Kathy Delaney-Smith is a retired American college basketball coach. She retired at the end of the 2021–22 season after 40 seasons as head coach of the women's basketball team at Harvard University.[1][a] At the time of her retirement, she was the longest-tenured women's head coach at a single school in NCAA Division I.[b] With Harvard, Delaney-Smith had her 600th win as an NCAA Division I coach in March 2019.
In 1998, Harvard beat Stanford in the first round of the NCAA tournament, the first time in men's or women's Division I NCAA history that a sixteenth seeded team had beaten a number 1 seed.[2]
Early years
Delaney–Smith grew up in the Boston suburb of Newton, Massachusetts and is one of six children. She attended Sacred Heart High School and became the first female in Massachusetts basketball history to score 1000 points. Delaney-Smith joked that this was because the coach was her mother who made her teammates pass to her.[3]
She attended college at Bridgewater State, which, at the time, did not have a varsity basketball team for women. Rather than compete on the recreational club basketball team, Delaney-Smith chose to compete on the synchronized swimming team—the only competitive option for female swimmers at the time.[3]
High school coaching
After graduating from Bridgewater, her goal was to become a swim coach. She knew that Westwood High School, a few miles south of Newton, had constructed a new swimming pool, so she applied for a position as teacher and swim coach. She interviewed with the school superintendent, whose daughter played on the basketball team. He mentioned the basketball team was "terrible" and asked, "Can you coach them and can you win?" She responded that she could.[3]
Although she played in high school, she faced a new challenge: she grew up playing the six-on-six version of basketball, a very different style of basketball than five-person basketball which she now had to learn how to coach. The team went 0–11 in the first season, but over the next 11 years, the teams she coached had six undefeated seasons, including a 100-game winning streak, a 204–31 record, and won a state championship. During the winning streak, her players started calling her the "Wizard of Westwood", borrowing the nickname of UCLA coaching legend John Wooden.[4][5]
Delaney-Smith has always been a strong advocate of gender equity. While at Westwood, she filed multiple Title IX lawsuits to help ensure that the players had sufficient resources, and also pushed the school to schedule girls' games at night to allow parents and recruiters to watch.[5] In the mid-70s, she encountered other obstacles when she and her team played a road game. The team had changed from street clothes into uniforms in the locker room at their own school and then traveled to the game. They returned to their own gym, "tired, sweaty and eager to retrieve their belongings", but their own gym was occupied by a visiting boys' team. They were told they had to wait. Delaney-Smith disagreed, and led her team past the teacher guarding the door. She remarked, "I think it was a little frenetic, to be honest." But, she made her point.[6]
In her time at Westwood, Delaney-Smith coached seven Boston Globe All-Scholastic selections, and saw many of her players continue their careers in college. Among the players she coached was future sportswriter Jackie MacMullan. Delaney-Smith was inducted into the Westwood Hall of Fame in 1996.
Harvard
Due to her success as a high school basketball coach, she received numerous inquiries regarding a college position, but the first one she took seriously was a call from Harvard due to the commitment to gender equity demonstrated by the hiring committee. Even after being hired by Harvard, she continued to have to fight for her teams. On one occasion, when traveling to a road game, the team showed up for the pregame shoot-around, but found that the men's team was using the gym.[7]
The transition to the college game mirrored, in some ways, her start as a high school coach. While they won a few games in the first three seasons, Harvard finished last in the conference in each of those years. That would change in the 1985–86 season, when the team had their first 20-game winning season, went 9–3 in the conference, and finished in a tie for first place, her first of many conference titles. That first conference championship is one of her fondest accomplishments, which she savors because she believed her team "outworked most opponents".[4]
Today, winning the conference tournament means an automatic bid to the postseason NCAA tournament. However, until 2017, the Ivy League did not operate a conference tournament, instead awarding its automatic bid to the regular-season champion. More importantly, not all conferences had an automatic bid to the tournament in 1986. The Ivy League would be granted an automatic bid starting in 1994. While an Ivy League team could be invited to the NCAA tournament as an at-large team, it has only happened once, by Dartmouth in 1983. Harvard finished first in the Ivy League in 1986, 1988, and 1991, but did not get their first invitation to the NCAA tournament until 1996.[8]
Harvard first played in an NCAA tournament in 1996. Although the Crimson lost to Vanderbilt, they hit 16 three-point attempts in the game, setting a record for an NCAA tournament game that has been subsequently tied but not exceeded as of 2017.[8] In 1997, they again won the Ivy League, going 14–0 for their first-ever undefeated conference season[9] and an invitation to the NCAA tournament, where they faced top-seeded North Carolina and lost.
In 1998, Harvard again won the conference, and had its best season ever winning 23 games, helped by the leading scorer in the nation Allison Feaster, who averaged 28.5 points per game. They were invited, as expected, to the NCAA tournament, but despite their overall performance they would receive a 16 seed. They traveled west to play number-one seed Stanford Cardinal on their court. However, Stanford would be playing without two of their best players—Vanessa Nygaard, who tore an ACL in the Cardinal's final Pac-10 Conference game, and Kristin Folkl, who suffered the same injury shortly after in a practice. Despite the losses, the Cardinal were favorites to win the game, as a 16 seed had never beaten a top seed. As the team walked onto the court, one of the event workers said "Welcome to real basketball".[10] Feaster delivered, scoring 35 points, but it was a teammate, Susie Miller, who hit a three-pointer late in the game to secure the win, representing the first, and still the only time a 16 seed has beaten a one seed in an NCAA women's tournament game.[11] The feat has since been matched by the men, as the UMBC Retrievers upset Virginia in 2018, and Fairleigh Dickinson upset Purdue in 2023.
In 2014, she reached another milestone when Harvard beat Yale 69–65. That represented career win 515, pushing her past Princeton men's coach Pete Carril for the most wins by an Ivy League basketball coach.[12] In March 2019, Delaney-Smith won her 600th game as an NCAA Division I coach.[13] In her last season, Delaney-Smith was one of only three active head coaches, and the only women's head coach, to spend at least 40 years at the same Division I institution.[c]
