In April 2000, the MSU women’s basketball team filed into the team room in Breslin Student Events Center. The women sat together, nervous, waiting to meet the person who would become their mentor, their leader, and above all, their coach.
Enter Joanne P. McCallie.
When the vocal, energetic woman walked through the door and into their lives, it was with promises of pursuing championships and a big, “How y’all doing?”
“We had no idea what to expect,” senior center Erin Skelly said. “But right away, her personality, it put us at ease.”
And right away, she installed a new way of thinking and playing into the women’s basketball program.
She would mold this gang that held little offensive promise - and had lost its two superstars to graduation - into a team with tighter defensive skills than anyone in the conference.
There were struggles and there was a comeback, and the final record doesn’t really show how much the team grew with McCallie as its leader.
It doesn’t show what McCallie is trying to create.
Looking at 35-year-old McCallie’s résumé, you might assume last year’s 10-18 season would chalk up to a major disappointment.
Overall, she has 11 conference championships to her name and nine NCAA Tournament appearances.
So a stranger to success, she is not.
“We’re going to pursue championships,” McCallie said, on more than one occasion through MSU’s worst season since 1976, when the Spartans went 6-16.
She said it with promise at media day in October 2000 and she said it with determined bitterness after the 48-point Penn State blowout in State College, Pa., on Super Bowl Sunday.
No matter how grim things looked in the middle of the team’s nine-game losing streak, McCallie was set in her ways. She had no plans to accept her players hanging their heads no matter how terrible they played.
Not on her team.
Her philosophy - that greatness and victory are choices, not things that happen by chance - was prevalent all season, in practice, in press conferences and eventually, on the court.
At practice, she yelled and criticized as any coach would. But she also expected the players to choose to speak up as well and correct their own mistakes.
If a player ran a suicide - a series of increasingly longer sprints - and failed to touch a line with their foot, she would insist they begin again.
“I’m a person who believes A is A,” McCallie said. “There’s a line there. Touch it. If you don’t touch it, you run again. I don’t look at that line and pretend it grew somehow.”
Call it a philosophy of personal responsibility.
McCallie believes in that approach; she believes hard work and positive attitudes will take a team to championships.
And before Ohio State cut MSU’s season short by beating them 52-48 in the first round of the Big Ten Tournament on March 1, a revelation occurred.
The team finally understood what McCallie and the assistant coaches were saying all season long.
Once instilled with new philosophy, the team brought a six-game streak of poor play and a nine-game losing streak to an end - all because it began listening to its coach.
“She taught us to push yourself more than you think you can,” center Skelly said. “You think you’re tired, but you’re not tired - your mind is stronger than the pain.”
Although McCallie had many things to teach her team, she said she walked away from her first season in East Lansing a changed person as well.
“We became better coaches because of these players,” she said. “We learned how to navigate through and find a way to come together.”
As far as last year, McCallie has only one regret.
“I wish the team could’ve taken more in some of the wins,” she admits. “Obviously we were not going to be a dominant team
