The WNBA regular season is in its final stretch. Playoff pictures are sharpening. Records are being set. And three women who first picked up a basketball in Maryland gyms are right in the middle of it.

I want to check in on them — not with a season preview or a draft recap, but with where they actually stand right now, in the numbers and in the moments, as August closes out.

Angel Reese is doing something no one in WNBA history has done this fast.

Angel Reese grew up in Randallstown and walked the halls of St. Frances Academy on Brentwood Avenue before anyone outside Baltimore knew her name. This offseason, she was traded from Chicago to the Atlanta Dream, reuniting her in the frontcourt with a familiar face — more on that in a moment.

The trade has worked. Reese is averaging 15.9 points, 11.9 rebounds, and 2.7 assists a game this season, and the Dream have clinched a playoff berth at 24-13, good for first in the East. Along the way, Reese became the fastest player in WNBA history to reach 1,000 career rebounds, hitting the mark in just her 79th career game. She followed that up with a career-high 31 points in a win that helped lock up Atlanta’s postseason spot

.I have watched a lot of rebounders in thirty years of coaching. What Reese does — the relentlessness of it, night after night — doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because somebody taught her that the ball on the floor belongs to whoever wants it more. Baltimore taught her that.

Brionna Jones missed half the season. She’s making up for lost time.

Brionna Jones is from Harford County — Aberdeen High School, where she and her sister Stephanie once shared a backcourt. She tore her meniscus this past offseason playing overseas for USK Prague, had surgery in February, and didn’t make her 2026 season debut until mid-July. She missed the Dream’s first 24 games.

Since coming back, she’s easing into rhythm alongside Reese in Atlanta’s frontcourt — 9.3 points, 6.1 rebounds, and 2.1 assists in her return stretch, including a season-high 15 points on a perfect night from the field against Toronto. She’s coming off the bench for the first time since her earliest years in the league, which is its own kind of humility for a four-time All-Star. She has said plainly that she’s still building her conditioning back up. I believe her, and I also believe she’ll get there. This is a woman who has torn an Achilles and come back an All-Star before. A meniscus is not going to be the thing that stops her.

Kaila Charles was cut five times. She just signed a contract that says the cutting is over.

Here’s a name I need to tell you about, because I nearly missed her myself.

Kaila Charles is from Glenn Dale, Prince George’s County. She played her first three years of high school at Eleanor Roosevelt in Greenbelt before finishing at Riverdale Baptist, then went on to a three-time All-Big Ten career at Maryland. Connecticut drafted her 23rd overall in 2020. Since then, her WNBA journey has run through five different franchises — Connecticut, Atlanta, Seattle, Dallas, and now Golden State — with waivers and hardship contracts stitched between nearly every stop.

She joined the Valkyries last August on a seven-day deal. This April, Golden State signed her to a multi-year contract worth roughly $1.2 million. She has rewarded that faith: a career-high 15 points off the bench against Chicago earlier this month, regular double-figure scoring nights down the stretch, and a real role in a Golden State rotation that has climbed to 25-11 and clinched a playoff spot of its own — remarkable for a franchise in just its second season.

I think about what it takes to get cut five times and keep showing up anyway. That is not a stat line. That is a person deciding, over and over, that this is still worth it. Person first, player second — that is the whole idea behind everything we do here, and Kaila Charles is living proof of it in real time, in the WNBA, this week.

Three counties. Three stories. One stretch run.

Baltimore City. Harford County. Prince George’s County. Three different corners of this state, three different paths into the league, and right now, three Maryland women pushing their teams toward the playoffs at the same time.

I’ll be watching all three of them down the stretch — and I’ll be back with an update once the postseason picture is set.

Know a Maryland woman playing professional basketball we haven’t documented? Write to us at doagbc@gmail.com. The database has 386 verified players and counting. The work does not stop.

— TKS

Read the full series: doagbc.substack.com

Every city. Every county. Every one of them has a queen. It’s time you knew her name.

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Maryland Made: Every City/County Has a Queen is a real book. Amazon approved it this week. Volume I — The Pioneers — is done, verified, formatted, and on its way to Amazon.

.I have written a lot of words on this Substack about players. This one is about the book those players belong in, and how it got here.

Why I Started This in the First Place

For years, I have been building a database of Maryland high school girls who went on to play Division I basketball — a list that has grown past 386 names and counting. Somewhere in the middle of that research, I realized the database was never going to be enough. Spreadsheets don’t tell you what it felt like to be the only girl in the gym after practice. They don’t tell you what it cost a family to get their daughter to an AAU tournament three states away. They don’t tell you what it meant to a coach when a kid nobody else wanted finally got her letter from a college.

Those are stories. Maryland’s story — our story — deserved to be told properly.

So I wrote it down.

What This Book Actually Is

Maryland Made is a three-volume series telling the history of Maryland girls’ basketball through the players who lived it. Volume I — The Pioneers — covers the players who laid the foundation, from the 1970s through the 1990s. Twelve chapters. Twelve players. Twelve different paths that all led to the same place: a Maryland kid becoming a Division I basketball player, often before anyone was keeping score of who was watching.

Tara Heiss. Tori Harrison. Gert Scott. Comalita Haysbert. Dwuana “Dafne” Lee. Rosemary Kosiorek. Dana Johnson. Kisha Ford. Sonia Chase. Chanel Wright. Denise King. Melba Chambers. If you’ve been reading this Substack, some of those names are familiar to you by now. If you haven’t, this book is where you meet them properly, from the beginning, the way they deserve to be met.

Every chapter follows the same rule I set for myself on day one: person first, player second. Before I tell you about a jump shot or a scoring record, I want you to know who this person is — where she grew up, what she was up against, who believed in her before the world caught up. The stats matter. They’re in every chapter, laid out in full. But they are not the point. The person underneath them is the point.

Each chapter includes a Coach’s Note in my own voice before the story starts, a full player snapshot, the narrative itself, Fast Facts and honors, a Lesson section on what today’s players and coaches should take from her story, a What Happened Next on where life took her after basketball, and Think About It questions built for a classroom. I built this for two audiences at once. It sits comfortably in a elementary or middle school classroom or library — approachable, honest, never talking down to a young reader. It reads like Maryland basketball history, because that’s what it is.

Why I Started With the Pioneers

You don’t get to Angel Reese, or Nia Clouden, or any of the players filling out today’s Division I rosters — the ones I’ve been writing about all summer — without the players in this volume proving it was possible first.

Volume I opens with a name most people outside the game have never heard, and that’s exactly the point. It moves through Baltimore rec centers, Towson gyms, and county programs where girls were building something with almost no attention on them at all, years before AAU circuits, television coverage, or NIL deals existed. These are the players who didn’t have a blueprint. They were the blueprint.

I took verifying their stories seriously. Every school, every stat, every claim in this book has been checked and rechecked against original sources — box scores, newspaper archives, university athletics records. Where I couldn’t confirm something with certainty, I said so plainly rather than overstate it. These women earned an accurate record, not an exaggerated one.

How to Get It

Maryland Made: Every City/County Has a Queen — Volume I: The Pioneers is available now on Amazon in paperback, published under DOAGBC Press. It’s built full-size — 8.5 by 11, easy to read, easy to hand to a kid — and it’s built to last on a shelf, not just get read once and set aside.

If you are a parent, grandparent or anyone connected to a female baller this book was made for that child. If you coach, teach, or run a program in Maryland, this book was built with you in mind. I want it in gyms. I want it in classrooms. I want it in school libraries where a fourth grader or a middle schooler can pull it off the shelf and see a Maryland name she recognizes from her own city or county, maybe even the High School she wants to attend. If you’re in a position to bring it into your school or program, or you know someone who is, that’s exactly the kind of help I’m asking for right now.

What’s Next

Volume II — Going National, covering the 2000s through the early 2010s — is already underway behind the scenes. Volume III will carry the story into the modern, NIL-era game, the players I’ve been writing about here all along.

And this Substack isn’t slowing down either way. I’ll keep bringing you the current players, the history, the deep dives — Volume I is the foundation, not the finish line.

Every city. Every county. Every one of them has a queen. It’s time you knew her name. Now it’s a book, too.

Know a Maryland player whose story belongs in a future volume? I want to hear about her. Reach out any time at doagbc@gmail.com.

— Coach Tully Sullivan

Read the full series: doagbc.substack.com

Every city. Every county. Every one of them has a queen. It’s time you knew her name.

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1. One of Volume I’s queens never touched a basketball until she got to high school — and four years later she was starting in the national championship game.

Dana Johnson (Western High) picked up the game for the first time as a freshman. By her senior year at Tennessee, playing for Pat Summitt, she was the Lady Vols’ leading scorer in the 1995 NCAA Tournament — including the national title game against an undefeated UConn team. She later became one of the very first women in Maryland history to coach a boys’ varsity basketball team.

— Chapter: Dana Johnson

2. Maryland’s all-time assists record was held for decades by a woman who spent her post-basketball career as a FedEx courier.

Tara Heiss — the first Maryland player ever to reach 1,000 career points — set a school assist record that stood for a generation. After basketball, she worked more than twenty years delivering packages. She was inducted into four separate halls of fame across two sports before she passed away in 2023.

— Chapter: Tara Heiss

3. In 1982, a Maryland girl got the exact same newspaper cover treatment as the top-ranked boy recruit in the city — and it had basically never happened before.

The Baltimore Sun ran Tori Harrison and future NBA player Reggie Williams side by side under the headline “The Rush Is On.” Harrison, a 6’4” Towson Catholic center, went on to two Final Fours at Louisiana Tech and became a Division I head coach at 27 — one of the youngest in the country at the time.

— Chapter: Tori Harrison

4. One of the toughest players in the book was the youngest of fifteen children — and at sixteen years old, she beat a team of grown women to win a tournament MVP overseas.

Gert Scott grew up the youngest of 15 kids in Baltimore. As a 16-year-old sophomore, she and her Towson Catholic team traveled to Ireland for a senior-division tournament — every other player was 18 to 25 — and Scott took home MVP honors after scoring 21 points in both the semifinal and the championship.

— Chapter: Gert Scott

5. One of this book’s own subjects has a real, unsolved mystery ending — and the authors are asking readers to help solve it.

Comalita Haysbert started for a Top-20 Notre Dame team under Hall of Fame coach Muffet McGraw. The last confirmed record of her is from January 1991. What happened to her after that has never been confirmed. The chapter ends with an open call for anyone who knew her to come forward.

— Chapter: Comalita Haysbert

6. Because the WNBA didn’t exist yet, one Maryland pioneer built her pro career across five countries and three continents — then came home and coached for thirty straight years.

Dwuana “Dafne” Lee Blakley played professionally in Switzerland, Belgium, Israel, Greece, and China between 1993 and 1999. She then spent the next three decades coaching at seven different Baltimore-area programs, often while still playing overseas herself.

— Chapter: Dwuana Lee

7. A 5’5” Baltimore point guard turned down professional basketball offers to become an accountant instead — she’s now a partner at one of the “Big Four” accounting firms.

Rosemary Kosiorek set West Virginia’s all-time assists record and once averaged 24.3 points a game for a full season — still the school’s single-season scoring record more than thirty years later. She had pro offers waiting after college. She chose accounting instead, and today she’s a Partner at KPMG.

— Chapter: Rosemary Kosiorek

8. Before Angel McCoughtry, before Angel Reese, before St. Frances Academy meant anything nationally — one player got there first.

Melba Chambers was the very first St. Frances Academy player ever to reach the Big East Conference, starring at Georgetown years before the school built the pipeline that would eventually produce a #1 overall WNBA pick and a WNBA All-Star. In 2014, she returned to Georgetown — not as a player, but as a coach.

— Chapter: Melba Chambers

9. A Baltimore City guard played in the WNBA’s very first Finals — in the league’s very first season — before becoming a police officer.

Kisha Ford, who started at Western High before transferring to Bryn Mawr, became Georgia Tech’s all-time leading scorer and was drafted into the WNBA’s inaugural 1997 season. She played in that year’s Finals with the New York Liberty. She later became a forensic accountant, then a police officer.

— Chapter: Kisha Ford

10. A Baltimore County kid became the first Maryland woman ever drafted into the WNBA straight out of college — and then kept playing professionally for a decade across ten countries.

Sonia Chase, out of McDonogh School, was taken by the Charlotte Sting in the 1998 WNBA Draft — the first Maryland-raised woman to go directly from college into the league. She went on to a ten-year pro career spanning the WNBA, more than ten countries internationally, and the NWBL.

— Chapter: Sonia Chase

11. Down one point at halftime in the state championship game, one Maryland queen scored 19 of her 24 points in the second half alone — and turned the game into an 18-point blowout.

Chanel Wright’s Western High team trailed at the break in the 1995 Class 4A championship — one of only two times all season they’d been behind. She responded with an 8-0 run to open the second half, then 19 total points and 11 rebounds after intermission, turning a 23-22 deficit into a 51-33 win and a perfect 26-0 season. Her own explanation afterward: “I told myself I can’t stand still, I need to move to get the ball.”

— Chapter: Chanel Wright

12. Eight girls from one Baltimore high school team went on to play Division I basketball — all from the same senior class.

Denise King and her Seton Keough teammates had played together since they were eleven years old. In 2000, they won the first-ever IAAM A Conference championship — and eight players off that single roster went on to Division I programs. King later became the ninth head coach in UMass Lowell women’s basketball history, closing her own full-circle loop from player to program-builder.

— Chapter: Denise King

Every city. Every county. Every one of them has a queen. It’s time you knew her name. Now it’s a book, too.

Know a Maryland player whose story belongs in a future volume? I want to hear about her. Reach out any time at doagbc@gmail.com.

— Coach Tully Sullivan

Read the full series: doagbc.substack.com

#MarylandMade · #DOAGBC · #TheBookIsReal · #MarylandBasketball · #WomensBasketball

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For a while now, this Substack has been about one database — 380+ Maryland girls who made it to Division I basketball, and counting.

That database was never going to be the whole story.

I’ve been working on something new. Something that turns the names and the numbers into what they actually are: stories. Real ones, about real Maryland young girls who became queens of their city or their county, long before anyone outside the gym was paying attention.

It has a title. It has twelve chapters. And soon, it’s going to have a cover.

Here’s something else I’ll say now, because it matters to me: this isn’t just a book for coaches and diehard fans. I built it to work in a fourth, fifth, or sixth grade classroom too — something a teacher could actually use, and something a young reader could see herself in. If you teach, run a school library, or work in a Maryland athletic department, this one’s for you too.

I’ll be sharing more very soon — including the cover of the book, the first look at who’s inside it, and how you’ll be able to get your own copy.

If you coach, teach, love this game, or just want the next girl baller in your life to know these names, you’re going to want to be here for this.

Stay tuned.

Every city. Every county. Every one of them has a queen. It’s time you knew her name.

— Coach Tully Sullivan

Diary of a Girl’s Basketball Coach

doagbc.substack.com | doagbc@gmail.com

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Every fall, before the season started, Breezy Bishop sat down and wrote a booklet.

Twenty pages. Illustrated. She called it “Western High School Doves.” She raised the money to print it herself. And then she mailed it to the athletic department of every college in the United States of America — from Adelphi to Youngstown State, she said, including the Naval Academy, West Point, and the Ivies. Every college heard about her Doves.

Inside the booklet: pictures of school administrators and program supporters. Academic statistics. And most importantly, her players — freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Every year. All four classes. “These kids are not just good athletes,” she wrote. “They’re good kids — they’ve learned to work hard and study hard.”

She described her role at Western High School this way: “I market every student to the best colleges in the country.”

She was a girls’ basketball coach. She was also, before anyone in high school athletics had a name for it, a college placement operation for young women from Baltimore City who otherwise would not have had anyone advocating for them at that level.

Over seventeen years, 63 of her 64 players who applied for college scholarships received them — athletic or academic or both. She said it plainly: “That has to be one of the best records of any high school anywhere in the country.”

She is right. And she is the only Maryland girls’ high school basketball coach in the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.

This is the story of Breezy Bishop. It is the story of the second role model I chose when I was starting out as a coach. Her name was the second of two. And I want this article to be the fullest account of what she built that has ever been published outside of Baltimore.

The Girl Who Played with the Boys

Barbara Jude Bishop was born on September 7, 1935. Her family called her Breezy. The nickname stuck for ninety years and counting.

She grew up in Baltimore with three brothers who served in the Army, the Navy, and the Marines. Her grandmother, by the accounts that survive, knew from early on that Breezy would make her contribution to sports. In her early teen years, her mother and grandmother worried because she was always playing sports with the boys in her neighborhood. They were so concerned about this that they sent her to Girl Scout camp, perhaps hoping the outdoors experience would redirect her interests.

It did not redirect her. It expanded her. She came home from camp with new curiosity about swimming, hiking, and canoeing. She went on to play basketball, softball, and track and field in high school.

She wanted to major in physical education in college. Her father would not support her financially to do it. This is the first obstacle in the Breezy Bishop story, and it is the one that might have ended everything before it started. It did not. She found another path. She got to college, she got her degree, and she eventually came back to Baltimore to teach physical education and health and coach track and field — and, eventually, basketball.

She arrived at Western High School in the 1970s. Western is the oldest female public high school in America — founded in 1844, when the city of Baltimore established a school specifically for the education of women in a time when such institutions were rare. Breezy Bishop and Western High School were made for each other. A woman who had spent her whole life fighting for the right to compete. A school that had spent 130 years giving women the space to learn.

424 Wins, 17 City Championships, and a Win Percentage That Belongs in a Different Conversation

Let me put Breezy Bishop’s record on the table before I discuss anything else, because the record is the foundation on which everything else rests.

