Minium: ODU Will Honor Marianne Stanley's Three National Championship Women's Basketball Teams On Saturday

By Harry Minium

NORFOLK, Va. – Others will disagree with me, but I’ve long thought that Marianne Stanley was probably the greatest coach in Old Dominion athletics history.

She surely has the stats.

Hired as the ODU women’s basketball head coach in 1977 at the tender age of 23, she carved out a spectacular career in her 10 seasons here.

She claimed a WNIT crown in her first season and then won three national championships. In all, she won 268 of 327 games (82 percent) while at ODU.

She and Nancy Lieberman, Inge Nissen, Anne Donovan, et. al., made the name Old Dominion synonymous with the explosive growth of the women’s game in the 1970s and 1980s.

ODU hosted the first two NCAA Final Fours while Stanley was coach. 

And in 1985, at a time when big-time athletics powers had begun to put resources into women’s basketball, she won her final national title and ODU’s first NCAA women’s basketball championship.

I had the pleasure of covering that team as a sports writer for The Virginian-Pilot and I never saw a coach get more from less than Marianne.

The reason I used the word “probably” above is that many would argue Wendy Larry, her successor, is ODU’s greatest coach. An aside here: Wendy was an assistant coach on that 1985 national championship team.

Wendy was 559-203 at ODU, took the Lady Monarchs to 20 NCAA Tournaments, won 17 Colonial Athletic Association championships in a row and took ODU to the 1997 NCAA Tournament championship game.

Wendy also has the stats.

Regardless, of who you think was the best, ODU will celebrate all three national championship teams Saturday afternoon when the Monarchs women's basketball team hosts Texas State at 1.

Former coaches and players will be introduced at halftime in ODU’s annual alumni game.

I hope there is a big crowd to welcome Marianne home and not just because of her contributions to ODU or her accomplishments as a coach.

She deserves a ton of credit for taking a courageous stand for equality that greatly damaged her career.

Marianne left ODU in 1987 after taking the Lady Monarchs to the NCAA Sweet 16 to coach at Penn, then a huge step down. A native of suburban Philadelphia, she moved to the Ivy League school for her daughter, Michelle.

“There was nothing wrong at ODU,” Stanley said. “I just wanted my daughter to be close to family for a while.”

She left after two years for Southern California, where she did a quick rebuild on that once proud program.

She was hired in the fall of 1989, just before the season began, and struggled to an 8-19 finish without having had the ability to recruit. Two years later, USC was 23-8 and went to the Elite Eight.

The Women of Troy finished 22-7 and went to the Sweet 16 in her fourth season, and she entered contract negotiations with an optimistic outlook.

Her ask was simple: I should be paid at the same level as men’s coach George Raveling. She tried to make it easy for USC. It doesn’t all have to be salary. It doesn’t have to come right away. Just show me we’re making progress.

Maybe provide my daughter with room and board. You can also pay me in other ways.

USC officials had been encouraging in meetings with Stanely, but her contract offer fell far short of equity. She tried to get more and was bluntly told, your job isn’t as difficult as coaching a men’s basketball team.

So, she sued, and while many coaches subsequently benefitted from her sacrifice, going to court cost her dearly.

She filed an $8 million lawsuit in state court in California and without getting bogged down in details, it was moved to federal court, which at the time, was more conservative than the state courts.

USC fired her while the lawsuit played out. She applied for job after job but could not get hired. The lawsuit made her damaged goods in the eyes of many athletic directors.

“I still have a box with more than 100 rejection letters,” Stanley said.

After three years, federal appeals court rejected her bid to take her case to a jury.

Their reasoning? They agreed with USC that coaching women’s basketball was less demanding than coaching men.

My oh my, how far we’ve come. I can’t imagine any court coming to the same conclusion in 2025.

“All I wanted was a chance to get this to a jury,” she said. “I knew that people would understand the logic of what I was asking for.”

Lieberman, who played on the 1979 and 1980 national championship teams, and was a two-time national Player of the Year, said coaches benefitted from her principled stand.

