked about it, but I never really had the want to say, ‘No, we need to play a game dad,’” Maureen said. “It was always just, ‘I’m good with just scrimmaging and cheering you on.’”
“The scrimmaging was fine,” Rita noted. “But now that they have to play each other, in this profession it’s tough because there’s always going to be a winner and a loser. When your livelihood is winning of course that makes it extra hard.”
J.J. Klein, “A matchup years in the making,” Army West Point Athletic Communications, January, 2021
Family will not see the game
The unfortunate part of this from the daughter’s perspective is that no one from the family will see these games,
Unfortunately, because of the coronavirus, the Magaritys’ family and friends can’t be in attendance for today’s historic game.
“I can’t help but be a little upset that because of the pandemic my kids can’t be there, my sister and brother, my nieces and nephews, and Mom can’t come. His friends and my friends,” Maureen said. “It’s going to be special but kind of a bummer they can’t be there.”
“Family affair: Dad, daughter to make college basketball coaching history,” Associated Press, January 9, 2021
“Surreal”
The A.P. points out that this is likely the first time that a father and daughter have coached against one another on the Division I level,
“It’s going to be surreal,” said Dave Magarity, who turns 71 this month. “What’s unique about it — it goes without saying that not only is it possibly the first time it’s happened, but we’re in the same league. It’s one thing if we were playing in a tournament, or it would have been nice to play in the NCAA Tournament or NIT. We’re in the (Patriot League), in this crazy season, we play each other four times.”
The Magaritys have met in a few preseason scrimmages, but Maureen knows this weekend’s women’s game is different. Holy Cross travels to West Point, N.Y., to play Army today before hosting the Black Knights back in Worcester, Mass., on Sunday.
“I think this year does put a lot of things in perspective. Playing against my dad, he’s done such a great job throughout his coaching career,” she said. “To survive coaching this long speaks volumes about my dad and what he’s taught me.
“Family affair: Dad, daughter to make college basketball coaching history,” Associated Press, January 9, 2021
Leaving St. Francis was a bitter pill
While he was the youngest head coach when he was hired at St. Francis in 1978, he was also unceremoniously fired five years later in what would become a controversy for the way it was handled.
That left Magarity with a wife and young children without an income and health care and many other things. Ultimately, Dave found his way to Marist, and he was then hired as head coach when the previous coach was fired after the NCAA nailed it on recruiting violations.
He had never coached women’s basketball on the collegiate level until Maggie Dixon was hired at Army in 2003. Maggie’s brother, Jamie, later the head coach at Pitt, recommended that she hire a veteran coach to help her, and he recommended Dave.
Now, 15 years after Maggie’s heartbreaking passing, he is still there, remembering the years that he tutored his daughter and cheered as she earned at Div. I scholarship to Boston College.
The B.C. Big East gig did not go well for Maureen, and she returned to Marist, where she became a solid player.
After being hired as an assistant to her dad at Army, she then left three years later to become head coach at New Hampshire,
Maureen grew up on the court at Marist as her father coached the men’s team. He spent 18 years there before leaving for a few years, then returning as an assistant on the Army women’s team.
Maureen got her coaching start at Army, where she was an assistant for her father after he took over the program in 2006 when coach Maggie Dixon died. Maureen had been offered a job as an assistant by Dixon before she died. Maureen spent three years as an before becoming head coach at New Hampshire job.
J.J. Klein, Army, January 2021
Long time ago
Four decades is a long time since she was born in Altoona, but Maureen will turn 40 in March. She has a unique emotional and professional attachment to her father, and then have been down some roads together, both literally and figuratively.
Today, what will change as she battles her father for the first time on the court, followed by a game on Sunday. It should be an interesting weekend for the Magarity family.
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