In 24 seasons at Western High School, she went 424-40. Seventeen Baltimore City championships. Two Maryland State Championships — back-to-back, in 1994 and 1995. Teams consistently ranked among the nation’s best by USA Today. Named Baltimore Sun All-Metro Coach of the Year in 1984, 1990, and 1995. Selected as the WBCA National High School Coach of the Year in 1995. Inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2000.

The win percentage is .914. In twenty-four seasons. That is not a number from a favorable schedule or a weak league. The Baltimore City public school athletic environment is one of the most competitive and physically demanding in the country. Western’s players came from all over the city, from neighborhoods where the conditions of daily life were often genuinely difficult. Breezy Bishop built her 424-40 record with those players, in that city, over twenty-four years.

For context: Lin James, the all-time regional wins leader, won 608 games over 48 years. Breezy Bishop won 424 games in 24 years. She won those games at a rate that, if she had coached another 24 years at the same pace, would have put her over 800 wins total. She is not behind Lin James. She is a different kind of great, operating in a completely different environment, at a completely different velocity.

The Booklet: What Nobody Else Was Doing

I want to spend real time on the “Doves” booklet because I think it is the most important thing Breezy Bishop did, and it is almost never discussed in the context of her coaching legacy.

In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, women’s basketball players at public high schools in Baltimore City did not have agents. They did not have recruiting services. They did not have ESPN HoopGurlz rankings or national recruiting databases. They had whatever their coach did for them, and whatever their coach did was usually limited to answering calls when college coaches reached out.

Breezy Bishop did not wait for calls. She made the calls. She wrote the booklet. Every fall. Twenty pages. Self-funded. Mailed to every college in the country.

The Abell Foundation, which recognized her work, described it precisely: “Every fall the Doves fly into the athletic coach’s office of every college in the country — from Adelphi to Youngstown State, including the Naval Academy and West Point and the Ivies. Every college hears about my Doves.”

She was not just sending basketball statistics. She was sending academic information, character references, photographs, school context. She was providing college coaches with a complete picture of each player — not just what the player could do on the court but who the player was as a student and a person.

She had one standard she held publicly for her players: in seventeen years, she said, not one player had scored below 700 on the SAT — the threshold for athletic eligibility. Not one. She said this not to brag but to make a point about what her program actually produced: academically eligible, athletically competitive women who were ready for the next level.

The result: 63 of 64 players who applied for scholarships over seventeen years received them. One missed. Sixty-three succeeded. College attendance for the program ran above 85 percent for twenty years and above 90 percent for the five years preceding the Abell Foundation’s recognition of her work.

Dana Johnson did not play basketball before she arrived at Western High School as a freshman. Breezy Bishop found her potential, developed her game from nothing, and turned her into an All-American who received a full athletic scholarship to the University of Tennessee — Pat Summitt’s program, the greatest dynasty in the history of women’s collegiate basketball.

Johnson became the athletic director and boys’ basketball coach at Dunbar High School. Asked about Bishop at the 2022 court dedication ceremony, she said: “She was way ahead of her time. When it came to preparing us for the next level, it was like a seamless transition. We were doing things at the high school level that colleges were doing, so it wasn’t totally new to us when we got there. It was brilliant.”

Friday Rap Sessions: When the Coach Became a Listener

During basketball season, Bishop ran two-and-a-half-hour practices every day except Friday. On Friday, the team ran for an hour. And then they did something no other coach I have ever studied was documented doing on a regular basis.

They had rap sessions.

Not film sessions. Not chalk-talk sessions. Rap sessions — conversations. Circle-of-chairs sessions where Bishop listened to her players talk about their lives. She described it as the time when she learned the character of her players. She wanted to know what was happening at home, in the neighborhood, in the classroom. She wanted to know who she was actually coaching before she asked anything of them on the court.

Monica Dailey, who played for Bishop and graduated in 1990, described what those sessions produced over the long run: “What Coach Bishop has done is replicate herself in thousands of young women.”

That is a sentence that deserves to be read twice. Replicate herself. Not produce basketball players. Not develop athletes. Replicate herself — meaning that the qualities Bishop modeled for her players, the values she embedded in those Friday conversations, went out into the world inside the women who sat in that circle. They became teachers and coaches and administrators and mothers and professionals, carrying something they had received in a gym on the north side of Baltimore.

Tiffany Silver was the point guard on Bishop’s final teams at Western. She said Bishop was so demanding that Silver always felt she wasn’t good enough. When Bishop retired and Silver eventually stepped into a coaching role herself, Bishop was still there — coaching Silver, coaching her players, coaching the entire staff. “She still coached me, the players … the entire staff on how to coach young women,” Silver said. “We never took it for granted at that time, and we don’t take it for granted now.”

Kim Smith, Lafayette Court, and the Girl Who Was Scared of Her

Kim Smith grew up in Lafayette Court, a high-rise public housing project in Baltimore. She came to Western knowing she needed discipline. She got it — but not without a fight.

“She really didn’t like players doing a lot of talking,” Smith said of Bishop. “I walked out of practice at least once a week, but always came back.” Then she added this: “I was really scared of my mother. I was definitely afraid of her — but she didn’t know it.”

Smith was a star guard on Western’s 1994 and 1995 state championship teams. She went to Georgetown on scholarship. When things got difficult there — the way they sometimes do for young women navigating a new city, a new level of competition, and a new life away from home — she transferred.

She transferred to North Carolina State. She did not know, when she made that decision, that Breezy Bishop had just retired from Western and had been hired as an assistant coach at NC State — where the Wolfpack reached the NCAA Women’s Final Four for the first time in school history during Bishop’s one season there.

“She was such an anchor for me,” Smith said. “I was going to let this take me around the world. She left such an impression.” Speaking of Bishop’s words at the court dedication: “Things that she said to me when I was 14 years old, I say now.”

The relationship between Breezy Bishop and Kim Smith — a girl from Lafayette Court housing and the five-foot coach who terrified her and also saved her — is the Bishop story in miniature. It is the relationship repeated, in different forms, across hundreds of young women over twenty-four years.

The Hall of Fame, the Scholarship Fund, and the Tournament That Bears Her Name

In 2000, Breezy Bishop was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Tennessee — the same city where the greatest women’s college basketball program in history was built by Pat Summitt, the program where Bishop sent Dana Johnson. She is the only Maryland girls’ high school basketball coach in the Hall. Not one of a few. The only one.

After Western, she coached collegiately — at Coppin State, at Johns Hopkins, at Towson State, and then for the 1997–98 season as an assistant at NC State. The Wolfpack made the Final Four that year. She then stepped out of coaching and returned to Baltimore, to the community she had always been serving.

She established a scholarship fund through the Baltimore Community Foundation — the Breezy Bishop Western High School Scholarship Fund — that awards a minimum of $10,000 annually to a deserving female graduate of Western, renewable for up to three additional years. She turned her legacy into an ongoing financial investment in the next generation of Western women.

The annual “Breezy Bishop Showcase” — a girls’ basketball tournament at the Western/Poly Athletic Complex — became the largest girls’ basketball tournament on the East Coast, drawing thirty-two teams from across the Mid-Atlantic region. ESPN HoopGurlz covered it. National programs competed in it. The best high school basketball in the region, gathered annually in Baltimore City, named for a woman who believed the women’s game deserved exactly that kind of visibility.

In September 2022, at the age of 87, she stood in the Eva Scott Gymnasium at Western High School as the court was dedicated in her name. Current coach Tasha Townsend — a 1993 Western graduate who played one season for Bishop — and star player Ny’Ceara Pryor presented Bishop with the championship ring from the 2021–22 state title, Western’s first since 1995.

She had been on the floor at the Xfinity Center in College Park months earlier when the Doves won that title. She watched her program win its first championship in twenty-seven years. Then they gave her a ring.

At the ceremony, she said: “The Lord has given me the grace to walk this earth for 87 years. I feel like maybe I did get it right.”

And then — according to the Baltimore Banner’s account of the day — she dropped the microphone.

Why I Chose Her: The Role Model from Across Town

Earlier in this series, in the piece about Jerome Shelton, I wrote that I had two coaching role models I watched from a distance when I was starting out. Jerome Shelton was one. Breezy Bishop was the other.

What I took from watching Breezy Bishop was something different from what I took from watching Shelton. Shelton taught me about consistency and humility, about the long game of building a program in one place. Bishop taught me about advocacy. She taught me that coaching girls’ basketball is not just about what happens inside the gym. It is about what you do on behalf of your players after the final buzzer every season.

The Doves booklet is the thing that changed how I thought about my responsibility as a coach. Here was a woman who looked at her players — young women from Baltimore City who were athletically gifted and academically eligible and who, without someone actively advocating for them, might never have gotten in front of the right college coaches — and she said: I will be that advocate. I will write the twenty pages. I will fund the printing. I will mail it to every college from Adelphi to Youngstown State.

She did not wait for the system to notice her players. She forced the system to notice her players. Every single fall. For seventeen years. Without a marketing budget. Without a recruiting service. Without any infrastructure except her own relentless belief that these young women deserved to be seen.

I am not Breezy Bishop. I have never done anything on the scale of what she did. But the principle she embodied — that the coach is not just a coach, that the coach is also a door-opener and a story-teller and an advocate for people who need someone in their corner — is one I carried from the moment I first understood what she had built.

What the Hall of Fame Means Here

The Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame is in Knoxville, Tennessee. Its mission is to preserve and promote the history of women’s basketball — from the first games played in a Massachusetts gymnasium in 1892 to the packed arenas of today. It is the definitive record of what the sport has been and who built it.

There is one Maryland girls’ high school basketball coach in that building. One name from this state, from this city, from the public school system that produced generations of young women who were coached, advocated for, educated, and sent into the world by a five-foot giant who wrote a twenty-page booklet every autumn.

Her name is Barbara Jude Bishop. They called her Breezy. She coached the Doves for twenty-four years. She won 424 games. She sent 63 of 64 players to college on scholarships. She was the WBCA National Coach of the Year. She put the floor at Western High School on the national recruiting map. And she is in the Hall.

She dropped the microphone in September 2022, at 87 years old, in a gymnasium named for Eva Scott at a school founded in 1844.

And she has been coaching coaches ever since.

Coach Breezy Bishop Court. Western High School. Baltimore, Maryland.

Diary of a Girl’s Basketball Coach · doagbc.substack.com · doagbc@gmail.com

The Breezy Bishop Western High School Scholarship Fund is administered by the Baltimore Community Foundation. For information, visit bcf.org.

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In 2019, the administration of Arundel High School in Gambrills, Maryland, decided to name the girls’ basketball court after its girls’ basketball coach.

They told Lee Rogers what they planned to do. He asked them not to.

“Lee was almost mortified,” said former athletic director Kevin Necessary. “He said please don’t put my name on that floor. You have to force Lee to accept some recognition.”

They did it anyway. And they were right to.

Lee Rogers coached girls’ basketball at Arundel High School for thirty-four years. He compiled a career record of 570-251. He won four state championships and finished as runner-up three times. He won eleven region titles and fourteen county championships. He mentored more than fifty players who went on to play college basketball, a substantial number of them at the Division I level. He was selected to coach the West squad in the McDonald’s All-American Girls Game — one of the most prestigious individual honors in high school basketball coaching in the country.

His former athletic director called him “one of the most underrated and underappreciated high school coaches — not basketball coaches, all high school coaches — that’s ever coached in our county.”

Kevin Necessary is correct. And this article is an attempt to fix that.

The Three Women Who Made the Call

The most important thing to know about Lee Rogers’ coaching career is that it almost didn’t happen. Not the girls’ basketball part of it, at least.

Rogers had coached boys’ basketball at Arundel for five seasons before stepping away from the sideline for a few years. He was a physical education teacher at Lindale Middle School, a feeder school for what was then Andover High School and later became North County High. He had settled back into teaching without coaching and might have stayed there.

Then three women changed his mind.

Sally Entsminger, the longtime girls’ basketball coach at Andover and North County, knew Rogers through their shared middle school connection. Through Entsminger, Rogers had come to know two Hall of Fame-caliber coaches: Pat Chance at Old Mill High School, and Linda Kilpatrick at Southern High School. The three of them looked at Rogers and told him: you would be good at coaching girls. You have the right demeanor. You should try it.

Lee Rogers took the Arundel girls’ basketball job in 1989. He went 6-16 in his first season. “I was wondering what in the world I had gotten myself into,” he said.

The women who sent him to that job knew something he didn’t yet know about himself. That is the origin story of one of the most successful girls’ basketball programs in Maryland history — a phone call, or a conversation in a hallway, from three coaches who recognized something in a man that he had not recognized in himself.

Donna Parker, Donna McGowan, and the Second Season

The 6-16 first season was not the end of the story. It was barely the beginning.

In Rogers’ second season, led by combination guard Donna Parker, Arundel posted a winning record. Word spread through the community around Gambrills and Odenton and Crofton that playing basketball at Arundel was fun under the new coach. That word-of-mouth is how a program starts to build. Not with championships or recruiting visits — with players telling other players that the environment is worth joining.

Also in those early years, Rogers began working alongside assistant Donna McGowan. The two of them were together for thirty-four seasons. “Donna has been with me since we started and has really been my backbone,” Rogers said when his coaching record was being celebrated publicly. He insisted, when he was chosen to coach the McDonald’s All-American Game, that his entire staff — including McGowan — be allowed on the bench. The honor was for the program, not the head coach, and the bench would reflect that.

That detail says everything about Lee Rogers as a coach. He would not accept a public honor without taking the people who helped build the thing being honored. He would not stand at the front alone while the people who actually did the work stood somewhere else.

Learning to Lose to Breezy Bishop, and Then Learning to Win Without Her

In the 1994–95 season, Lee Rogers coached his Arundel Wildcats to a 25-1 record. They went to the Class 4A state championship game. They lost to Western High School, led by Hall of Fame coach Breezy Bishop, 51-33. Their lone loss of the season was to the best program in Maryland, coached by the only Maryland girls’ high school basketball coach who would ever be inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.

What Rogers did next is the detail that tells you the most about who he was. He was humble enough to ask for advice.

Every starter came back the following year. Rogers went out and found the counsel he needed to take the next step. The 1995–96 Wildcats went 27-2. They won the first state championship in Arundel girls’ basketball history, defeating Sherwood 57-49 at UMBC, led by standout forward Chavonne Hammond — who posted 15 points, 14 rebounds, and eight blocked shots in the title game.

“What I remember about that first state championship was the environment,” Rogers said years later. “Green and white took over that gymnasium and we had incredible support.”

He did not talk about what he had done. He talked about what the community had brought to the moment.

The Players He Built from Nothing

Every coach wants the fully formed recruit — the player who arrives already polished, already competitive, already pointed toward something. Lee Rogers built his legacy on a different kind of player.

Chavonne Hammond, who went to Vanderbilt and led the 1996 championship run, had been playing organized basketball for only three seasons when Vanderbilt’s recruiting coordinator first laid eyes on her. Rogers had identified something in a player the recruiting world had not yet found.

Simone Egwu, who went on to play at the University of Virginia, came to an Arundel summer camp as a raw and unformed prospect. Rogers’ own memory of the first time he saw her is one of the best details in this story: “Simone was playing with her dolls in the bleachers during breaks.” She was not, at that point, a basketball player. She was a child. Rogers saw something in her anyway. He developed her into a Division I player and the centerpiece of a program that won an 89-game county winning streak during that era.

Shante Edmonds had never played any organized sport of any kind before she arrived at Arundel. She walked in with no basketball background, no athletic history, no prior competitive experience. She left as an All-County performer with a scholarship to Columbia University.

Ana Baker, a key contributor on the 2004 state championship team who went to UNC-Asheville, came back to Arundel after college to serve as an assistant coach for five years. She said of Rogers: “He had a perfect balance between discipline and caring. He was always able to get a lot out of all the girls that played for him because they knew how much he cared. He was tough, demanding and pushed us hard in order to take the team to the next level.”

That phrase — “they knew how much he cared” — is the foundation of every relationship in Lee Rogers’ coaching record. The pressure he put on his players was real. The 2.5-hour practices were real. The ultimatums were real. And none of it would have worked if the players hadn’t known, underneath all of it, that the man demanding things from them was doing it because he genuinely wanted something for them, not just from them

.

Positionless Basketball Before Anyone Called It That

The basketball Rogers played at Arundel was ahead of its time by a decade.

Full-court pressure defense. Push the ball in transition. Create turnovers and turn them into easy baskets before the opposing defense can set up. And the philosophical core of the whole system: positionless basketball. Rogers was an early proponent of training players at every spot on the court — making sure his guards could play inside and his post players could operate on the perimeter, so that the defense never knew which matchup to exploit.

“Arundel’s offense comes off pressure defense,” said Old Mill’s Craig White, describing what Rogers had built. That sentence is a complete scouting report. The offense was downstream of the defense. The scoring came from disruption. The team that you watched in transition was the product of the team that was already taking the ball from you.

Dana Johnson, who went on to become the athletic director and boys’ basketball coach at Dunbar after playing for Breezy Bishop at Western, described what Breezy Bishop’s practices were like: college-level systems applied at the high school level so the transition was seamless. Lee Rogers was doing the same thing at Arundel — not with the same recruiting base, not in the same league, but with the same coaching philosophy: prepare these young women for where they’re going, not just for where they are.

The result was an 89-game winning streak against county competition. Four state titles. Three runner-up finishes. A program that opponents planned specifically around for thirty-four years.

The Four Championships: A Record of Each

1996: Arundel 57, Sherwood 49. The program’s first title. 27-2 season. Chavonne Hammond’s double-double anchors the game. Green and white takes over the gymnasium at UMBC. Rogers’ first state championship, one year after learning how to lose to Breezy Bishop.

2000: Arundel beats Oxon Hill in the final. 25-2 season. Led by Najmah Fauntleroy, who went on to play at Delaware State, and Jill Marano, who went on to play at LaSalle. The program’s second title, establishing the dynasty as something real and sustained rather than a one-year peak.