“She took a bullet for every women’s basketball coach to follow,” Lieberman said. 

“She did it before anyone else had the guts to do it. There’s Curt Flood, Spencer Haywood, Billy Jean King and Marianne Stanley. It’s one thing to be retired and then chime in and another to do it at the height of your career.

“She lost her job, and she was 100 percent right. I deeply admire her as my friend, my coach and as someone who really changed women’s athletics.”

She was named co-head coach at Stanford in 1995-96 temporarily while Cardinal Head Coach Tara VanDerveer was busy with the U.S. National Team. The Cardinal finished 29-3 and lost in the semifinals of the Final Four.

A year later, she moved to California as the head coach. Once there, she was finally paid equally to the men’s coach, though that was little consolation given the lost attorney’s fees and three years of being out of work.

Marianne’s background steeled her for the challenges of coaching. She grew up across the street from a playground in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania where she had to fight for playing time with neighborhood boys.

“I was told, ‘No, you can’t play,’ but I learned pretty quickly how to get my time on the court,” she said. “I learned that guys want to shoot. So, I’d hustle after the ball and put it in their hands.

“I played defense, passed, dove after loose balls and wasn’t worried about scoring. The guys began to say, ‘Oh yeah, let’s take her. She’ll give us the ball.’”

Fortunately, she went to Catholic school at a time when most public schools had no sports for females other than cheerleading or dance.

She played on an all-girls team from the first grade on. She starred at Archbishop Prendergast High School at a time when Philly high school women’s basketball was played at a high level. Many tournament games were played at the historic Palestra.

After starting at West Chester State College, she then matriculated to Immaculata, an all-girls school with just 400 students that was then, along with Queens, a kingpin of women’s college basketball.

She was a starter on two AIAW national championship teams – women’s basketball wasn’t yet a sport recognized by the NCAA – and was twice an All-American under Kathy Rush, a pioneering coach.

She played on the first women’s basketball team to play at Madison Square Garden (the game drew nearly 12,000 paying fans) and later, on national TV. A movie, The Might Macs, was made about those early Immaculata teams.

After a year serving as Rush’s assistant, she applied at ODU, and Dr. Jim Jarrett, then ODU’s Director of Athletics and Dr. Al Rollins, then the University president, were intrigued.

ODU had recently begun offering women’s basketball scholarships, the first in the state to do so, and Lieberman and Nissen were already on campus. It was obvious that ODU was headed places.

Marianne was young but very sure of herself, and obviously passionate.

“I wanted the job very much,” Stanley said. “I can’t thank Jim Jarrett and Al Rollins enough for all they did for women’s sports and for me personally.

“I’m so grateful that Jim Jarrett saw something in me. He didn’t look at age as a deterrent to me being part of something really, really special.”

I didn’t see a lot of the 1979 and 1980 national championship teams because I was then covering high school sports for The Virginian-Pilot. But by 1985, I was covering the Lady Monarchs.

Stanley had a talented starting lineup – Medina Dixon and Tracy Claxton could have played on any team, anywhere. But because of injuries and defections, she took her team to the Final Four with only nine players.

The coaches often invited young men they found playing pickup basketball at the old ODU Fieldhouse to practice with them so they could have a full lineup.

“We always said, all we need is nine,” Stanley said.

Stanley coached with equal parts passion, love and at times anger. She was so demanding and yet could nurture and care for her players.

And, as I said, could she ever coach.

In 1985, ODU waltzed past Syracuse, N.C. State and Ohio State in the NCAA Regionals at the ODU Fieldhouse to gain a bid to the Final Four in Austin, Texas.

Then, at halftime of the semifinal against Northeast Louisiana (now Louisiana-Monroe), Marianne’s team was trailing badly.

So, she rolled the dice and installed a “junk” defense at halftime.

Dawn Cullen Jonas, a junior from Norfolk Catholic High School, was stationed under the basket at center and told to guard the paint.

