A week from now, the Magarity family will enjoy Super Bowl Sunday, Magarity style.
While most of the sports world will be consumed by pregame analysis for the big game between the Buccaneers and the Chiefs, the focus of the Magaritys will be on West Point, N.Y., where father and patriarch Dave will be coaching his final home game for the Army women’s basketball team, having decided to retire at season’s end.
For a man who just turned 71 and has more than 1,000 games in a storied collegiate career, that would be reason enough to stop and pay attention.
But it gets better.
Dave’s scheduled opponent is Holy Cross, the team coached by his oldest daughter, Maureen. If excitement was the undercard to their historic first meeting at the start of the month, representing as it did the first father-daughter coaching matchup in Division 1 basketball history, then what a perfect encore this will be. The teams will meet Saturday afternoon in Worcester, then again Sunday afternoon in the home finale at Christl Arena.
Like a baton reaching out from the past and into the future, handed from a man who valued coaching and teaching women every bit as much as he did men, to a daughter so influenced by the main man in her life that she was inspired to carry on his life’s work.
“It really is so special,’’ says Rita Magarity, Dave’s wife of 43 years and mother to Maureen, Katie, and Dave Jr. “The very last game he’ll play here will be against Maureen.’’
Maureen, in her first year with the Worcester program, is a coach on the rise. She was the youngest head coach in Division 1 when she took over New Hampshire in 2010, and one national coach of the year award and 146 victories later, she was hired by Holy Cross. As transitions go, the timing might have been better, given the pandemic that has changed everyone’s world, and the recent divorce that changed her own. But with her two young girls in tow, and with her parents and siblings at her back, she’s reshaping the Crusader program.
Her roadmap here was built along her childhood discovery of the game, filled with endless hours of backyard and driveway hoops, through her outstanding high school and college careers (first at Boston College, then at Marist where Dave was the head men’s coach) and through her early jobs as an assistant coach at Marist and Army.
But mostly, it was mapped in her father’s shadow, sitting next to him in the car as he drove her to tournaments, sitting by his side on two of his coaching staffs, driving the rest of the family nuts at family gatherings that turned into their personal strategy sessions.
“Some of my best childhood memories are just being with my dad’s team, on road trips, playing at different tournaments and being on the bus,’’ Maureen remembered. “It was such a great childhood in that sense, such a different experience than what my friends’ parents were doing. I was just always so into it and so proud, obviously of my dad, my whole family. It was our life.’’
Perhaps that’s the reason their story resonated as much as it did leading up to the Jan. 9-10 home-and-home doubleheader, when AP women’s basketball expert Doug Feinberg first pointed out the historic nature of their meeting.
Interest soared, with national networks, morning talk shows, and newspapers from across the country requesting interviews and touting the game. The whirlwind took them right up to tipoff, when business took over. Maureen’s Crusaders won their first game of the season in an 80-46 blowout.
Father and daughter held an unprecedented combined Zoom call after the game, and no plexiglass partition between them could dampen the emotion of the moment. For all the volatility 2020 brought to our worlds, the emergence of one hashtag in particular seemed to make something good out of something tragic.
Maureen couldn’t help but feel its power as she reflected on what had just happened.
“This year has obviously been a tremendously tough one for a lot of people, so many emotions, the pandemic, everything. But it was also the year of the #girldad. With Kobe Bryant passing away, and all the attention around that, there were so many different stories that came out about it,’’ Maureen said. “Honestly, people need something a little lighthearted, something to watch and keep your mind off all the seriousness of what’s going on in the world.
“It’s an honor, such an honor, to me and to my dad, my whole family, my sister, my brother, my mom. We just appreciate all the coverage — we laugh about it because we never thought it would blow up this way.’’
Dave, flashing his legendary wit, quipped, “It made my life miserable.’’
His smile told a different story of course, one filled with pride for a daughter who, on that day, pantsed him on the court.
“No question I’m proud of her as a father, and the fact they were prepared as well as they were to play us,’’ he said. “She’s always going to do a good job.’’
How could she not? She learned from the best.
“Maureen was always so mature for her age,’’ Rita said. “She started taking an interest in basketball around 8 years old. She always would be sitting with Dave watching tapes and game tapes, always shooting in the backyard. David and Katie went off on their own and played together. Maureen was always independent and more serious than the other two. She just loved basketball so much and she loved coaching.
“She idolized Dave, and to this day, he’s her hero. I think Maureen will always have him in the coaching profession, he will always be her mentor. But he actually is her best friend.’’
Tara Sullivan is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at tara.sullivan@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @Globe_Tara.