2004: Arundel’s third title. 26-2 season. Led by Alex McGuire (Army), Ana Baker (UNC-Asheville), and Janae Butler (Wilmington). Three players with three different destinations, all developed under the same staff, all ready for the next level.

2010: Arundel 53, Gaithersburg 40. The fourth and final state championship of the Rogers era. Eleven region titles and fourteen county championships completed the record.

Four state championships spanning fourteen years is not a program that peaked once and coasted. It is a program that rebuilt after every graduation, that found new players and turned them into winners, that had a system deep enough to survive the loss of Chavonne Hammond and Sherrone Vails and Simone Egwu and still compete at the highest level the following season.

The McDonald’s Game: The Honor That Belongs in the Conversation

In 2018, Lee Rogers was selected to serve as head coach of the West squad in the McDonald’s All-American Girls Game in Atlanta.

That selection is, in the world of high school basketball coaching, a statement. The McDonald’s All-American Game is the country’s most visible high school all-star game, and the head coaching assignments go to people who have earned the recognition of the national coaching community. It is not a local award. It is not a state award. It is a national certification that you belong among the elite.

Rogers made one non-negotiable demand when he accepted: his entire staff had to be on the bench. Not just him. Not just the head coach. The people who had been doing the work for decades at Arundel High School would stand on the floor at the McDonald’s All-American Game, or he was not going.

Donna McGowan stood on that floor. After thirty-plus seasons as his assistant. After years of being the backbone of a program that the man at the front of it refused to take individual credit for.

That moment is the Rogers story. Not the trophies. Not the wins. The insistence that the people who actually did the work stand at the front with you when the honor comes.

The Players in the Database

For the purposes of the Diary of a Girl’s Basketball Coach database — our record of Maryland high school women who went on to play Division I basketball — Lee Rogers’ program is well-represented.

Najmah Fauntleroy, a key figure on the 2000 state championship team, went to Delaware State — she is documented in our database. Jill Marano, co-leader of that same 2000 championship squad, went to LaSalle — also in the database. Chavonne Hammond went to Vanderbilt. Simone Egwu to Virginia. Sherrone Vails to Louisville. These are the visible, verified entries. The full breadth of the program’s D1 placement record — Rogers is credited with more than fifty college players, a large contingent at the Division I level — means there are almost certainly names in the Arundel record that deserve fuller documentation in future research.

This matters for a specific reason: Rogers’ success at sending players to college was not built on the most visible, most recruited players. Shante Edmonds, who had never played organized sports before Arundel, went to Columbia University — an Ivy League institution. That placement, for a player with no prior competitive history, is the product of a coach who saw something and developed it from scratch. It is the kind of placement that rarely appears in recruiting databases because the player never had a ranking.

The full accounting of what Lee Rogers sent out of Arundel High School over thirty-four years is a research project that deserves its own chapter.

The Underrated and Underappreciated

Kevin Necessary, who served as Arundel’s athletic director, called Lee Rogers “one of the most underrated and underappreciated high school coaches — not basketball coaches, all high school coaches — that’s ever coached in our county.” He said, “I don’t think people realize just how successful his program has been. I’m not just talking about all the wins, which speak for themselves.”

I think the reason Lee Rogers is underrated is the same reason several coaches in this series are underrated: he coached at a public school without a national recruiting profile, in a county that does not have the media infrastructure of Baltimore City, in a sport that historically received less coverage than the boys’ game. He was successful, and he was consistent, and he was quiet about it. He refused the recognition. He deflected the credit. He asked them not to put his name on the floor.

The coaches in this series who let the work speak for itself — Shelton, Kilpatrick, Lin James, Rogers — all share that quality. They did not build programs to build their reputations. They built programs to build young women. The reputations came later, sometimes much later, and were accepted with the same quiet steadiness with which the work itself was done.

Three women — Sally Entsminger, Pat Chance, Linda Kilpatrick — looked at a boys’ basketball coach who had stepped away from the sideline and said: you have the right demeanor. You should try coaching girls.

He went 6-16 in his first season.

He finished with 570 wins, four state championships, and a McDonald’s All-American coaching assignment.

The court at Arundel High School carries his name. He asked them not to put it there.

They were right.

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There is a moment in almost every coach’s life when someone else’s example gets inside them and doesn’t leave.

For Linda Kilpatrick, that moment came in the hallways and gymnasium of Southern High School in Harwood, Maryland, where she was a student. The man who got inside her and didn’t leave was Tom Albright — the Southern boys’ basketball coach who would go on to win 550 games, multiple state championships, and whose name is now on the gymnasium at the school where they both worked.

She watched him. She paid attention to how he carried himself with his players. She understood something about the relationship between a coach and a community, about what it meant to spend your life at one school, building one program, going home every night to the same town where your players went home every night.

And then she went out, went to college, built a life, and came back.

She came back to Southern High School. She coached the girls’ basketball program for thirty-nine years. She won five state basketball championships and three state lacrosse championships. She compiled more than 500 wins. She was inducted into the Anne Arundel County Sports Hall of Fame and the Anne Arundel Community College Hall of Fame. And in December 2023, eight years after she retired, the basketball court at Southern High School was dedicated in her name.

Tom Albright’s name is on the gym. Linda Kilpatrick’s name is on the court. Two coaches. One school. One community in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. A tradition that ran for more than a combined ninety years.

This is what a coaching legacy looks like when it takes root

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Growing Up in the Game That Didn’t Officially Exist Yet

This is the part of Linda Kilpatrick’s story that people who only know the wins and the championships might not fully appreciate: she built all of it at a school that, when she was a student there, did not have a girls’ interscholastic athletics program. Not a weak one. Not an underfunded one. None.

When Linda Kilpatrick was a teenager growing up in Anne Arundel County, the girls competed in intramural-type events — round-robin Saturday tournaments against other county schools. Not sanctioned competition. Not state tournaments. Not the kind of thing that showed up in a newspaper or led to a college scholarship. Just girls who wanted to play, finding whatever structure was available to them.

She played everything she could. Basketball, volleyball, softball — whatever the school offered, whatever the informal system offered. She went on to play basketball at Anne Arundel Community College, again in a similar intramural-adjacent structure, and then she competed in basketball and the shot put at the University of Maryland. All of that came before Title IX was enacted in 1972.

Let that sit for a moment. The woman who would go on to win five state basketball championships in Anne Arundel County grew up in a version of Anne Arundel County where girls didn’t officially have the right to play interscholastic sports. She had to find the game around the edges of the system because the system wasn’t designed to include her.

Then Title IX passed. Then the doors opened. And Linda Kilpatrick, who had watched Tom Albright build something at Southern for years, walked through them.

The Man Who Put the Idea in Her Head

Tom Albright coached boys’ basketball at Southern High School for decades and won 550 games, four county championships in a row, multiple state titles, and the kind of loyalty from his players that only comes from a man who treats the young people in his care as family.

He gave rides to players who had no other way to get to school. He took as much pride in his teaching — he taught computer science — as in his coaching. When one of his former players described him as a father figure, it wasn’t a metaphor. It was a description of a real relationship.

Kilpatrick watched all of this as a student. She saw what it looked like when a coach was completely invested in the community they served. She saw what it meant to show up every day at the same school, to know the players’ families, to be part of the fabric of a town.

There is a direct line between what Tom Albright built in the boys’ gym at Southern High School and what Linda Kilpatrick built in the girls’ program. The inspiration was visible. The model was right in front of her. And when she came back to Southern to coach, she carried that model with her.

The gymnasium at Southern High School is named for Tom Albright. The basketball court carries Linda Kilpatrick’s name. The man who inspired her and the woman he inspired are both, permanently, part of the same building.

Coming Back: The Rarest Choice in Coaching

After the University of Maryland, after all of that, Kilpatrick sent her resume out across Anne Arundel County. Her alma mater was the first to respond. Southern High School called her back.

She took the job. She has described it simply: “I was happy with what I was doing.” That sentence contains more wisdom than most coaching philosophies I have read in thirty years. She was happy. Not because the wins were coming easily — they weren’t, especially at the start. Not because the resources were overflowing. But because she was coaching at her school, in her community, building something that was genuinely hers.

She had chances to move into college coaching. Two young children kept her home, she has said — but I think the truth is also that she understood something about what public high school coaching makes possible that college coaching does not. At the high school level, you are not just coaching players. You are coaching daughters, sisters, neighbors. You are part of the same community as your players’ parents, their teachers, their pastors, their employers. The relationship between coach and player at the high school level is deeper than almost any relationship in college athletics, because it is embedded in real life, not insulated from it.

She credits her ex-husband, Michael Kilpatrick, with helping her coach in those early years. When she was inducted into the Anne Arundel County Sports Hall of Fame, his was the first invitation she sent. Eleven of the twelve players from her first state championship team — won in 1979, in her third or fourth season coaching — attended that induction ceremony. That is not a statistic. That is a portrait of a relationship that lasted forty-plus years after the final buzzer.

Five State Championships: What That Requires at a Public School

Linda Kilpatrick said something about her program that I want to spend some time with, because I think coaches who have not built programs at public schools without recruiting advantages may not fully hear what she is saying.

“I’m not St. Mary’s,” she said. “I’m not any of the private schools where I can entice players to come here. You have to play the hand you’re dealt.”

She said this not with bitterness but with clarity. She is describing the conditions of her work. At Southern High School in Harwood, Maryland, she coached whoever came to the school from the surrounding community. She could not offer scholarships. She could not recruit across county lines. She could not market the program to the parents of eighth-graders who lived somewhere else. She got the girls who walked through the door, and she made them into state champions.

Five times.

The first title came in 1979. Eleven of the twelve players from that team were in the room decades later when she was inducted into the county Hall of Fame. The titles continued across different eras, different rosters, different competitive landscapes. She took her teams to the state tournament thirteen documented times. And she did something that she described as the thing she is most proud of: in every decade she coached — the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s, the 2010s — her program went to the state final four.

Five decades of final four appearances at a public school in Anne Arundel County with no recruiting pipeline. That is the record. Let it land.

The Part of the Story Almost Nobody Tells: Lacrosse

When people write about Linda Kilpatrick, they write about basketball. Five state championships. 500-plus wins. The court named after her. They miss, or only briefly mention, the other sport.

Linda Kilpatrick also coached girls’ lacrosse at Southern High School. She won three state lacrosse championships.

Three.

Not every coach who is exceptional in one sport could build a championship program in a second one simultaneously. The fact that Kilpatrick did this — that she was building state-title programs in two different sports, at the same school, in the same community, across the same career — tells you something important about what kind of coach she was. She was not a basketball coach who happened to coach lacrosse. She was a developer of young women athletes who happened to be competing in two different sports.

Eight state championships in two sports. At a public school. Without the ability to recruit across boundaries. That is Linda Kilpatrick’s complete record, and it has almost never been presented completely

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The Mentor She Became: Lee Rogers and the Generational Transfer

Here is the part of the Linda Kilpatrick story that almost no one outside Anne Arundel County basketball knows, and it is the part I find most powerful.

Lee Rogers had been coaching boys’ basketball. He left coaching for a few years. He came back to teaching physical education at a middle school. And then three women — Sally Entsminger of North County, Pat Chance of Old Mill, and Linda Kilpatrick of Southern — looked at him and said: you would be good at coaching girls’ basketball. You have the right demeanor. You should try it.

Lee Rogers went on to coach girls’ basketball at Arundel High School for more than thirty seasons. He won four state championships. He compiled 534-plus wins. He was selected as head coach of the West team in the McDonald’s All-American Girls Game — one of the highest honors a high school girls’ basketball coach can receive. He eventually had his name put on the court at Arundel — a distinction he was reportedly almost mortified to accept. And Rogers has said directly that Linda Kilpatrick was part of the reason any of it happened.

Tom Albright inspired Kilpatrick to become a coach. Kilpatrick (along with Entsminger and Chance) inspired Rogers to coach girls’ basketball. Rogers built a 534-win, four-state-title program at Arundel. That is three generations of coaching legacy, all rooted in the community of Anne Arundel County, all connected through people who saw something in someone else and chose to encourage it.

This is how the sport actually grows. Not through national television contracts or recruiting rankings. Through a woman who watches a man coach a boys’ team, decides she wants to do that for girls, comes back to her own school to do it, and then thirty years later tells a young teacher: you have the right demeanor. You should try it.

Pat Chance and the Chain That Goes Back Further

Just as Kilpatrick was a mentor to Lee Rogers, she herself was shaped by someone who came before her: Pat Chance, the longtime girls’ basketball coach at Old Mill High School in Anne Arundel County.

Kilpatrick described Chance as “one of my great mentors,” and then she said something I think about every time I see a young coach who doesn’t yet fully understand what they’re building:

“She was a great coach, and I surpassed her winning record in Anne Arundel County, and when I stop, somebody’s going to surpass mine.”

Read that sentence out loud.

That is not a sentence about winning. That is a sentence about the purpose of a coaching life. You receive something from the person who came before you. You pass it forward. You build something that outlasts you. And the measure of your success is not whether your record stands forever — it is whether what you built was worth surpassing.

Pat Chance to Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick to Rogers. Rogers to whoever comes next at Arundel. That is the chain. That is what a genuine coaching legacy looks like when you follow it all the way back to its roots and all the way forward to where it’s still growing.

Kilpatrick Court

In December 2023, eight years after Linda Kilpatrick retired, Southern High School dedicated its basketball court in her name. “Kilpatrick Court.” The ceremony made the local papers. Former players came. The community showed up.

What I love about the timing is this: it took eight years after she retired. That is not an institutional oversight. That is the rhythm of the way real things get recognized. The wins stop. The seasons end. And then, slowly, the community comes to understand what it had. It takes the absence of the thing to fully see what the thing was.

The gymnasium is Tom Albright’s. The court is Linda Kilpatrick’s. The same building. The same school. The man who inspired her and the woman he inspired, permanently named together in the place they both gave their professional lives.

I do not know if Linda Kilpatrick thinks about that often — the symmetry of it, the completeness of it. But I think about it. I think about a girl who grew up at a school where girls couldn’t play interscholastic sports, who watched the boys’ coach and thought: I want to do that. Who came back. Who did it for thirty-nine years. Who left behind a court that will carry her name for as long as that building stands.

What This Means for the Women’s Game in Maryland

Our database tracks players. But the players are produced by coaches. And the coaches are produced by other coaches, going back through the generations to people who decided, in gyms that were not yet fully legitimized, in programs that did not yet have the resources they deserved, that the women’s game was worth building.

Linda Kilpatrick is part of that lineage at a structural level. She was coached by the example of a man who loved what he was doing and showed her what loyalty to a community looked like. She was mentored by Pat Chance. She mentored Lee Rogers. She built eight state championships across two sports at a public school in Harwood, Maryland, without the ability to recruit across a single county line.

And then she retired, and the school put her name on the floor.

I think about something she said near the end of her career, when she was approaching 500 wins and a reporter asked her about the milestone. She laughed a little. She said she didn’t really think about the numbers. She said there were so many other things that meant more to her in basketball than the number of wins.

Then she described winning her 500th game. A couple of players who hadn’t seen her in a long time snuck into the gym and surprised her. There were balloons. There was a banner. There were family members with champagne and flowers.

She said: “It was a relief that it was finally over with. And that’s what it’s all about, how I’ve touched these kids, how they still support me.”

How I’ve touched these kids.

That is the measure. Not the championships, though she won eight of them. Not the wins, though she accumulated more than 500 of them. Not the court with her name on it, though it is a beautiful thing. The measure is the players who showed up at the gym, decades later, to surprise the woman who had changed their lives.

She came home to Southern High School. She stayed for thirty-nine years. She played the hand she was dealt.

Kilpatrick Court. Southern High School. Harwood, Maryland.

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608.

Six hundred and eight wins. That is the career record of Lin James, who coached girls’ basketball at North Harford High School in Pylesville, Maryland for forty-six years. Add the two seasons she coached in Augusta, Georgia before she ever came to Maryland, and you get forty-eight years of coaching women’s basketball — forty-eight years in which she won more games than any other girls’ basketball coach in the history of this region.

The all-time record holder. In Maryland. In a sport this publication exists to honor. And the reason most people have never heard her name is the same reason this database and this publication were built: the women’s game does not always get the recognition it has earned.

That ends here.

The Backyard Where It Started

Her first coach was her father.

Lin James grew up with a basketball and a backyard and a father who understood that his daughter had something special. They worked on skills together, the way the best coaching relationships start — informally, patiently, in a place where the only thing that mattered was getting better. By the time she reached high school, she was ready for varsity competition. She played all four years. Her high school team won one hundred games during her career and made two appearances in the state tournament.

When she thought about college, Anderson Junior College in South Carolina offered her something rare for the era: a chance to play basketball on scholarship, tuition free. She took it. After two years there, she transferred to the University of Tennessee, where — and this detail tells you everything about the time she was operating in — there was no women’s basketball program to speak of. The women played intramural games. They competed in informal matchups against other Tennessee schools. The game she had been playing since she was a girl, the game her father had coached her in the backyard, did not yet exist at the collegiate level in a form that could carry her forward.

She graduated from Tennessee. She took a teaching and coaching job in Augusta, Georgia. While she taught, she also played on a semi-professional women’s basketball team — which tells you that even when the institutional structures of the sport weren’t available to her, she found a way to stay inside it.

In 1967, she married. She and her husband moved to Maryland. She accepted a teaching position in Harford County at North Harford High School in Pylesville — a small rural community in the northeastern corner of the state, where the land rolls into farm fields and the nearest city is Bel Air, a twenty-minute drive south.

She would teach there for forty-six years.

She would coach there for forty-six years.

She would win 608 games.

What It Means to Start in 1967

I need to stop here and put a date in context, because the date is the whole story.

Lin James arrived at North Harford High School in 1967. Title IX, the federal law that mandated equal opportunity for women and girls in educational programs including athletics, was signed in 1972. That means Lin James began coaching girls’ basketball five years before girls’ basketball was a federally protected right.

Think about what that means in practical terms. When she started coaching, girls’ interscholastic sports were not guaranteed. The game was being played because people like Lin James showed up and ran it, on whatever terms the institution would offer, with whatever resources were available. There were no national television contracts. There were no ESPN recruiting rankings. There were no WNBA draft nights to point toward as proof of destination.

There was a gymnasium. There were girls who wanted to play. And there was a coach who had come from Tennessee by way of Georgia, who had played on a semi-pro team because no other structure existed, who understood exactly what the game could mean to a young woman’s life.

She built a program in those conditions. She kept building it after Title IX passed. She kept building it through the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s, the 2010s. She coached through the entire arc of the women’s game — from a sport that barely had a structure to a sport with a professional league, a nationally televised college game, and a generation of young women who grew up knowing that basketball could take them somewhere.

And she did all of it in Pylesville, Maryland. Population: small. Spotlight: none.

What 608 Wins Actually Requires

When I started coaching in the 1990s, I would look at win totals like Lin James’s and try to understand how you get there. The math is one thing. The human reality is another.

In a typical high school basketball season, a team plays somewhere between fifteen and thirty games. In the early years of Lin James’s coaching career, before statewide tournaments became established, before non-conference scheduling expanded, the seasons were shorter. Fifteen games might have been a full year. That means 608 wins, spread across forty-eight years, required sustained excellence year after year after year — with very little margin for rebuilding years, for gaps, for the kind of cyclical dips that most programs experience when they lose a senior class.

Her documented record at North Harford is 608-229. That is a winning percentage of approximately 72.6 percent. Maintained. Over forty-six years. At a rural public school with no recruiting advantages, no private school flexibility, no ability to draw players from across a region the way a Bishop McNamara or a St. Frances Academy can.

She coached whoever came to North Harford High School from the surrounding community in Harford County. She made them into basketball players. She did this for forty-six consecutive years.

In 1985, her North Harford team was Harford County champions, regional champions, state semi-finalists, and ranked twelfth in the state of Maryland. That recognition matters not because of the ranking itself, but because of what it tells us: Lin James was producing competitive basketball in one of the most rural settings in the state, and she was doing it well enough that the rest of Maryland had to acknowledge it.

On December 10, 2012, in her forty-sixth season at North Harford, she reached her 600th career win. She was subsequently inducted into the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame. The following year, 2013, she retired.

The record stood at 608 wins. It has stood ever since

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The Woman Who Knew Her Best

The best testimony about Lin James that exists in the public record comes from Linda Kilpatrick, the former coach of Southern High School in Anne Arundel County, who herself compiled more than 500 wins and five state championships in thirty-eight years. Kilpatrick described James simply as “my good friend.”

That detail — a friendship between two of the greatest coaches in Maryland girls’ basketball history — tells you something about the world they inhabited together. They were not rivals in any direct sense. Their schools are an hour apart. But they were colleagues in the deepest sense: two women who had given decades of their professional lives to the same sport, in the same state, with the same population of athletes, and who understood what that work actually demanded.

When Kilpatrick was approaching her 500th win in 2014, the Baltimore Sun published a piece that included a list of the all-time wins leaders for the region. Lin James was at the top. Kilpatrick, at 499 wins, was described as trailing only James — her good friend who had retired the previous year after winning 608 games in 48 years at North Harford.

The list continued beneath them: Jerome Shelton at St. Frances, Teresa Waters at Oakland Mills and River Hill, Dave Greenberg at Mount Hebron and Centennial. All significant coaches. All long tenures. All building something meaningful at their respective programs.

Lin James is above all of them. She has been above all of them for more than a decade. And the conversation about Maryland girls’ basketball coaching rarely mentions her name.

The Generation That Had to Fight for the Floor

I think about what it meant to be a girls’ basketball coach in 1967 in rural Maryland. I think about it not abstractly but specifically. What was Lin James’s first team like? How many players? How long was the season? Did they have uniforms? Did they have a budget? Did anyone in the community come to the games?

I don’t have answers to those questions. What I have is context. In 1967, girls’ interscholastic basketball existed largely through the goodwill of individual schools and individual coaches. There was no federal mandate. There was no guaranteed funding. The sport existed because people like Lin James showed up and said: these girls deserve to play, and I will coach them.

She had come from a University of Tennessee where women played intramural basketball because collegiate competition wasn’t available. She had come from a semi-professional team in Georgia because that was the only competitive structure that existed for her after college. She arrived in Harford County already knowing, at a personal level, what it meant to be told that your sport was not quite real — not quite worthy of the same investment, the same attention, the same institutional support as the men’s game.

That experience, I believe, is what made her a great coach. Not because it made her angry — though it might have — but because it gave her clarity about what the game could mean. She had felt what it was like for girls’ basketball to be treated as secondary. She was not going to let her players feel that. She was going to build something at North Harford High School that was real, that was serious, that demanded and received the same investment that the boys’ program did.

That is the only way you win 608 games in forty-eight years at a rural public school. You build something real.

Pylesville, Maryland: The Place That Doesn’t Get Articles Written About It

This is something I want to say directly: the reason Lin James is not a household name in Maryland girls’ basketball is not because of what she did. It is because of where she did it.

Pylesville is a census-designated place in northern Harford County. It is not a city. It does not have the media infrastructure of Baltimore, the suburban profile of Montgomery County, or the private-school visibility of the IAAM or WCAC conferences. When journalists looked for the best girls’ basketball stories in Maryland, they looked where the cameras already were. St. Frances Academy in East Baltimore. Western High School in Baltimore City. The IAAM championship games at Stevenson University.

North Harford is a forty-five-minute drive from most of those places. Its players were not going to Power Five programs in the numbers that St. Frances’s players were. Its games were not being covered by ESPN or the Baltimore Sun’s full sports desk.

But the coach who won the most games in the region’s history was there. She was there for forty-six years. She won 608 times. She was inducted into her school’s Athletic Hall of Fame. And the story of what she built has remained, for the most part, local.

This is exactly the kind of story that Diary of a Girl’s Basketball Coach exists to tell. We did not build this database and this publication so we could write about the players everyone already knows. We built it because there are coaches and players whose contributions to the women’s game in this state have never been properly documented. Lin James is the most glaring example.

The Record, in the Context It Deserves

Here is how Lin James’s record sits against the coaches who followed her on the all-time list:

Jerome Shelton at St. Frances Academy passed 600 wins in 2019 — in his twenty-ninth season. It took Lin James forty-eight seasons to reach 608. That difference tells you two things: Shelton coaches in an era of longer schedules and has had access to elite talent in a national-profile program. James coached during an era when seasons were shorter and her talent pool was whatever walked through the doors of North Harford High School.

Linda Kilpatrick at Southern High School finished with 500-plus wins in thirty-eight years and five state championships. Breezy Bishop at Western High School finished with 424 wins in twenty-four seasons — and was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame. Teresa Waters at Oakland Mills and River Hill had 455-plus wins in thirty-two years.

Every one of those coaches is remarkable. Every one of those records is the result of decades of sustained, committed work. And Lin James is above all of them.

When you look at the complete list — when you put it on paper and read it top to bottom — there is no ambiguity about what the record says. The all-time win leader for girls’ basketball coaches in the Baltimore and Maryland area is a woman from Tennessee who moved to Harford County in 1967 and spent the next forty-six years teaching and coaching at a rural public high school.

Her name is Lin James.

What We Owe Her

I started coaching girls’ basketball in the 1990s. I was surrounded by people who had built programs before me, who had figured things out the hard way, who had spent years and decades making the women’s game real in communities that weren’t always sure they wanted it.

Lin James was one of those people. She was doing this work before I was born. She was coaching girls’ basketball at North Harford High School when Title IX was still five years away, when the women’s game had no national television contract, no professional league, no recruiting industry, no standardized structure. She did it anyway.

There is a generation of coaches who built the women’s game from the ground up, who created the conditions that made everything that came after possible. Lin James is one of them. She is, by any measure, the most accomplished girls’ basketball coach in the history of this state, and the story of what she built in Pylesville, Maryland, is one that deserved to be told a long time ago.

We are telling it now. Better late than never. But for the record — and for the record-holder — it should have been told sooner.

608 wins.

48 years.

One school in one small corner of Maryland.

The all-time record.

A Note from the Authors

If you played for Lin James, coached alongside her, or have information about her career, her players, or the programs she built at North Harford High School, we want to hear from you. The history of girls’ basketball in rural Maryland deserves to be as complete as the history of girls’ basketball in Baltimore City and the private school leagues. This article is the beginning of that record, not the end of it.

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St. Frances Academy Supplement · A Personal Reflection

When I started coaching girls’ basketball in the 1990s, I was looking for a map.

I was not a former Division I player. I had not grown up watching a coach whose blueprint I could simply copy. In 1998, I was the dad of one of the team mangers of the Institute of Notre Dame basketball team. I had just started the Lady Lions program, we had just moved practice to Gardenville Recreation Center in Baltimore City. I came to the IND games as a ride home for my daughter but became one of their most vocal supporters eventually becoming a coach there. I remember the first time watching Jerome Shelton coach against IND. I knew they were the top team so I decided to watch how he operated. What I saw was a coach that was had complete confidence in his players, their preparation and the game plan. I ended up watching the second half of the game from behind their bench just to ear hustle his huddles. It started me on a path I am still travelling today.

I found two people who became my role models from a distance. I watched them work for years before I ever met either of them. I studied how they talked about their players in the press. I paid attention to how they carried themselves on the sideline. I noticed what they chose to say after wins and what they chose not to say.

One of those two people was Jerome Shelton.

This piece is about why.

The Path He Didn’t Take

Here is something I want to be clear about: Jerome Shelton was not a former player who had been handed a program. He was not a local star who had stayed in his hometown and stepped into a guaranteed pipeline. He was a New Jersey native who spent seven years in the United States Army before becoming a history teacher at a school in East Baltimore.

A history teacher. Not a physical education teacher. Not a former college coach who had slid into a high school role. A man who taught history to teenagers, and who arrived at St. Frances Academy carrying a belief that the discipline and leadership he had developed in the military could be applied to the development of young women on a basketball court.

He assisted with the boys’ team for two years first — learning the culture of the school, watching how the program operated, becoming part of the institution before he asked the institution to trust him with something new. In 1990, he took over the girls’ program.

There was no gymnasium. Not for eleven years. He coached his first eleven seasons in a program that practiced everywhere it could find space. Think about that. Eleven years of building a program without a home floor. Eleven years of borrowed gyms and early morning slots and late-night practices and teams that went from competitive to dominant before they ever had a place to call their own.

This is the first thing I took from watching Jerome Shelton: a real program does not require perfect conditions. It requires a person who refuses to let the absence of perfect conditions become the reason nothing gets built.

The Mentor He Found, and the Humility That Required

There is a quote from Jerome Shelton about his own development as a coach that I have thought about for years. Not because it is dramatic. Precisely because it is not.

He was speaking about former Coppin State women’s basketball coach Douglas Robertson, who mentored him in his early years at St. Frances. He said Robertson taught him how to run practices and how to establish genuine relationships with his players. And then he said this:

“He encouraged me to go to clinics and study up on the game, so I could be a better coach and really be able to handle the quality of student-athletes I was getting in my program. Because when you get better players, you’ve got to become a better coach. You have to be able to teach those better players. They have an appetite that is tremendous for learning. You want to make sure you can accommodate that.”

Read that again slowly.

He is saying that as his players improved, he held himself responsible for improving to meet them. He did not stand still and let his program’s talent carry him forward. He went to clinics. He studied. He sought out people who knew more than he did about coaching women’s basketball. He was a Army veteran and a history teacher who was humble enough to admit that he had things to learn, and disciplined enough to go learn them.

This is the second thing I took from watching Jerome Shelton: the coach who stops learning stops serving the players who need him most.

That Douglas Robertson — a Black women’s basketball coach at a historically Black college in Baltimore — was the person who shaped Shelton’s development is not a small detail to me. Robertson understood the world those players were coming from. He understood what it meant to coach young Black women in Baltimore and prepare them for something larger than where they started. Shelton had the wisdom to seek out exactly the right person to learn from.

How He Coaches: The Quiet Man on the Sideline

If you have watched Jerome Shelton coach, the first thing you notice is what he doesn’t do. He doesn’t perform. He doesn’t need the moment to be about him. His team wins a championship, and he does not chase the Gatorade bath — he “dodges the dunking as adroitly as his team topped the Eagles,” as the IAAM’s own coverage put it once, with a phrase I have always loved. In January 2020, when he won his 600th career game against a nationally ranked opponent, there was no celebration on the court. His players knew what the milestone meant. He moved on.

He described his approach to pressure this way: “I try to alleviate the pressure by focusing on the journey. I try to minimize the clamor.”

Those two sentences are a coaching philosophy. Not a framework, not a mission statement, not a set of principles. Two sentences. Focus on the journey. Minimize the clamor.

What he means, I think, is this: the noise around a great team — the national rankings, the unbeaten-season pressure, the weight of a dynasty that has to be defended every February — is the enemy of the process. The coach’s job is to protect the process from the noise. To keep the players inside the work, not outside it, looking at what the world is saying about them.

I watched him do this repeatedly. Year after year, team after team, the program would be ranked nationally, would be carrying the weight of an eight-game or five-game championship streak, would have players being recruited by every major program in the country — and the coach on the sideline was the same. Low-key. Precise. Holding himself to the same standard he held his players to.

The Language He Uses About His Players

I am a person who listens to how coaches talk about their players. I do this because the language reveals the relationship, and the relationship reveals the coaching philosophy. You can know almost everything you need to know about a coach by listening carefully to the words they choose when they describe the people they coach.

Jerome Shelton’s language is specific, warm, and consistently focused on the individual rather than the performance. When he reached 500 wins, he said: “I’ve had a lot of good players and they made this possible so it’s bigger than me.” When he reached 600, he said: “First, it’s a testament to faith and trust that my institution has in me and the brilliance of our players who played for me over the last 29 years.”

Notice what he does. Both times, in the most publicly visible moment of his coaching career at that point, he redirected credit away from himself. Not performatively — not the self-deprecating false modesty that coaches sometimes perform for the cameras. He meant it. He has always meant it.

On Nia Clouden, the night she scored her 1,000th point in a championship game: “There is nothing on the basketball court that Nia can’t do. She’s a special player. She’s going to make some college coach very happy.”

On Mia Davis, a senior who had been with him for three years: “Mia has had an unbelievable three years with us. We call her ‘Big Sister,’ and we asked her to do big things for us.”

On Angel Reese, his most famous player, before she left for college: “She’s a Type A personality. She’s not interested in resting on her laurels. She wants to max out her ability. She wants to be better than everybody else.”

On Reese after she won the national championship at LSU: “I feel like a proud poppa. What you are seeing at LSU is what she did here. She’s just taken it to another level.”

What I hear in all of this is a coach who sees his players as people first and athletes second. Who carries specific, detailed knowledge of each individual — her personality type, her leadership role in the program, her trajectory beyond his gym. Who takes genuine pride in their lives after they leave him, not just in what they accomplished while they were with him.

This is the third thing I took from watching Jerome Shelton: the coach who cannot describe his players as individuals has not actually coached them

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The Staff He Built and Kept

One of the things about Jerome Shelton that gets overlooked in the national conversation is the consistency of his staff. Nyteria Burrell — known to the players as Coach Nyke — has been beside him through the program’s defining eras. When Angel Reese texted before the 2023 NCAA National Championship game, it was Burrell she reached out to. That detail tells you something about what the relationship between a coaching staff and its players looks like when it has been built with care over time.

Coach Burrell said about Reese before that game: “I knew when the lights come on, she’s gone to shine.” That sentence is not about basketball. It is about a woman who knows another woman, has known her since she was a teenager in East Baltimore, and believes in her completely.

The best coaching staffs are not collections of specialists. They are collections of people who share a vision of what their players deserve. Jerome Shelton built exactly that kind of staff, and he kept them. That stability — the continuity of relationships between coaches and players and between coaches and coaches — is one of the least visible and most important factors in what St. Frances has built.

Melba Chambers, who played for Shelton and then became a Division I star at Georgetown, returned to her alma mater as a coach and was part of the staff during four of the five IAAM championship seasons she was there. A player who was good enough to compete at the Big East level chose to come back and invest herself in the program that raised her. That choice says as much about Shelton as any championship banner.

What the Numbers Actually Mean

Let me put Jerome Shelton’s record into context, because the numbers deserve context.

He took over in 1990. He has had just three losing seasons in thirty-five years. He has won fifteen league championships. He reached 500 wins faster than any coach in Baltimore-area history — in 25 seasons. He reached 600 wins in 29 seasons. When he crossed 600, only one coach in the region had more all-time victories, and that coach needed 48 years to get there. Shelton was on pace to pass that record in fewer than 35.

These are the numbers of a dynasty. But the word “dynasty” doesn’t capture what makes this remarkable. Dynasties are built on talent, and Shelton has always had talent. What is remarkable is the consistency: the ability to rebuild, to reload, to face a program like McDonogh or St. Vincent Pallotti or St. John’s Prep in a February championship game and win, year after year after year. That is not about talent. That is about a system of values that is installed in players from the moment they arrive and that outlasts any individual roster.

He has coached the aunts of Angel Reese and Angel Reese herself. He has coached players who graduated fifteen years apart, sent them to programs across the country, watched them go on to the highest level the sport offers, and still shown up at 501 East Chase Street the following fall to do it again.