Forwards Claxton and Dixon played man-to-man, fronting the post players, while guards Marie Christian and Lisa Blais played man-to-man.

ODU rallied to win, 57-47, after pulling down a Final Four record 57 rebounds.

Stanley broke out the defense again in the second half of the final against Georgia and the Lady Monarchs, willed on by Dixon (18 points and 15 rebounds) won again, 70-65.

Once again, ODU hauled down 57 rebounds. Claxton was the tournament MVP.

There was “nothing lady like,” opined the Mike DiGiovanna of the Los Angeles Times, about the way ODU defeated Georgia for the national championship.

My take was a little different. My lead paragraph:

"She finally has one of her own. Marianne Stanley, the fiery, outspoken Old Dominion women's basketball coach, has a national championship that people can't call 'someone else's.'"

Later in my game story, I explained that Stanley won with a team whose stars she recruited. 

Years later the players and coaches from that team came together via Zoom meetings as Dixon fought the good fight against cancer. Players and coaches would gather on Zoom to encourage Dixon, who died in 2021.

"The players and coaches from that team have remained close throughout the years," Marianne said. "We never lost touch with each other."

The second half of Marianne's coaching career was largely spent in the WNBA. She coached at Cal four seasons, then moved on to the WNBA as a head coach for five seasons in Indiana and Washington. She was also an assistant coach with Los Angeles

In 2002, she was named the WNBA’s Coach of the Year and was inducted into the Women’s College Basketball Hall of Fame.

She also coached three seasons as an assistant for Vivian Stringer at Rutgers. Her last job was at Indiana of the WNBA in 2022, where she was the head coach for 2 ½ seasons.

“I’ve since been using the ‘R’ word,” she says, referring to retirement. She’s settled in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she is a frequent spectator at ACC men’s and women’s basketball games.

Her daughter lives in Long Beach, California, and Marianne has three grandchildren.

She says she has few regrets and one of them was not her fight against USC for equal pay. She would do it all over again, she said.

And she has such great memories.

“I was blessed to have a good career,” she said. “Winning those first two national championships at ODU, that was so special.

“Everyone thinks about Nancy when you talk about those teams, and she was a great player. But those teams were much more than Nancy. We had so many good players.”

Marianne is to arrive in Norfolk Friday night to attend a reception with men’s and women’s basketball alumni, including the 1975 men’s basketball team, which won the Division II national championship.

And she will be reunited with ODU’s Delisha Milton-Jones, head coach of the Monarch women’s basketball team. Marianne coached Milton-Jones when they were both with the Los Angeles Sparks.

“I had the pleasure of coaching D,” Marianne said.

“Before she was hired, I spoke to (ODU Director of Athletics) Wood Selig about her. I think DeLisha is someone who has a real passion for the game. She’s someone who won’t make excuses for things, will figure out the way to get the job done, and is passionate about people around her.

“I thought from day one that she was going to be a really good coach. She’s smart and wears her emotions on her sleeve.”

Milton-Jones said in some ways, Marianne is ODU’s “forgotten hero.”

“When it comes to women’s basketball, we don’t talk about Marianne enough,” Milton-Jones said.  “Wendy Larry did some tremendous things here over a longer period of time.

“But when you look at Marianne Stanley’s legacy, it’s just as spectacular. Three national championships? That is amazing.

“We developed a bond when I was with the Sparks. She’s such a great coach but she’s also a beautiful human being, a gentle soul.

“I’ve pulled something from every coach I played for, and I’ve had some tremendous coaches. But she’s the one I remember sharing some of the most gut-busting laughs with but then at the same time, she would be tearing me a new one in terms of wanting me to play harder, jump higher, focus and lock in.

“She’s a tiny woman, but she was on the court with the big girls telling them how to play in the paint.

“She was such a tremendous coach. No matter what generation, she could tap into your heart and turn you into a champion.

“I’m so glad she’s coming home this weekend.”

Minium is ODU’s senior executive writer. Contact him at hminium@odu.edu or follow him on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram