E.O. Smith girls basketball coach Mary Roickle has retired to spend more time with her family, she said Monday.
Under Roickle, E.O. Smith won its first state championship in 2023, beating top-seeded Pomperaug 58-46 for the Class L title at Mohegan Sun Arena. Her record, over 12 seasons, was 209-76. The Panthers also won three CCC conference championships during her tenure.
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“It was a great run,” Roickle said. “I absolutely loved it, never knowing I would stay this long. It was time for family first reasons.”
Roickle, 72, said she and her spouse Muffy have always put travel off due to basketball obligations and now they are able to do that.
“It came down to where’s my heart and my heart is family first,” she said. “I’ve always called this job ‘full-time part-time.’ You put in so much and it’s not just practice, not just on the court, it’s the culture you want to build. It’s watching the film. It’s scouting. It’s helping these kids understand life lessons which are not always at practice or on the court.”
Roickle was a former college coach who was hired by Frank Layden, who would go on to coach the Utah Jazz, to coach at Niagara, where she and her roommate initially started the women’s basketball team in the early ‘70s. Her teams went 84-19 over four years and she brought the team to the AIAW Division II Final Four where it advanced to the championship game and lost. She later coached at the University of Detroit. When her team had to play at Indiana, she snuck into one of Bobby Knight’s closed practices to watch and he threw her out.
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Her teams beat Tara VanDerveer’s team when VanDerveer coached at Ohio State and scrimmaged against Pat Summitt’s Tennessee team (and lost).
In 1981, after five years of coaching, Roickle had the third-highest winning percentage (.805, 107-26) among active college coaches, just behind UCLA’s Billie Moore and ahead of Summitt, N.C. State’s Kay Yow, Auburn’s Joe Ciampi, Rutgers’ Theresa Grentz and Maryland’s Chris Weller.
Roickle, who had studied to be a nurse, left coaching for 30 years and went into management of pharmaceutical companies before moving to Connecticut, where she coached the Manchester Community College women’s basketball team, before the school shuttered its sports program. Roickle took over for Kirk Murad, who left E.O. Smith a year after the Panthers went to the state finals in 2012.
