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.