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Sunday, June 1, 2008
Martha and Dr. Robert Todd
Greater Louisville, KY
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This dynamic duo has coached two generations of girls’ basketball teams from second grade through high school. After retiring this year as coaches of Assumption’s team, they shared some of their favorite memories from 30 years of coaching with VYPE.
VYPE: How did you get into coaching basketball?
DR. TODD: We both played basketball for Bellarmine University. When we graduated, I went on to medical school.
MRS. TODD: And I taught school. After I’d been teaching one year, one of the parents asked me if I would coach the middle school girls’ team. That was in 1976. Then I went to Holy Rosary and coached their high school team from ’79 to ’83. At that time, Bob helped me but he was still doing residency and unless you were on faculty you couldn’t be on the bench, so I was on the bench alone. He would help out in practices.
In ’83 we stopped coaching for 5 or 6 years when our four daughters were born. Then we got back into it for grade schools.
DR. TODD: We developed a program for second through fourth graders. Then we picked up fifth and sixth, then seventh and eighth grades. We started an AAU association, the Louisville Fillies, and we had four teams, age 10 through 14. That was in the early years of AAU before there was a real explosion.
I remember one time we had four teams going to the nationals in different cities in different weeks and we took all our vacation and went to all the nationals. It was a lot of fun.
MRS. TODD: Robert went down to help with Manual and I stayed on with St. Agnes. Then we didn’t coach for a while. Then five years ago the Assumption program opened up and they spoke to us about it.
DR. TODD: The interesting thing is we have been coaching so long we actually have coached several daughters of players we coached at the very beginning. We didn’t want to stay long enough to coach granddaughters.
VYPE: What has changed since 1977 in girls’ basketball?
DR. TODD: One of the things is that it went from being a seasonal sport to being 12 months of the year. When we took over the Assumption program it was a 12-month program with breaks. You have a spring program after the season, a summer program, a fall program and your winter season.
Another thing is that when we went to school, and even with kids we coached early on, there was always a good athlete two-sporting, maybe even three-sporting. Now the push is to one sport. Martha and I actually like two-sporting. All our daughters two-sported. There is medical data indicating that it helps protect athletes by using different muscle groups.
MRS. TODD: Another thing that has changed is the diversity of sports that are available. Especially since we coach women. When I played in high school there were girls where there were not programs in some of the public schools. Now they have lacrosse, ice hockey, synchronized skating…there are so many different sports. It has its advantages and disadvantages for established programs like basketball. With the opportunities to do these other sports, the number of children who are playing basketball at the high school level is fewer.
And a lot of them also see it as an opportunity to get scholarships.
DR. TODD: That is the fourth change that we see. At the beginning there were very few scholarships. You played basketball because you got into the sport in the second grade and you loved it. It was just so much fun to get out there and play and play with your friends. The opportunity for scholarships was there but they were few and far between.
MRS. TODD: I did not play on scholarship. The year after I graduated they offered the first scholarships at Bellarmine. I don’t regret at all not playing on scholarship because I purely love the game. Sometimes we go back and forth with the emphasis on scholarships. It’s a good thing but sometimes it changes the motivation for playing.
DR. TODD: What we have seen at times is the importance of playing for your high school is just part of the 12-month experience and the AAU basketball becomes higher profile than the high school because the coaches can come see you during the off-season during the summer. I think you lose something in your attachment to your alma mater because you’re working at being seen by a college or university rather than just playing for your school. One of the things we tried to emphasize at Assumption is even though we’re in this new generation of athletics, you will look back and really be glad that you emphasized playing for your school.
We counseled our players to choose the university; don’t let the university choose you because they make a certain offer. You choose that university because it meets your needs. If you do that, whether you are successful at the university level in athletics or you decide that you’re not going to play or you have an injury that ruins your career, you’re going to love the experience you have at the university. We’re seeing so many student athletes that are unhappy if they do it the other way around.
MRS. TODD: A lot of our players thanked us for doing that because the ones who have chosen their school are really happy with where they are.
VYPE: What are your best memories from your years of coaching?
MRS. TODD: I would put it in two categories: my best competitive memories and my best pure memories. I don’t know which is higher in importance to me.
The times we have had with these kids have been just fantastic. One that comes to mind is last year, we were at a team camp up in Cincinnati playing Catchphrase. It was the coaches versus the players. We probably had 30 people in the room playing four different games. You couldn’t even hear. But it was so much fun.
DR. TODD: It was highly competitive yet we were having a ball.
We tried to make the program primarily a family environment and secondly competitive. So the competition grew out of the family environment that we developed. It takes a lot of work to maintain that with 30 kids in the program and all the coaching staff on the same page with that approach. And then to be competitive, because when we stepped out on the court it was all business. But in between it was relaxed and we liked that.
MRS. TODD: Another memory was when we played in a national tournament in Iowa called the Sacajawea. They started it to celebrate the 200th year of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The teams came from schools that were along the Lewis and Clark trail from New York to Washington. When we got there, the team went into a classroom and did a presentation about what role Louisville played in the expedition. Getting our girls to do that was a lot of fun…seeing them in another capacity other than just on the court. That was a good memory for me.
DR. TODD: This tournament had three nationally ranked teams from across the United States and we won it the first year.
MRS. TODD: For me the greatest competitive memory was making it to the state tournament last year and to the final four.
DR. TODD: When a team clicks, it is such a great feeling for a coach. It’s like just driving on a smoothly paved highway. You don’t have to steer. You just enjoy the ride. When a team clicks, the hardest thing you have to do is decide when to sub because everyone is playing well. Everything is just on hydroglide.
MRS. TODD: Another real competitive memory was when we had an AAU team that came in fourth in the nation. They were 12 and under. We were out in Utah and we got to walk in to the music, “One Moment in Time.” It was really exciting because it was a lot of teams from all over the nation.
VYPE: How did your coaching duties affect your family?
DR. TODD: We had four daughters who all played, and three of them played basketball in college and the other one played field hockey. They got so used to us coaching and they would be statisticians on teams where they didn’t play, and we had a daughter who was our freshman coach this year. That was fun. They were all talented and would help teach. We had two of them help run our summer camps. It meant that Martha and I could go and talk to the kids and teach and talk with the parents and not have to do the organizational things. It was nice because it gets you closer to your daughters.
MRS. TODD: They enjoyed it. It wasn’t like they felt they had to do it. Yet that was part of the reason we retired. Because our daughters are now going in different directions and when you are committed to a basketball program, you are gone over Christmas holidays, you’re gone over spring break, you’re gone all summer. Our oldest daughter just graduated from medical school and is moving to Tampa to do her residency. The ability to even get to go visit her would have been limited.
DR. TODD: And we have two in medical school and when they’re free we wanted to be free and not saying ‘Well, we’d like to hook up with you but we’ve got this thing.’
MRS. TODD: It has to be your first priority. You can’t do a basketball program at a high school level and it not be. It wouldn’t be fair to the girls.
DR. TODD: Since we coached for 30 years or so, I got to see Martha every day for this three-hour period in the afternoon when normally I would have been busy doing something in medicine or she would have been doing something and we would have caught up with each other around 6:00. We ended up catching up with each other around 3:00 and at 6 or 6:30 we would head home from the gym.
MRS. TODD: And we still like each other.
VYPE: What will you miss most?
MRS. TODD: The girls would call us Mama Todd and Papa Todd. The memories of the kids are just great.
DR. TODD: I would get 30 new daughters every year. It was so much fun. They would come over to our place for a retreat and we would just hang out and get to know them. I’ll miss that part of it.
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