What Angel Reese Said at His 600th Win

I want to stay with this for a moment, because I think it is the most honest testimony about what Jerome Shelton is as a coach.

The night he won his 600th game — a dominant performance against a nationally ranked opponent — there was no ceremony on the court. Shelton kept it moving. But his senior star, Angel Reese, spoke afterward. She had 27 points, 13 rebounds, and five assists in the game. She was a few months from leaving for the University of Maryland as the highest-ranked recruit in program history. She said this:

“It’s been a great four years with him. I’ve learned so much. He’s a really great coach and I really will miss him when I go to College Park next year, but he’s gotten me ready for college, avoiding a lot of the bad calls I get and keeping me composed through a lot of adversity that I go through.”

She is not talking about basketball skills. She is talking about composure. About handling adversity. About being prepared not just to perform but to navigate — the bad calls, the pressure, the clamor, all of it.

That is what Jerome Shelton teaches. He teaches the game, and he teaches the life. And his players know the difference between a coach who does one and a coach who does both.

What I Took from Watching Him

I have been coaching for nearly thirty years now. The Baltimore Lady Lions program was founded in 1997. I have sent players to Delaware, Pittsburgh, Coppin State, Delaware State, Glenville State. Not to LSU. Not to Michigan State. Not to Ole Miss. My world and Jerome Shelton’s world are not the same world, and I have never pretended otherwise.

But the principles I watched him apply are not principles that belong only to programs that produce first-round draft picks. They are principles that belong to anyone who is serious about coaching young women and taking that responsibility seriously.

Build the program, not your résumé. Find someone better than you who is willing to teach you, and listen to them. Learn the individuals, not just the roster. Keep the staff together. Focus on the journey. Minimize the clamor. Refuse to let the absence of perfect conditions be the reason nothing gets built.

These are not complicated principles. They are hard ones. The hardest thing about coaching is not the X’s and O’s. It is showing up with the same integrity and the same standards, year after year, with different players who need different things from you, in a city that is always changing around you.

Jerome Shelton has done that for thirty-five years in East Baltimore. He did it without a gym for the first eleven. He did it when nobody outside the city was paying attention. He did it when Angel McCoughtry was the first-overall WNBA pick and when Angel Reese was the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four and when Nia Clouden was setting scoring records at Michigan State. He was the same coach before any of that happened and after all of it.

That is why I chose him as a role model. Not for the wins. For the consistency. For the clarity. For the humility that allowed a history teacher from New Jersey, with no coaching pedigree and no inherited pipeline, to go to a clinic, learn how to coach a practice, build genuine relationships with young women in one of the most challenging cities in America, and refuse to stop until he had produced something worth studying.

I have been studying it for thirty years. I am still learning.

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St. Frances Academy Series Supplement · A Personal Reflection by Coach Tully Sullivan

High School Program Series · No. 2 · East Baltimore, Maryland

I want to start this piece the right way, which means not starting with basketball. Being raised Catholic I have been aware and appreciated the Mother Mary Lange story.

In 1828, thirty-five years before the Emancipation Proclamation, a Haitian refugee named Elizabeth Lange opened a school in her home in Baltimore’s Fells Point neighborhood. She was teaching children of African descent — both enslaved and free — to read the Bible. In Maryland, a slave state with a large free Black population, educating persons of color was socially taboo. Educating enslaved children was illegal.

She did it anyway.

On June 13, 1828, that school became the Oblate School for Colored Girls — the first Catholic school in America established specifically for Black children. Elizabeth Lange became Mother Mary Lange, foundress of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first religious order in the United States composed entirely of Black women. Her cause for sainthood was opened by the Catholic Church in 1991. The room where she lived, prayed, and died — in the East Baltimore building the school moved into in 1871 — remains virtually undisturbed. Students pass it every day.

The school is now called St. Frances Academy. It is located at 501 East Chase Street. It is the oldest continually operating Black Catholic school in the United States, and for the purposes of this article, it is the most remarkable girls’ basketball program in the history of the state of Maryland.

Three first-round WNBA draft picks. One school. One address. One city.

I have been coaching girls’ basketball in Baltimore for nearly thirty years. I am not objective about this city. But I would not need to be objective to know that what St. Frances Academy has done — and what Coach Jerome Shelton has built there over thirty-five years — is unlike anything else in this state’s history.

The Floor with a Name on It

Before there was a gymnasium, there were practices everywhere. Jerome Shelton arrived at St. Frances Academy as a history teacher and, after assisting with the boys’ team for two years, took over the girls’ program in 1990. He coached his first eleven years without a real home gym. The team practiced wherever it could find space.

When the school finally built a gymnasium, the floor was dedicated to Sister John Francis Schilling. She had come to St. Frances as an English teacher and counselor in 1984. She was a basketball player in her youth. She coached at the school, blogged about the sport, and to this day keeps the official scorebook at home games. The floor that carries her name has been walked on by three women who were eventually selected in the first round of the WNBA Draft.

“Once you have good coaches and teams, you don’t have to recruit,” Sister John Francis once said. “People come to you.”

That has been the story of St. Frances Academy basketball for three decades. The players came. And when they left, they went to the highest levels the sport has to offer.

The Coach: Jerome Shelton

Jerome Shelton spent seven years in the U.S. Army before arriving in East Baltimore as a history teacher. He is a New Jersey native. He had no blueprint for what he was about to build. He credits former Coppin State women’s basketball coach Douglas Robertson, who mentored him early, teaching him how to run practices and how to establish genuine relationships with his players.

“He encouraged me to go to clinics and study up on the game,” Shelton said, “so I could be a better coach and really be able to handle the quality of student-athletes I was getting.”

That quality has been consistent for thirty-five years. Shelton has had just three losing seasons. He has won fifteen league championships — two Catholic League titles before the IAAM was formed in 1999, and fourteen A Conference championships since. He reached 500 career wins in 2016, 600 in 2019. He has built something at a small East Baltimore Catholic school with roughly 240 students that the largest, best-funded programs in the country would envy.

His core staff has been with him for years. Long-time assistant Nyteria Burrell — known to the players as Coach Nyke — has been a constant presence through the program’s greatest eras. When Angel Reese texted before the 2023 NCAA National Championship game, it was Burrell she wrote to. “This one is for the city,” Reese told her. Coach Burrell knew what that meant. She had been hearing that language, in different forms, for years.

“I’m humbled and grateful for it and I thank God that he’s allowed me to be in this position to coach some beautiful young women who are very talented,” Shelton said when he reached 600 wins. He was not speaking about wins. He was speaking about people.

Before the Angels: Building the Foundation

The program that would eventually send three players to the first round of the WNBA Draft was built on a foundation that rarely gets credit. Before the championships and the national headlines, there were players who arrived at St. Frances, developed under Shelton’s staff, and went on to achieve things at the Division I level that established the culture the later stars inherited.

Melba Chambers graduated from St. Frances and went to Georgetown University, where she became one of the program’s all-time leaders in points (973), assists (188), and rebounds (365), earning Big East Player of the Week twice and MVP honors for the 1998–99 season. She helped Georgetown make its first-ever WNIT appearance. She played professionally in Germany. She returned to Georgetown as an assistant coach and returned to St. Frances for five seasons as a head JV and varsity assistant coach, helping the program win four of the five IAAM championships during her time on staff. She is the St. Frances story made complete: a player who came from the program, excelled at the highest level available to her, and came back to invest in the next generation.

Mi-Khida Hankins graduated from St. Frances and went to Providence College, where she became one of the top 25 scorers in program history and was named to the Big East All-Freshman Team. She did this while coming from a program so loaded with talent that she graduated as one of the lesser-known alumni — which is, itself, one of the most remarkable things about St. Frances Academy.

The Webb sisters — Kortni and Kristi, twin daughters of former UMBC player Angel Webb — graduated from St. Frances and played Division I basketball at Pittsburgh (Kortni, Big East) and Coppin State (Kristi, MEAC). They are, in a piece of basketball genealogy that matters enormously to this program’s story, the aunts of Angel Reese.

The pipeline was already running. It just hadn’t yet produced what was coming.

The First Pick: Angel McCoughtry, 2009

She grew up in northeast Baltimore, playing pickup basketball at the Northwood recreation center. Her father, Roi McCoughtry, had played forward at Coppin State. By the time she arrived at St. Frances Academy in East Baltimore, she was already being identified as something different.

Angel McCoughtry averaged 14 points, 10.5 rebounds, three assists, and five blocks per game as a senior at St. Frances, where she helped guide the team to a 26-3 record and the Catholic League championship. She was named the 2003 Baltimore Metro Player of the Year.

The path to college was not simple. She had originally signed with St. John’s out of St. Frances, but a standardized test score short of NCAA eligibility requirements forced her to spend a year at Patterson School in Lenoir, North Carolina, before being recruited again. She arrived at the University of Louisville a year later than planned, and proceeded to become the most decorated player in the program’s history.

At Louisville: the all-time leader in career points (2,779), rebounds (1,261), and steals (481). Big East Player of the Year. The first women’s basketball player to have her number retired by the program. Selected first overall by the Atlanta Dream in the 2009 WNBA Draft.

WNBA Rookie of the Year in 2009. WNBA All-Star five times. Three WNBA Finals appearances with Atlanta. A 42-point playoff performance that stands as one of the highest-scoring games in WNBA postseason history. Two Olympic gold medals with Team USA (2012, 2016). Named to the WNBA’s W25 — the 25 greatest players in the league’s first 25 years.

She is the first product of St. Frances Academy’s basketball program to reach those heights. She has returned to East Baltimore to give back — most visibly in the summer of 2023, when she and Angel Reese, two St. Frances alumni who had never played together, co-hosted a basketball camp at their alma mater for Baltimore’s youth.

“Representation matters, especially for women,” McCoughtry said at that camp. “They need to see us more.”

The camp was held in the gym where Sister John Francis’s name is on the floor.

Eight Titles in Eight Years: The Dynasty That Built the Culture

Between the 2000–01 and 2007–08 seasons, St. Frances Academy won eight consecutive IAAM A Conference championships. Eight years. Eight titles. In a conference that includes the best Catholic schools in the Baltimore metropolitan area, that run represents a level of dominance that is almost impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t watched it firsthand.

After winning the ninth title in 2009–10, the program sustained its championship standard into the next decade. Four more IAAM championships followed between 2015 and 2020. Fifteen total. The numbers are not the story — they are the evidence of the story, which is about what Jerome Shelton built in that gymnasium year after year, class after class, with players who came to East Baltimore because the standard at 501 East Chase Street was unlike anything else in the state.

Melba Chambers was on staff for four of the five IAAM titles won during her time as an assistant. The championship culture had roots in the players who came before the draft picks, the coaches who came back after their playing days were done, and the standard that Shelton held to through every era of the program.

The dynasty period is what made everything that followed possible. When Nia Clouden arrived at St. Frances in 2014 and Angel Reese arrived in 2016, they did not walk into an ordinary program. They walked into fifteen years of accumulated excellence.

Nia Clouden: The Second First-Round Pick

She is from the DMV region. She came to East Baltimore for the standard. And Shelton described her simply, in the way he always describes his players — specifically, with conviction: “There is nothing on the basketball court that Nia can’t do.”

In the 2016–17 season, Clouden scored her 1,000th career point for St. Frances in the IAAM A Conference championship game. In the same game, she helped deliver the title. She graduated as the 2017 Maryland Gatorade Player of the Year.

At Michigan State, she became a two-time Big Ten Player of the Year and set the program’s all-time single-game scoring record with 50 points — a game that many who watched it described as the most remarkable individual performance in Big Ten women’s basketball history.

The Connecticut Sun selected her twelfth overall in the 2022 WNBA Draft. She became the second St. Frances Academy alumna to be selected in the first round of the WNBA Draft, thirteen years after Angel McCoughtry went first overall to the Atlanta Dream.

Two St. Frances alumni. Two first-round picks. Thirteen years apart. The same school on the same street in the same city.

Angel Reese: The Third, and the Most Famous

When you walk through the St. Frances Academy gym, there is a jersey in the Hall of Fame. It is the one Angel Reese wore in her final home game in 2020, when she led the Panthers to their fifth consecutive IAAM A Conference championship.

Reese is the daughter of Michael Reese and Angel Webb — and Angel Webb, her mother, played Division I basketball at UMBC. The Webb sisters, Kortni and Kristi, who played at Pittsburgh and Coppin State and graduated from St. Frances, are her aunts. Basketball at St. Frances was, for Reese, not a discovery. It was a family inheritance.

She arrived as a freshman and went directly into the starting lineup, contributing to a team that won four consecutive IAAM championships during her four years in East Baltimore. She was ESPN’s No. 2 overall recruit in the class of 2020. She scored 18 points in the 2019–20 championship game. “I’ve really been through everything,” she said after that fifth straight title, referencing public criticism she had faced during her high school career. “But this tops it all off.”

After a year at Maryland and a transfer to LSU, Reese won the 2023 NCAA National Championship and was named Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four. She was the face of a national conversation about women’s basketball that reached further than the sport had reached in years.

The Chicago Sky selected her seventh overall in the 2024 WNBA Draft. She was named Rookie of the Year. The city of Baltimore gave her the keys. There is a basketball court dedicated to her name in Randallstown.

Shelton remembered what she was like before any of that: “Angel was a person who was called upon to go to speaking engagements, to talk to donors. She relished that. What you are seeing at LSU is what she did here. She’s just taken it to another level.”

The Three

Let me put them in sequence, because the sequence matters.

2009: Angel McCoughtry, Atlanta Dream, first overall. Two Olympic gold medals. Five WNBA All-Star selections. WNBA Rookie of the Year. Named to the WNBA W25. The most decorated player in Louisville women’s basketball history. She graduated from St. Frances Academy, Baltimore City.

2022: Nia Clouden, Connecticut Sun, twelfth overall. Michigan State’s all-time single-game scoring record (50 points). Two-time Big Ten Player of the Year. She graduated from St. Frances Academy, Baltimore City.

2024: Angel Reese, Chicago Sky, seventh overall. NCAA national champion. Final Four Most Outstanding Player. WNBA Rookie of the Year. She graduated from St. Frances Academy, Baltimore City.

Three first-round picks. One Catholic school in East Baltimore. All three players developed under Jerome Shelton, with a staff that includes Nyteria Burrell and years of consistent assistant coaches who believed in the program’s philosophy.

In the history of American women’s basketball, there is no other high school that has sent three players to the first round of the WNBA Draft. No private school. No prep academy. No nationally ranked powerhouse with unlimited recruiting reach. No program anywhere in this country has done what St. Frances Academy has done.

That is not a local claim. That is the national record.

What It Means to Be the Standard

In the previous piece in this series, I wrote about Bishop McNamara and what Ron James and the Team Takeover pipeline had built in Prince George’s County. I called it “Forestville’s Factory.” The language was intentional. A factory is a place with a process, a system, a repeatable output.

St. Frances Academy is something different. St. Frances is not a factory. It is a cathedral.

A cathedral is built across generations, by hands that will not live to see it finished. It is built on a foundation that goes deeper than the people who occupy it at any given moment. It carries something that outlasts individual chapters. The women who play basketball at St. Frances Academy do not just inherit a tradition — they inherit a responsibility. They play for their program, for their city, for the children in East Baltimore who watch them from the stands, and for a mission that started thirty-five years before the Civil War.

The gym floor carries Sister John Francis’s name. The Hall of Fame carries Angel Reese’s jersey. Mother Lange’s room remains undisturbed in the building.

The school’s head, Deacon Curtis Turner, said it plainly: “Since our founding by Mother Mary Lange in 1828, our mission has always been rooted in service, justice, and opportunity.”

Basketball is one of the ways that mission is expressed. It is not the whole story. It is the visible part of a much larger, much older story that belongs to the city of Baltimore and to every young woman who has ever walked through those doors at 501 East Chase Street.

The Scorebook Is Still Being Kept

Sister John Francis still keeps the scorebook at home games. Every point, every rebound, every foul, every substitute. The record of what happens on the floor with her name on it.

Jerome Shelton is still on the sideline. In the 2024–25 season, his Panthers won the fifteenth IAAM A Conference championship. The program is consistently ranked among the top in the state. There are players currently at St. Frances who will go on to Division I programs, and some who may go further.

Angel McCoughtry and Angel Reese stood together in that gym in the summer of 2023 and talked to the children of Baltimore about what was possible. They talked about representation. They talked about believing.

Everything they said in that gym had already been said, in different words, on the same ground, for almost two hundred years.

That is what St. Frances Academy is.

Diary of a Girl’s Basketball Coach is a Substack publication by Tully Sullivan (Chesapeake High School / Baltimore Lady Lions) and Alexis Washington (Eastern Technical High School). Subscribe at doagbc.substack.com.

Contact: doagbc@gmail.com · High School Program Series No. 2ry. It is the visible part of a much larger, much older story that belongs to the city of Baltimore and to every young woman who has ever walked through those doors at 501 East Chase Street.

The Scorebook Is Still Being Kept

Sister John Francis still keeps the scorebook at home games. Every point, every rebound, every foul, every substitute. The record of what happens on the floor with her name on it.

Jerome Shelton is still on the sideline. In the 2024–25 season, his Panthers won the fourteenth IAAM A Conference championship. The program is still No. 2 in the state by most national rankings. There are players currently at St. Frances who will go on to Division I programs, and some who may go further.

Angel McCoughtry and Angel Reese stood together in that gym in the summer of 2023 and talked to the children of Baltimore about what was possible. They talked about representation. They talked about believing.

Everything they said in that gym had already been said, in different words, on the same ground, for almost two hundred years.

That is what St. Frances Academy is.

Diary of a Girl’s Basketball Coach is a Substack publication by Tully Sullivan (Chesapeake High School / Baltimore Lady Lions) and Alexis Washington (Eastern Technical High School/ Baltimore Lady Lions). Subscribe at doagbc.substack.com.

Contact: doagbc@gmail.com · High School Program Series No. 2

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“I’ve known him since I was in the third grade,” she said.

That is not a recruit talking about her new coach. That is a player describing a relationship that had been running, without interruption, for roughly eight years. Ron James was her AAU coach long before he became her high school coach. He knew her game. She knew his voice. The transition from summer ball to the WCAC was not a transition at all — it was a continuation.

This is the story inside the Bishop McNamara story. The program’s success cannot be fully explained without understanding Team Takeover — what it is, how Ron James built it, and how it and Bishop McNamara became, functionally, the same pipeline.

What Team Takeover Is

Team Takeover is a Nike-sponsored AAU program based in Washington, D.C. It was founded by Keith Stevens, who built the boys’ program into one of the most respected grassroots organizations in the country — a DMV institution that has produced NBA-level talent and, in the words of The Washington Post, made Stevens “the new power broker of D.C. area basketball.”

In the boys’ game, Team Takeover was already a known quantity. Stevens had built it from nothing into a Nike EYBL program — the Nike Elite Youth Basketball League is the top tier of American grassroots basketball, the circuit where the best high school players in the country compete every spring and summer and where college coaches come to evaluate talent. To get a Nike EYBL invite is to be recognized as one of the country’s elite programs.

The girls’ program came later. In 2012, Ron James was brought in to build a girls’ division for Team Takeover from the ground up. He was given the mission, the organizational infrastructure, and the Nike affiliation. What he built with it, over the next decade-plus, would eventually reshape girls’ basketball in the entire DMV region.

What James Built from Scratch

The numbers are staggering when you lay them out in sequence. Starting in 2012, Ron James built a girls’ program within Team Takeover that, by the time he took the Bishop McNamara head coaching job in 2023, had accumulated:

Over 650 wins as head coach of Team Takeover’s 17U Nike EYBL team and 8th grade Nike Jr. EYBL team. More than 75 players helped to earn Division I scholarships. Eight McDonald’s All-American athletes. Twelve Jordan Brand Classic All-Americans. Multiple USA Today, Naismith, WBCA, and First-team All-American honors. Gold and silver medals for Team USA. Three separate recognitions from Silver Waves Media on their “100 Most Impactful People in Women’s Basketball” list.

That is not the portfolio of an AAU coach who ran a summer program. That is the portfolio of a developer — someone who spent more than a decade building individual players from middle school through the end of their high school careers, watching them arrive at college programs across the country, and doing it repeatedly, with different groups of girls, year after year.

James himself described the philosophy simply: “Focusing on developing exceptional players by promoting leadership, discipline, and sportsmanship across his program to ensure lifelong success for his student-athletes.” That language — “lifelong success” — is not language that comes from someone whose horizon is the next tournament. It is language that comes from someone whose definition of development extends past the last game of the season.

He also, crucially, had a background that went beyond basketball. James brought 27 years of educational experience — in Prince George’s County Public Schools and Fairfax County Public Schools. He earned a Master of Science in Educational Leadership from George Mason University and a Bachelor of Science from Lincoln University. He was not just a basketball coach. He was an educator who coached basketball.

The Structure of the Pipeline: How It Actually Works

The Team Takeover Girls program runs teams at multiple age levels — most notably the 8th grade Nike Jr. EYBL team and the 17U Nike EYBL team. This means James was meeting players as early as seventh and eighth grade and developing continuous relationships with them through their final year of high school eligibility.

Madisen McDaniel’s comment — “I’ve known him since I was in the third grade” — suggests the relationships sometimes started even younger, in recreational or pre-EYBL contexts. Whatever the entry point, the effect was the same: by the time a player arrived at Bishop McNamara, she already had years of shared history with the man who would be coaching her in the WCAC.

For Zhen Craft, who signed with Georgia and anchored the 2024–25 national championship team, James said: “I coached her the hardest because of her IQ, and how multi-talented and versatile she is.” He knew exactly what kind of player she was because he had already spent years developing exactly that.

For Qandace Samuels — a sophomore during the championship season, the younger sister of UConn forward Qadence Samuels — the Team Takeover connection meant she arrived at McNamara already knowing the program’s standards, James’s coaching style, and what was expected of her. She didn’t need an adjustment period. She needed a chance.

The result, as James told High School On SI during the 2024–25 season: “Nine players led Bishop McNamara in scoring in a game.” That depth — that willingness of players to accept reduced individual roles in service of the team — is not built in one season. It is built over years of a shared developmental culture. It is built across summers in the Nike EYBL circuit and winters in the WCAC.

The Older Connection: Scott, King, and the Pre-James Era

The connection between Team Takeover and Bishop McNamara predates Ron James’s arrival as head coach. It runs through the Frank Oliver era as well.

Madison Scott and Liatu King — the Class of 2020, the two players who were drafted by WNBA teams in 2025 — both played AAU basketball for Team Takeover while attending Bishop McNamara under Coach Oliver. Their summer development was happening under James while their WCAC development was happening under Oliver. Two different coaches. Two different environments. The same player, the same trajectory

.

Liatu King “led her AAU team to the 2019 Nike EYBL championship” according to her Notre Dame biography. That was Team Takeover, under James, the summer before her senior year at Bishop McNamara under Oliver. She won an EYBL championship in the summer, then won the WCAC championship the following winter. Same development philosophy, two settings.

This overlap meant that when James took over as McNamara’s head coach in August 2023, he wasn’t inheriting a foreign program. He was stepping into the school side of a pipeline he had already been running for a decade. He already knew many of the players. He already knew the competitive environment. And — critically — the players already knew him.

What Makes This Unusual — and What It Means for Women’s Basketball

In men’s basketball, the AAU-to-high-school pipeline relationship is widely discussed, often critically. The influence of shoe companies and AAU programs on recruiting decisions has been scrutinized at every level. But the conversation in women’s basketball has historically been different — partly because the women’s grassroots infrastructure has received far less media attention, and partly because the dynamics of how women’s players are developed and recruited have not been subject to the same scrutiny.

What the Team Takeover – Bishop McNamara relationship represents, at its best, is a coherent philosophy applied across multiple years and multiple environments. James did not build Team Takeover Girls as a recruiting funnel for one school. He built it as a development program. The fact that many of those players ended up at Bishop McNamara when he became the head coach there is a reflection of trust — the trust players and families had in a coach they had known for years.

The athletic director at Bishop McNamara, Marty Keithline, said it plainly when announcing the hire: “Ron James has done extraordinary work developing the Team Takeover girls’ basketball division. His dedication to his players and their success makes him an excellent choice to be the next leader of the Bishop McNamara girls’ basketball program.”

The school wasn’t just hiring a basketball coach. It was formalizing a relationship that had already been producing elite players for over a decade.

The Broader Vision: Year-Round Development

Team Takeover Girls plays year-round — AAU tournaments, the GBOA (Grassroots Basketball of America), the Nike EYBL circuit in the spring, and fall and winter leagues. This is not a two-week summer camp. This is a continuous competitive and developmental environment that operates parallel to the high school calendar.

For a player like Qandace Samuels, who is one of the program’s top current prospects, the basketball year has almost no off-season. She is developing under James’s coaching from approximately the time school lets out in June until it restarts the following school year — and then she is playing for him again in the WCAC from November through March. The windows of time when she is not under his direct development influence are narrow.

This is not unusual for elite-level women’s basketball. But it is unusual for the same coach to be the constant across both environments. Most elite players develop under one coach in AAU and a different coach in high school. At Bishop McNamara, for a significant portion of the current roster, those two coaches are the same person.

When James said, during the national championship run, “The area is extremely tough — brutal and competitive,” he was speaking as someone who had spent over a decade in that brutally competitive environment, summer and winter, year after year. He was not discovering the DMV’s competitive landscape. He had helped create it.

A Note on What This Means for the Database

For the purposes of our Maryland D1 database and the DOAGBC project, the Team Takeover connection raises a question worth tracking: how many of the players in our database with Bishop McNamara as their high school also played for Team Takeover at the AAU level? The answer is likely most of the recent ones, and tracking that overlap would provide a richer picture of how elite talent is being developed in Prince George’s County specifically.

The broader point for the article: when we say Bishop McNamara “produced” Madison Scott and Liatu King, we are being accurate but incomplete. They were also produced by Team Takeover. They were developed in both environments simultaneously, by coaches who, whatever their differences, were operating from a shared vision of what elite women’s basketball development looks like.

That shared vision is the real story. The WCAC championship banners and the WNBA draft picks are the evidence.

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Diary of a Girl’s Basketball Coach · doagbc.substack.com · doagbc@gmail.com

Pick 14. Dallas Wings select Madison Scott, Ole Miss.

Pick 28. Los Angeles Sparks select Liatu King, Notre Dame.

Two players drafted in the same year. Two players from the same graduating class. Two players from the same high school in Forestville, Maryland.

Bishop McNamara High School. One address on Marlboro Pike in Prince George’s County. Two names on a WNBA Draft board.

I’ve been coaching girls’ basketball in this state for nearly thirty years. I have watched this program from a distance, the way you watch something that earns your respect before it earns your full attention. What happened that night in Brooklyn wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a coincidence. It was the visible proof of something that had been built, quietly and deliberately, in a corner of Maryland that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves.

This is the first piece in our high school program series. We’re starting here because Bishop McNamara has done something rare: it has produced professional players. Not just Division I players — though it has produced dozens of those too. Not just All-Americans — though it has produced those as well. It has produced women who heard their names called on draft night. That is a different level of achievement, and it deserves a different kind of attention.

6800 Marlboro Pike

Bishop McNamara High School sits in Forestville, in the heart of Prince George’s County, Maryland. It is a Catholic school — founded by the Brothers of the Holy Cross — and a member of the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference, a league that is, without argument, one of the most competitive high school athletic conferences in the eastern United States.

The WCAC is where reputations get made and momentum gets tested. DeMatha. Good Counsel. St. John’s. Paul VI. These are programs with national profiles, with deep recruiting pipelines, with the kind of alumni boards that get attention. To win in that conference — not just occasionally, but consistently, in the women’s game — you have to build something that lasts.

Bishop McNamara has done that. It did not always look this way. There were years when the program was competitive but not dominant, when it was developing players but not yet producing professionals. Then a coach arrived from the northeast side of Washington, D.C., and something changed.

The Man Who Built the Foundation

Frank Oliver Jr. is a 1996 graduate of DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville — he played for Morgan Wootten, the Hall of Fame coach. He went on to build a reputation coaching at H.D. Woodson High School in Washington, D.C., where he developed players who went on to compete in the Big Ten and SEC. He arrived at Bishop McNamara carrying that credibility, and he went to work.

What Oliver built at McNamara, over seven seasons, was a program that players wanted to be part of. He turned the gym into a destination. One of his players, Liatu King, later described a WCAC game during the 2018–19 season that had to be watched in an overflow room because the gym was sold out. In the WCAC, boys’ programs from powerhouse schools like Gonzaga and DeMatha routinely sell out gyms. For a women’s team to do the same thing meant Oliver had created something genuinely special.

The players he recruited were elite. But the players he developed were the real story.

She Was the First: Jakia Brown-Turner

She grew up in Oxon Hill, Maryland. She came to Bishop McNamara and, over four years, became something the program had never produced before: a McDonald’s All-American.

Jakia Brown-Turner was the first female basketball player at Bishop McNamara to earn that distinction — one of the most prestigious individual honors in high school basketball. She earned it in 2019, ranked No. 15 nationally by ESPN, after averaging 16.2 points and 7.3 rebounds per game and becoming the program’s all-time leading scorer. She was the Maryland Gatorade Player of the Year. She was named to the Jordan Brand Classic. She led the school to the WCAC Tournament final with a 31–4 record.

She chose NC State over Maryland. She spent four seasons with the Wolfpack, won three ACC championships, reached the Elite Eight, and earned first-team All-ACC honors as a sophomore. Then she came home — transferring to Maryland for her fifth year, where she was named a team captain before the season started and earned second-team All-Big Ten recognition. She totaled 1,706 career points, 731 rebounds, and 302 assists across those five college years.

After the 2024 WNBA Draft, Brown-Turner signed with the Washington Mystics — the team closest to the high school where she had once rewritten the record books. Her journey is not a straight line. But it is the kind of journey that a great program produces: a player who keeps finding ways to compete at the highest level.

She opened a door. Two of her teammates would walk through it together.

The Class of 2020: A Championship and a Legacy

The 2019–20 Bishop McNamara team went 28–5. They won the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference championship — the program’s first WCAC title since 2008, a drought of twelve years. Frank Oliver stood at the door of his team’s locker room and took a deep breath before going inside to celebrate.

Senior forward Madison Scott said afterward: “We did this for each other. We did this for McNamara. We did this for the community.”

Two players from that championship team would, five years later, be drafted by WNBA franchises.

Madison Scott: The Record-Holder

She was born in Indian Head, Maryland — a small town in Charles County at the very southern tip of the state. She grew up to be 6-foot-1 with the athleticism of a wing and the rebounding instincts of a post player, and national evaluators called that combination rare.

ESPN ranked her No. 13 overall in the 2020 recruiting class, No. 2 at her position nationally, with a 98 overall grade. She was a McDonald’s All-American — the first recruit in Ole Miss women’s basketball history to earn that designation. She chose Ole Miss over an offer list that read like a top-program tour: Virginia, Miami, Florida, Florida State, Virginia Tech.

At Ole Miss, she stayed. That is the part of this story that doesn’t get emphasized enough in an era when the transfer portal moves players in and out of programs every season. Madison Scott arrived in Oxford, Mississippi, and she built something. Five seasons. 155 games — the most in program history. She became just the fourth player in Ole Miss history to surpass 1,600 career points and 1,000 career rebounds. She earned the 2021 SEC Freshman of the Year award. She was named All-SEC three times, made the All-SEC Defensive Team twice, and won the 2025 Gillom Trophy as the best women’s player in the state of Mississippi.

The Dallas Wings selected her 14th overall on April 14, 2025.

After being waived during training camp, she later signed with the Washington Mystics — appearing in nine games in her first WNBA season. Then she signed with Geas Basket in Italy’s top professional league for the 2025–26 season. The journey continues. That’s what it looks like when the standard is professional basketball, not just Division I

.

Liatu King: The One Who Stayed Ready

There is a sentence in Liatu King’s biography that stops me every time I read it: she and her younger sister were born to deaf parents, and Liatu began learning American Sign Language when she was nine months old.

Before she was a basketball player, she was a communicator. She was also, as a child, a linebacker on her middle school football team — a girl competing alongside and against boys, standing out because she was that good. Then she found basketball, and eventually found Bishop McNamara, and eventually helped lead the Mustangs to their first WCAC championship since 2008.

At McNamara as a senior, she scored a team-high 13 points in the WCAC championship game. She left with 1,024 points and 1,018 rebounds in her high school career. That near-perfect balance of scoring and rebounding tells you everything about who she was as a player: she didn’t just score, she controlled.

She went to Pittsburgh and kept getting better, eventually becoming the ACC Most Improved Player as a senior. Then she transferred to Notre Dame for a fifth season and became something else entirely — setting the Notre Dame single-season rebounds-per-game record at 10.4, finishing with 342 rebounds in one year (fourth-most in school history), and averaging a double-double at 11.5 points and 10.4 boards. CBS Sports called her Notre Dame’s “X-factor.”

The Sparks took her 28th overall. She was waived before the season started, stayed ready, and came back on a hardship contract when L.A. was decimated by injuries. She appeared in 14 games, was released, signed with the Dallas Wings mid-season. When the Wings cut her, she moved on. That’s the career of someone who genuinely loves the game.

“You never know when your name’s going to be called,” she said during her time with the Sparks. “I was just able to be ready and take advantage of the opportunity.”

That readiness was built somewhere. It was built on Marlboro Pike.

After Oliver: The Ron James Era Begins

Frank Oliver left after the 2022–23 season to take over at IMG Academy in Florida. He left behind a program that had been elevated, a culture that had been established. The question every program faces at that moment is whether the next chapter can match what came before.

Ron James had an answer. As the Director of Team Takeover Girls Basketball since 2012, James had built one of the most respected AAU programs in the DMV. He had produced over 75 Division I players, eight McDonald’s All-Americans, and twelve Jordan Brand Classic All-Americans. He had won over 650 games as a head coach at the travel level. He was, in the words of the school’s athletic director, “a proud Bishop McNamara parent” already on campus.

James took the job. And then, two years into his tenure, he delivered a national title.

The 2024–25 Mustangs went 30–2. They were ranked No. 1 in the country by High School on SI — the program’s first national recognition at that level. They won the WCAC championship in a 61–41 dismantling of Bishop Ireton, led by sophomore Jaylah King’s 27-point, 14-rebound performance. James was named WCAC Coach of the Year.

The 2025–26 Mustangs followed it up. Back-to-back WCAC championships. Back-to-back Coach of the Year awards for James. A 57–55 upset of the No. 1-ranked Ontario Christian team at the Hoophall Classic in Springfield, Massachusetts. The program is not just competitive. It is ascendant.

“It’s extremely hard to get back here every year,” James said after the 2026 WCAC title.

The Pipeline That Keeps Flowing

The players currently coming through Bishop McNamara represent the continuation of a generation-long project. Qandace Samuels committed to UConn — the most successful program in the history of the sport. Maddy McDaniel chose South Carolina under Dawn Staley. Zhen Craft signed with Georgia. Yonta Vaughn played at Virginia. Gia Cooke was an ESPN Top 52 recruit who played at Maryland before transferring to Houston. Jakia Brown-Turner, Madison Scott, Liatu King — all from the same county, the same conference, the same gym.

