St. Joseph Gets Another Huskies Assist
Former UConn Guard Wendy Davis Takes Over Blue Jays’ Women’s Basketball Program
WEST HARTFORD – Wendy Davis was done coaching in college. She spent six years at Western New England College, 11 at Trinity and now Davis, who helped the UConn women’s basketball team to its first Final Four in 1991, was doing home remodeling work, happily working for a friend.
They did kitchens and bathrooms. Siding. Roofing.
Then fate — and University of St. Joseph athletic director Bill Cardarelli — intervened.
Amid the hoopla of the first men’s team coached by Hall of Famer Jim Calhoun and the school going co-ed, there was a crisis at
St. Joseph. A few weeks before the first practice, the women’s basketball coach told Cardarelli he had a chance for another job and a career change, and left.
It was terrible timing. In a semi-state of panic, Cardarelli called Davis.
They both live in Manchester. They have known each other for years. Her teammate from the 1991 Final Four team, Debbie (Baer) Fiske, had worked at St. Joseph as a coach and an associate athletic director. They would run into each other at Cumberland Farms.
“I always offered her jobs — ‘Come on, Wendy. It’ll be fun,’ so I chatted with her after this position opened up,” Cardarelli said. “She always said no, but now she goes, ‘Oh yeah, let’s meet.’
“I, probably at this point in my career, would make a fairly good used car salesman. We just really lucked out. Wendy is a tremendous coach.”
Cardarelli called her the next day. She said yes, but she had a vacation to Florida scheduled and wanted to take it. And she had to tell her boss should wouldn’t be remodeling homes anymore.
So she found herself walking into the West Hartford school Oct. 15 — the first day of practice — to meet her players for the first time.
“It was kind of comical,” she said. “We had a team meeting at noon. The first day of practice. There’s no way I could practice them. We hadn’t even met.”
And that’s how Davis, 48, became the other new coach from UConn at St. Joseph.
“She’s in kind of the same position as Jim in a way in that she has to build a program,” Cardarelli said. “She’s the perfect fit.”
Over a week has gone by. She knows her players’ names. They practice every day at 7 a.m.
“It’s been awesome,” Davis said. “I came into this with a clean slate. Everything I did before I look back and say, ‘Ah, I shouldn’t have done it that way. I should have done it this way,’ or ‘I should have said this and not this.’ They’re a great group of kids. It’s a breath of fresh air.”
At Western New England, Davis went 105-55 over six years, and her teams made it to the postseason every year. The year she left, 2005, she was the Great Northeast Athletic Conference Coach of the Year. In 11 years at Trinity, her record was 137-128. The Bantams only won one conference game her final year.
Last year, Davis had a brief stint helping out coaching junior varsity boys volleyball and serving as the freshman girls basketball and freshman girls soccer coach at Bloomfield High.
“When you’re at a place for 11 years, the stress of having to win, especially in the NESCAC, the expectations — you tend to be hard on the kids because you spent time recruiting them,” Davis said. “You saw how they did it in high school, and now they’re here and they’re not doing it. The expectation to win, win, win, and the recruiting aspect — it just weighs heavy on you.
“Here I came in, I didn’t recruit these kids. I had to learn their names the first practice. I had to give them all nicknames. I’m just approaching it very differently.”
The hype around the men’s team has been a little overwhelming at times. On her first day, Davis walked into the O’Connell Center and ran into a bunch of ESPN cameras in the lobby waiting for Calhoun.
But the women — who won only nine games last season and who have struggled to get enough players on their teams in the past as it grew tougher and tougher to recruit to an all-women’s college — say they are OK with it.
“It’s definitely good because our school’s getting attention,” said Shaniyah Williams, a sophomore from New Britain. “That can help with future recruits or people will be interested in the school. I know in previous years, with us being an all-girls school might have turned some people away.
“This year, being co-ed and having big names at the school — Wendy Davis played for UConn, too — so we have some UConn association, too. Overall, the attention is good.”
Davis told Cardarelli she would take the job for a year and see how it went.
“I kind of ignored that part,” Cardarelli said.
“We’ve kind of struggled really trying to find our identity,” he said. “We had a couple good years. We had a change in coaches. We haven’t made the tournament in a while. That’s always been our goal. It’s a challenge for anybody coming in here to coach. But you take Wendy with 17 years experience, coming from the NESCAC to here, I think she’s excited about it.”