Prince George’s County, Maryland, sent two players to the 2025 WNBA Draft from the same high school. Let that land for a moment. In a draft where every pick is a statement about years of development, two came from the same address on Marlboro Pike.

Former Coach Oliver summed it up the only way it could be summed up: “It was a blessing to coach both of them.”

What a Program Like This Actually Means

I started this high school program series with Bishop McNamara because the 2025 draft night told us something we should already know, and that women’s basketball still has to keep re-proving to the general public: the talent is here. It has always been here. It comes from communities like Forestville, from counties like Prince George’s. It comes from girls who, like Liatu King, learned to communicate with their hands before they learned to shoot with them. It comes from girls who, like Madison Scott, leave a small town in southern Maryland and hold records in Oxford, Mississippi, five years later.

What Bishop McNamara has built is not just a basketball program. It is a structure that turns ambition into opportunity, that takes young women from this part of Maryland and prepares them to compete at every level the game has to offer. It has done this across different coaches, different eras, different recruiting landscapes.

That kind of institutional continuity is rare. And it deserves to be recognized.

I’ve been coaching girls’ basketball for nearly thirty years. In all that time, I’ve learned one thing above everything else: the programs that last aren’t just developing players. They’re developing people. And the proof isn’t always on the court.

Sometimes it’s on a draft board in Brooklyn, New York, on a Monday night in April.

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Over the years, Baltimore has never been short on bucket getters. And if you really know Baltimore basketball, then you know the 90s were different, every school had somebody who could flat-out go.

But at Carver Vocational-Technical High School, they had a different kind of problem walking the halls.

Her name was Vida Milberry.

A 5-foot-11 forward/guard who didn’t just get buckets, she handed them out in bulk.

Somehow, her name has slipped through the cracks. That’s a mistake.

In the talent-packed mid-90s, schools like Western, Lake Clifton, Poly, and City ran the conversation. Carver wasn’t always the team circled in bold. But if you saw them on the schedule, you knew what time it was, because Milberry was coming.

And she was bringing everything with her.

As a senior, she led the entire metro area in scoring at 32.0 points per game. That capped off a four-year run where she averaged 20 or more every single season. By the time she left Carver, she had stacked over 2,000 career points and built a résumé that deserved a lot more noise in Baltimore circles.

She accounted for more than half of Carver’s entire offense. But scoring was just the headline.

She was pulling down 16.1 rebounds a night, dropping 7 assists, and snatching 8.5 steals, while knocking down a school-record 52 three-pointers just to stretch the floor.

And when she got going, it got scary. One December night in 1995 she had 46 points, 15 rebounds, nine assists, six steals in a win over Southern.

That wasn’t an outlier. That was the standard.

In a city where “everybody had somebody,” Carver had Vida Milberry. And for a few years in the 90s, that was more than enough.

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I have been coaching in Maryland gymnasiums for nearly thirty years. I have watched girls come through those doors not knowing what they were capable of, and I have watched some of them go places that still make me stop and think.

That is why this week matters.

The 2026 WNBA season is underway. Opening day was this past Friday. Training camps have concluded, final rosters are set, and I wanted an honest count — not of who was invited to camp, but of who is actually playing or recently competed at the highest levels of professional basketball right now.

The count is seven. Two on the same WNBA opening day roster. Three others who competed in WNBA training camps and did not make the final cut. Two playing professionally in Europe. One in a new domestic league.

I want to name every single one of them.

Two Maryland Women. One WNBA Team. Opening Night.

Angel Reese and Brionna Jones are both on the Atlanta Dream’s opening day roster. That sentence is worth sitting with for a moment.

Angel Reese — Atlanta Dream · St. Frances Academy, Baltimore

She walked the halls of St. Frances Academy on Brentwood Avenue — the same school that produced Angel McCoughtry, Nia Clouden, Melba Chambers, and Mi-Khida Hankins. St. Frances is the single greatest pipeline school in our entire database of 386 verified players. And it is a Baltimore City school. Not a suburb. Not a prep school with a national recruiting budget. A Baltimore City school. Reese came into camp on a non-guaranteed contract and earned her spot. She is exactly where she should be.

Brionna Jones — Atlanta Dream · Aberdeen HS / Calvert Hall

From Harford County. Eighth overall pick. EuroLeague Finals MVP with USK Prague last season. She arrived in 2026 camp with a guaranteed contract and a right knee surgery behind her. Her health as the season unfolds is the story to watch. The work that happens when no one is filming is part of this story too.

Two Maryland women. One team. One of the most talented rosters in the league.

Three Who Competed in Camp. Three Who Did Not Make the Final Cut.

Training camp is honest that way. You are either good enough on that particular day, in that particular system, against those particular players — or you are not. Three Maryland women were not, this time. Each of them competed. Each of them earned the invitation. That matters.

Ny’Ceara Pryor — New York Liberty (camp) · Western High School, Baltimore

Start here, because this one has a particular resonance.

Ny’Ceara Pryor attended Western High School in Baltimore — the same program at the center of the greatest dynasty story in Maryland girls’ basketball history. She graduated in 2022, the year Western won the Class 4A state championship, their first title since 1995. She averaged 28.2 points, seven assists, five rebounds and five steals as a senior and was named the Baltimore Sun’s All-Metro Player of the Year.

At Sacred Heart University she became the first player in program history — and in NEC history — to simultaneously win Player of the Year, Defensive Player of the Year, and Rookie of the Year. She transferred to Texas A&M for her final collegiate season and entered the 2026 WNBA draft as the active leader in career steals nationally: 357 steals in fewer than 100 college games.

The New York Liberty signed her to a rookie training camp contract in April 2026. She competed for a roster spot in New York and did not make the final twelve.

Western High School. The New York Liberty. That pipeline runs from one of the most storied programs in Baltimore City all the way to the floor of a WNBA training camp. That is the story this database exists to tell.

Stephanie Jones — Atlanta Dream (camp) · Aberdeen HS

Brionna’s sister. Also from Aberdeen. She earned a training camp invite to the same team her sister plays for and competed for a roster spot at the highest level of the professional game. She did not make the final twelve. That is not the end of her story. That is one chapter of it.

Madison Scott — Washington Mystics (camp) · Ole Miss

She competed for a spot with the rebuilding Mystics approximately forty miles from where she grew up in Maryland. She was among the final cuts. The Mystics are an extremely young squad still taking shape. The door is not closed.

Three Maryland women in three different WNBA training camps. All three competed. None of them disappear from this story.

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Two Playing Overseas. Right Now.

This is the part of the story that almost never gets told. These two women are not in a WNBA camp. They will not appear in mainstream women’s basketball coverage this week. But they are professionals. They are competing. They are Maryland.

Nia Clouden — BCF Elfic Fribourg Basket, Switzerland · St. Frances Academy, Owings Mills

A correction first, and it matters: Nia Clouden attended St. Frances Academy — not Riverdale Baptist as previously listed in our database. That record has been corrected. She joins Angel Reese, Angel McCoughtry, Melba Chambers, and Mi-Khida Hankins as confirmed St. Frances alums. The pipeline at that school is unlike anything else in Maryland.

She was the twelfth overall pick in the 2022 WNBA Draft. She is currently playing for BCF Elfic Fribourg Basket in Switzerland, competing in the Swiss SBL and EuroCup Women, averaging more than 20 points per game this season. She is a professional basketball player playing at the highest level available to her right now.

Abby Meyers — Perfu­merías Avenida Salamanca, Spain · Our Lady of Good Counsel, Potomac

From Potomac, Maryland. She played at Our Lady of Good Counsel and Northwestern, was drafted in the first round by the Dallas Wings, won the EuroCup Women championship with London Lions, and was named MVP of the Israeli league finals at Maccabi Ashdod. She arrived in Salamanca this season averaging 17.4 points, 7.4 rebounds, and 3.8 assists at Maccabi — described by Perfumerías Avenida as “a total scorer.” Spain’s LF Endesa is one of the strongest women’s leagues in the world. Abby Meyers is in it.

Two players from the same Montgomery County school — Our Lady of Good Counsel — are both professional basketball players right now. Lindsey Pulliam and Abby Meyers. The same pipeline. Different corners of the world.

One More, Closer to Home.

Lindsey Pulliam — UPSHOT League · Our Lady of Good Counsel

Pulliam played at Northwestern and competed professionally in multiple countries before joining the UPSHOT League in April 2026 — a new domestic professional league taking shape in the United States. It is not the WNBA. It is not Europe. It is a professional basketball player finding a court to play on, which is what professional basketball players do. She is still playing. That counts.

One Whose Next Chapter Is Still Being Written.

Jakia Brown-Turner — Most recently: Elitzur Holon, Israel · Bishop McNamara, Oxon Hill

Born in Oxon Hill, Maryland. Bishop McNamara’s all-time leading scorer. A McDonald’s All-American. She played at NC State and finished her college career at Maryland, averaging 13.5 points and 6.4 rebounds and leading the Terps in rebounds. She appeared with the Washington Mystics in 2024 and played in Israel’s Division A with Elitzur Holon in the 2024-25 season. Her 2026 team is unconfirmed as of this writing. We are watching.

What Seven Looks Like.

Two on the same WNBA opening day roster. Three others who competed in WNBA training camps this spring. Two playing professionally overseas — one in Switzerland, one in Spain. One in a new domestic league. One whose next chapter has not yet been written.

That is seven Maryland women in or recently out of professional basketball in May 2026. It is the product of St. Frances Academy and Western High School and Aberdeen and Bishop McNamara and Our Lady of Good Counsel. It is thirty years of work in gymnasiums this state has never fully celebrated.

And there is one more thing worth saying clearly: we had an error. Nia Clouden attended St. Frances Academy, not Riverdale Baptist. That correction has been made in the database. This project is built on verification. When we get something wrong, we say so and we fix it. That is the standard the work demands.

The 2026 season is underway. Maryland is in it — on the court in Atlanta, in Switzerland, in Spain, in New York, in Washington. We will be watching all of them.

Know a Maryland woman playing professional basketball we haven’t documented? Write to us at doagbc@gmail.com. The database has 386 verified players and counting. The work does not stop.

— TKS

Coach Tully Sullivan, Chesapeake High School / Baltimore Lady Lions

Coach Alexis Washington, Eastern Technical High School / Baltimore Lady Lions

Read the full series: doagbc.substack.com

#MarylandMade · #DOAGBC · #WNBA2026 · #WomensBasketball

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I have been coaching girls’ basketball in this state for nearly thirty years.

I have watched programs rise and fall, watched dynasties built and dynasties ended, watched coaches give decades of their professional lives to gymnasiums in all corners of Maryland — from Pylesville in Harford County to Gambrills in Anne Arundel, from Harwood in the south to East Baltimore in the city, from the suburbs of Prince George’s County to the private school corridors of the IAAM and the WCAC.

This article is the product of that watching, and of the research this publication has been doing since we started building the DOAGBC database. It is our attempt to answer a question that serious Maryland girls’ basketball people have discussed for years without a definitive written answer: which programs, across all of Maryland’s history, have been the greatest?

Before we start, a few ground rules.

This ranking covers programs across all competitive structures: the MPSSAA public school tournament, the IAAM, the WCAC, and every other structure in which Maryland’s girls have competed. Comparing across those structures is inherently imperfect — a program that wins the IAAM A Conference competes in a different ecosystem than one that wins the Class 4A state title. We acknowledge that. We rank anyway, because the players and coaches of this state deserve to have someone attempt the full picture.

The criteria: wins, championships, longevity, the quality of players produced, and the degree to which the program shaped what came after it.

Let’s go.

TIER ONE: THE UNTOUCHABLES

Programs that have produced the most championships, the most professional players, and the most lasting impact on the sport in this state.

No. 1: St. Frances Academy — East Baltimore

Coach: Jerome Shelton (1990–present) · Record: 600+ wins · Championships: 15 IAAM A Conference titles · WNBA First-Round Picks: 4

There is no serious argument for any other program at the top of this list.

St. Frances Academy has produced three first-round WNBA draft picks: Angel McCoughtry (No. 1 overall, 2009), Nia Clouden (No. 12, 2022), and Angel Reese (No. 7, 2024).

Jerome Shelton has coached at St. Frances for thirty-five years. He has won 17 IAAM league championships. He is second only to Lin James on the all-time regional wins list, and he reached 600 wins in fewer seasons than any coach in the area’s history. Two Olympic gold medals (McCoughtry, 2012 and 2016). WNBA All-Star selections - McCoughtry . One NCAA national championship (Reese, LSU, 2023). A Michigan State single-game scoring record (Clouden, 50 points). Multiple Big Ten and SEC Player of the Year awards between the three draftees.

The program is located at 501 East Chase Street in one of the oldest continually operating Black Catholic schools in the United States. The gym floor is named for Sister John Francis Schilling, who keeps the scorebook at every home game. McCoughtry and Reese stood in that gym in 2023 and talked to Baltimore’s youth about what was possible. Everything they said had been said, in different forms, on that same ground for almost two hundred years.

St. Frances Academy is the standard against which every other program in this state is measured.

No. 2: Western High School — Baltimore City

Coach: Breezy Bishop (1970s–1997) · Record: 424-40 (.914) · Championships: 17 Baltimore City, 2 State · Hall of Fame: Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame (2000)

The argument for Western at No. 2 begins and ends with the win percentage. A .914 winning percentage over 24 seasons, against public school competition in Baltimore City, is a number that should appear in conversations about the greatest coaching accomplishments in the history of the sport. Not the history of Maryland. The history of the sport.

Breezy Bishop is the only Maryland girls’ high school basketball coach in the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame. She sent 63 of 64 players who applied for college scholarships to college on scholarships. She published and self-funded a 20-page recruiting booklet every fall, mailing it to every college in America, because she refused to let her players be invisible to the world that should have been seeing them.

Western’s championship years include two back-to-back state titles (1994-95), seventeen Baltimore City championships, and a perfect-season dynasty period where the program was consistently ranked among the best in the nation by USA Today. The school itself is the oldest female public high school in America, founded in 1844. Coach Breezy Bishop Court has been the gym floor’s official name since 2022. The current Doves program won its first state title since 1995 in 2022 — and Bishop was on the floor in College Park to see it.

No. 3: Bishop McNamara High School — Forestville, Prince George’s County

Coaches: Frank Oliver Jr. (2016–2023), Ron James (2023–present) · Championships: WCAC (2020, 2025, 2026), No. 1 National Ranking (2025) · WNBA Connections: 3 players drafted

The program that opened this series. Bishop McNamara has produced three WNBA draft selections from a single graduating class and era: Jakia Brown-Turner (Washington Mystics, 2024), Madison Scott (Dallas Wings, pick 14, 2025), and Liatu King (Los Angeles Sparks, pick 28, 2025). Scott and King were drafted on the same night from the same high school in Prince George’s County.

Operating in the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference — the most competitive girls’ basketball conference in the mid-Atlantic region — McNamara has twice won back-to-back WCAC championships (under Oliver in 2019-20 and under Ron James in 2025-26). The 2024-25 team went 30-2 and earned the No. 1 national ranking in High School on SI. The Team Takeover Girls pipeline, operated by Ron James since 2012, has produced eight McDonald’s All-Americans and more than 75 Division I players. McNamara is the current standard-bearer of the WCAC era, and its upward trajectory shows no signs of stopping.

TIER TWO: THE DYNASTY BUILDERS

Programs that sustained excellence across multiple eras, conference structures, or coaching generations.

No. 4: Arundel High School — Gambrills, Anne Arundel County

Coach: Lee Rogers (1989–2023) · Record: 570-251 · Championships: 4 State (1996, 2000, 2004, 2010), 14 County, 11 Region

The most successful girls’ basketball program in Anne Arundel County history, built over 34 years by a coach who went 6-16 in his first season and finished with 570 wins. Lee Rogers was selected to coach the West squad in the McDonald’s All-American Girls Game in 2018 — one of the highest honors in high school basketball coaching — and insisted on bringing his entire staff to Atlanta, including 34-year assistant Donna McGowan.

Arundel produced more than 50 college players, a large contingent at the Division I level, including Chavonne Hammond (Vanderbilt), Simone Egwu (Virginia), and Sherrone Vails (Louisville). The 89-game county winning streak. Four state titles spanning fourteen years. A court named for Rogers at the school — which he tried to refuse. This program is the model of what sustained excellence looks like at a public school without recruiting advantages.

No. 5: Hammond High School — Columbia, Howard County

Record: 3 State Championships (1992, 1994, 1995) · 5 Consecutive Final Four appearances (1991–95) · MPSSAA Class 3A

The most underrepresented dynasty in the history of Maryland girls’ basketball.

Hammond High School in Columbia won three MPSSAA state championships in four years (1992, 1994, 1995) and reached the state final four in five consecutive seasons (1991-1995). In the context of public school basketball in Maryland, that run places Hammond alongside the all-time programs in any era. The 1991-92 championship team won the Class 3A title. The back-to-back titles in 1994 and 1995 came during an era when Western was simultaneously winning Class 4A titles under Breezy Bishop, meaning Hammond was the state’s best smaller-school program exactly when Western was the state’s best large-school program.

Howard County has historically been underrepresented in the DOAGBC database and in the public record of Maryland girls’ basketball. Hammond is the clearest example of that gap. The full documentation of that five-year dynasty — the coaches, the players who went on to Division I programs, the individual stories — is one of the priority research projects for this publication.

No. 6: Southern High School — Harwood, Anne Arundel County

Coach: Linda Kilpatrick (1975–2015) · Record: 500+ wins · Championships: 5 State Basketball, 3 State Lacrosse

Five state basketball championships. Three state lacrosse championships. Eight state titles in two sports, at a public school, over 39 years, without the ability to recruit across county lines. Linda Kilpatrick came back to her own alma mater to build this program, was inspired by the boys’ basketball coach (Tom Albright, 550 wins) whose name is on the gymnasium, and in turn inspired Lee Rogers at Arundel to coach girls’ basketball.

The coaching chain that runs from Kilpatrick to Rogers is the most direct generational transfer in Anne Arundel County basketball history. Her court was dedicated at Southern in December 2023 — eight years after she retired, which is exactly the right amount of time for a community to fully understand what it had. In every decade she coached, her team reached the state final four

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TIER THREE: THE RECORD-HOLDERS AND PERENNIAL POWERS

No. 7: North Harford High School — Pylesville, Harford County

Coach: Lin James (1967–2013) · Record: 608-229 · All-Time Wins Leader: Maryland/Regional

The all-time wins leader for girls’ basketball coaches in the Maryland and Baltimore region. Lin James arrived at North Harford in 1967 — five years before Title IX — and spent forty-six years building a program in rural Harford County that finished with 608 wins. No one has passed her. No one is close

.

The lack of national media coverage for a rural public school is the only reason Lin James and North Harford are not more widely known. She coached through the entire arc of the women’s game — from before Title IX to the era of the WNBA — at the same school, in the same community, for almost five decades. That consistency and that record belong at the top of any conversation about Maryland’s great coaches and programs.

No. 8: Riverdale Baptist School — Upper Marlboro, Prince George’s County

Coach: Sam Caldwell and others · League: WCAC · National: Perennial Top-10 rankings, multiple No. 1 regional designations

Riverdale Baptist has been a perennial presence in the Washington Post’s regional Top 20 rankings for more than two decades, regularly reaching No. 1 in the DMV area and competing with programs from across the country in national tournament settings. Operating in the WCAC alongside Bishop McNamara and other powerhouses, Riverdale Baptist has consistently produced Division I talent from Prince George’s County and beyond.

The program’s sustained national relevance — including multiple seasons finishing No. 1 in the regional poll, appearing in Dick’s Sporting Goods national tournament brackets, and competing against top programs from California and the Southeast — places it among the state’s elite even without multiple state championship banners. In a private-school league where the state tournament structure is different from the public school system, national rankings and head-to-head competition are the real measure.

No. 9: Old Mill High School — Millersville, Anne Arundel County

Coach: Pat Chance and successors · Championships: 3 State Titles (1992, 1993, and subsequent) · County perennial contender

Old Mill is the program that the MPSSAA record books list as winning three state championships in the early 1990s — 1992 and 1993 at the Class 4A level, coached by Pat Chance. Chance is one of the defining figures in Anne Arundel County girls’ basketball history: she mentored Linda Kilpatrick, she encouraged Lee Rogers to coach girls’ basketball, and she built a program at Old Mill that competed at the state level across three decades.

The Kilpatrick-Rogers-Chance coaching network that shaped Anne Arundel County girls’ basketball for thirty years has its roots at Old Mill, in the work that Pat Chance did before any of the others became well-known. That foundational influence earns the program its place in the all-time ranking.

TIER FOUR: THE HONORABLE MENTION — PROGRAMS THAT DEMAND RECOGNITION

C.H. Flowers High School (Prince George’s County): The 4A public school powerhouse of the modern era. Multiple recent county and region championships. Consistently ranked in the state’s top programs in the 2010s and 2020s.

Eleanor Roosevelt High School (Prince George’s County): Finished a perfect 26-0 season with the 4A state title in 2014. The benchmark for what a disciplined, well-coached public school program looks like at its peak.

Howard High School (Howard County): Won the Class 4A state title in 1994 — the same year Hammond won 3A, meaning Howard County produced two state champions in the same calendar year. An underappreciated achievement in a county whose basketball history deserves more documentation.

Largo High School (Prince George’s County): Three state championships (1997, 2007, 2016) across nearly two decades. A program that has been building and rebuilding and competing at the state level across different eras and coaching changes.

Linganore High School (Frederick County): Three state championships (1992, 1996, 1997) and multiple final appearances. One of the most successful rural-county programs in state history during the 1990s dynasty era.

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What the List Tells Us

When I look at this list as a whole, several things stand out.

First: the geography of greatness in Maryland girls’ basketball is almost perfectly distributed across the state. Baltimore City (Western, St. Frances), Anne Arundel County (Arundel, Southern, Old Mill), Prince George’s County (McNamara, Riverdale Baptist, Flowers, Eleanor Roosevelt, Largo), Howard County (Hammond, Howard), Harford County (North Harford). The talent has never been concentrated in one place. It has come from everywhere, developed by coaches who stayed, and produced players who went everywhere

.

Second: the coaches who built the greatest programs are not interchangeable. Breezy Bishop was a marketer and an advocate who sent 63 of 64 players to college on scholarships. Jerome Shelton is a former soldier and history teacher who goes to clinics and holds himself accountable to the level of talent he is coaching. Lee Rogers is a former boys’ coach who was sent to girls’ basketball by three women who saw something in him he hadn’t seen in himself. Lin James is a woman from Tennessee who showed up in Pylesville before Title IX existed and refused to stop. Each of them is completely individual. None of them could have built what the others built.

Third: the private school and public school divide is real but not absolute. The IAAM and WCAC operate in different competitive structures than the MPSSAA. But the players who walk into those gyms are the same players who walk into public school gyms — they are Maryland girls, most of them from Maryland communities, most of them from families that have lived in this state for generations. The programs may compete in different structures. The mission is the same.

Fourth: there are significant gaps in this record that future research must fill. Hammond High School’s five-year dynasty deserves its own deep article. The coaches who built programs at Largo, at Linganore, at Eleanor Roosevelt, at Howard, at C.H. Flowers have not been profiled in this series yet. There are women who played at every one of these programs who went on to play Division I basketball, and their stories deserve to be told.

The Work Continues

Our database currently documents more than 380 Maryland women who played high school basketball in this state and went on to play Division I college basketball. The programs on this list are the factories and the cathedrals that produced them. The coaches profiled in this series — Shelton, Bishop, Rogers, Kilpatrick, Lin James — are the architects.

But the list of architects is long, and we have not profiled all of them. Not yet.

The coaches at Hammond in the 1990s dynasty years. Pat Chance at Old Mill. The coaches at C.H. Flowers and Eleanor Roosevelt and Largo who built competitive programs in Prince George’s County across multiple decades. The coaches at Linganore in Frederick County who won three state titles in six years. All of them built something real. All of them sent players into the world. Most of them have never been the subject of a published profile.

If you coached girls’ basketball at one of these programs. If you played for one of these coaches. If you know the stories that are not in the public record — contact us. The address is at the bottom of this page. The database is live. The research is ongoing.

Maryland girls’ basketball built all of this. We are trying to make sure the record reflects it.

QUICK REFERENCE: THE RANKINGS AT A GLANCE

No. 1 — St. Frances Academy (East Baltimore) · 3 WNBA first-round picks · 15 IAAM titles · 2 Catholic League titles - Jerome Shelton, 720 wins

No. 2 — Western High School (Baltimore City) · .914 win% · 17 city titles, 2 state · Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame (Breezy Bishop)

No. 3 — Bishop McNamara (Prince George’s County) · 3 WNBA draft picks · WCAC titles, No. 1 national ranking 2025

No. 4 — Arundel High School (Anne Arundel County) · 570 wins · 4 state titles · McDonald’s All-American coaching assignment

No. 5 — Hammond High School (Howard County) · 3 state titles · 5 consecutive Final Fours (1991-95)

No. 6 — Southern High School (Anne Arundel County) · 500+ wins · 5 state basketball + 3 state lacrosse titles · Linda Kilpatrick

No. 7 — North Harford High School (Harford County) · 608 wins (all-time regional record) · Lin James

No. 8 — Riverdale Baptist (Prince George’s County) · Perennial national Top 10 · WCAC powerhouse

No. 9 — Old Mill High School (Anne Arundel County) · 3 state titles · Pat Chance coaching legacy

Diary of a Girl’s Basketball Coach · doagbc.substack.com · doagbc@gmail.com

If you have information, corrections, or stories about programs not fully covered here — we want to hear from you.

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Key Highlights from the Episode:

• The High School Legend: Revisit Chandrea’s dominant career at the Institute of Notre Dame (2001–2005), where she became the fifth-highest scorer in Baltimore metro history with 2,252 career points.

• The Stats of a Triple Threat: A look back at her staggering averages of 21.4 points, 12.8 rebounds, and 4.6 assists per game, including a legendary senior season with 20 double-doubles and two triple-doubles.

• Beyond Baltimore: Follow her journey from earning All-American honors at Odessa College to making the All-Big East First Team at Syracuse University alongside icons like Maya Moore and Tina Charles.

• A Global Professional Odyssey: Discover Chandrea’s decade-long professional career, where she became a championship-winning “Globe Trotter,” conquering leagues in Australia, France, Belgium, and Finland.

This episode is a must-watch for anyone celebrating the rich history of women’s basketball in Baltimore and the incredible legacy of one of its brightest stars.

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Want more on Chandrea’s journey? For a deeper dive, check out the more detailed article written on Chandrea Jones for our Women’s History Month Series. It was published this past March on the Diary Of A Girls Basketball Coach Substack site.

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Ny’Ceara grew up in Baltimore. She went to Western High School. Before anyone was paying attention, she told college scouts she played like she was 6’4” in a 5’3” body, and that she had the heart to match.

She was not wrong.

Ny’Ceara Pryor is the active leader in career steals in collegiate basketball — 357 across fewer than 100 games, the only active player to accomplish that feat. As of this month, she is in training camp with the New York Liberty. A Baltimore girl at the highest level of the professional game. 12thMan.com

How she got here.

In her very first college season at Sacred Heart University, Pryor became the first player in both program and league history to simultaneously earn NEC Player of the Year, Defensive Player of the Year, and Rookie of the Year. She was a freshman. That had never been done by anyone, anywhere in that conference. Sacred Heart University

She won NEC Player of the Year again as a sophomore. In her final season at Sacred Heart, she led the entire nation in steals per game at 4.1. After three years as one of the most decorated mid-major players in the country, she entered the transfer portal and landed at Texas A&M. 12thMan.com

She delivered there too. In 2025-26, Pryor averaged 16.1 points, 7.1 assists, and 3.6 steals per game, led the SEC in steals, and became the third player in conference history to record multiple steals in all 16 league games — doing it as the shortest player ever named to the SEC All-Defensive Team at 5’3”. 12thMan.com

She finished as the only player in Division I history to record 2,200 points, 550 assists, and 450 steals in a career, and was a Naismith Defensive Player of the Year Semifinalist. 12thMan.com

The Liberty.

Pryor went undrafted out of Texas A&M. The Liberty saw what the draft board missed. She signed a rookie scale contract with New York, with training camp opening April 19. She enters camp competing at point guard alongside Sabrina Ionescu on one of the most competitive rosters in the league. Threads + 2

The odds of making a final WNBA roster from a training camp contract are long. They have always been long. But Ny’Ceara Pryor has spent her entire career doing things that looked improbable on paper — leading the nation in steals from a mid-major program, making the SEC All-Defensive Team at 5’3”, setting records that had stood for decades.

She is in the building. She is a Baltimore City girl who built something remarkable, one steal at a time, in gyms most people never heard of.

We have been documenting Maryland women in professional basketball for years. Western High School belongs in that conversation. Ny’Ceara Pryor may be the most statistically extraordinary player to ever come through a Baltimore City gym.

The 2026 WNBA season starts this week. We will be watching.

— TKS

Coach Tully Sullivan, Chesapeake High School / Baltimore Lady Lions Coach Alexis Washington, Eastern Technical High School/ Baltimore Lady Lions Coach

Know a Maryland woman playing professional basketball we haven’t documented? Write to us at doagbc@gmail.com.

#MarylandMade · #DOAGBC · #WNBA2026 · #WesternHighSchool · #NewYorkLiberty

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I have gotten used to watching Maryland women do remarkable things in unremarkable silence.

That is why this week matters to me.

The 2026 WNBA season opens in a matter of days. Training camps are underway. I spent time going through the rosters — all fifteen teams — and then kept going. FIBA databases. EuroBasket profiles. League listings across four countries. I wanted an honest count of how many women with Maryland roots are playing professional basketball right now, at this moment, in April 2026.

The number is eight.

Four in WNBA training camps. Four more playing professionally overseas and in new domestic leagues. Eight women from Maryland high schools and AAU programs competing at the highest levels the professional game has to offer.

I want to name every single one of them.

Two of them are on the same team in Atlanta.

Angel Reese and Brionna Jones are both on the Atlanta Dream heading into 2026. I want to slow down here and say something that doesn’t always get said loudly enough.

Angel Reese grew up in Baltimore. She walked the halls of St. Frances Academy on Brentwood Avenue — the same school that produced Angel McCoughtry, Nia Clouden, Melba Chambers, and Mi-Khida Hankins. St. Frances is the single greatest pipeline school in our entire database of 386 verified players. And it is a Baltimore City school. Not a suburb. Not a prep school with a national recruiting budget. A Baltimore City school.

Brionna Jones is from Aberdeen. Harford County. She played at Maryland, became the eighth overall pick in the WNBA Draft, and last season won a EuroLeague championship as Finals MVP with USK Prague. She is back in the WNBA now with Atlanta — though I have to be honest with you: Brionna had right knee surgery this offseason, and her availability for the start of the season remains uncertain. We are thinking about her. Professional basketball includes chapters like this one. The work that happens when no one is watching is part of the story too.

Two Maryland women. One team. One of the most talented rosters in the league.

One of them has a sister in that same camp.

Stephanie Jones — Brionna’s sister, also from Aberdeen — is in training camp with the Atlanta Dream on a training camp contract. She is fighting for a roster spot against long odds, in front of coaches who are evaluating everything every single day.

I do not know if Stephanie makes this roster. Nobody does yet. But she is in the building. In the same camp as her sister. Competing for a shot at the same league.

That is a Harford County story that most of Maryland has never heard told.

Madison Scott is fighting for a spot in Washington.

Madison Scott is in training camp with the Washington Mystics on a training camp contract — competing for a professional roster spot approximately forty miles from where she grew up in Maryland. The Mystics have a young, rebuilding roster heavy with 2026 draft picks, which means the back-end spots are genuinely open. Madison Scott is in the room fighting for one of them.

And then there are the four playing overseas and beyond.

This is the part of the story that almost never gets told. These four women are not on a WNBA training camp roster. The mainstream women’s basketball coverage will not mention them this week. But they are professionals. They are competing. They are Maryland.

Nia Clouden — St Frances Academy - Baltimore City — was waived by the Connecticut Sun and is currently playing for BCF Elfic Fribourg Basket in Switzerland, competing in the Swiss SBL and the EuroCup Women. She was the twelfth overall pick in the 2022 WNBA Draft. She is a professional basketball player. She is playing in Europe right now.

Jakia Brown-Turner — Bishop McNamara High School, Prince George’s County — played her college career at NC State before transferring to Maryland, appeared briefly with the Washington Mystics, and then signed with Elitzur Holon in the Israeli Division A for the 2024–2025 season. Bishop McNamara has one of the strongest pipelines in the entire database. Jakia Brown-Turner is one more reason why.

Lindsey Pulliam — Our Lady of Good Counsel, Montgomery County — played at Northwestern and competed professionally in multiple countries before joining the UPSHOT League this April. Lindsey has been a professional basketball player for years. The league she is in right now may be newer, but the career she has built is not.

Abby Meyers — Our Lady of Good Counsel, from Potomac, Maryland — is playing for Perfumerías Avenida Salamanca in Spain’s LF Endesa, one of the most competitive women’s basketball leagues in the world, and represented the Israeli National Team during the 2025–2026 season. Spain. Israel. A Maryland girl from Potomac on an international stage.

I want to pause on that for a moment. Two players from the same Montgomery County school — Our Lady of Good Counsel — are both professional basketball players competing at the international level right now. Lindsey Pulliam. Abby Meyers. The same school. The same pipeline. Two different corners of the world.

What eight looks like.

Alexis and I built this database because we believed the count would matter when someone finally made it. Eight Maryland women in professional basketball right now — spread across Atlanta, Washington, Switzerland, Israel, Spain, and a new domestic league taking shape in the United States — is not an accident.

It is the product of programs and coaches and families who did the work without recognition, in gymnasiums this state has never fully celebrated. It is the product of St. Frances Academy and Aberdeen High School and Riverdale Baptist and Bishop McNamara and Our Lady of Good Counsel. It is the product of thirty years of Maryland basketball that this project exists to document.

The 2026 WNBA season opens this week. Eight Maryland women are in it — in one form or another, on one court or another, in one country or another. We will be watching every single one of them.

Know a Maryland woman playing professional basketball we haven’t documented? Write to us at doagbc@gmail.com. The database has 386 verified players and counting. The work does not stop.

— TKS

Coach Tully Sullivan, Chesapeake High School / Baltimore Lady Lions

Read the full series: doagbc.substack.com

#MarylandMade · #DOAGBC · #WNBA2026 · #WomensBasketball

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Key Highlights from the Episode:

• The Case for “The Extra Year”: Explore how reclassifying can provide vital time for athletic development [01:17], academic recovery or GPA improvement [01:51], and more strategic recruitment opportunities by shifting into a more favorable class [02:24].

• The Hidden Costs: It’s not just about the game. Coach Tully discusses the significant social impact of leaving your peer group behind [03:19] and the potential financial burden on the family [04:14].

• The Verdict: Coach Tully shares his personal philosophy on why he believes the social and developmental experience of high school is often “invaluable” compared to purely athletic gains [05:02].

Whether you are a parent of a rising star or a student-athlete weighing your options, this episode provides a grounded, realistic look at the factors you must weigh before making the jump.

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