Scots Sports Superiority, part two: The culture of Maryville College Athletics integral to success by women’s team coaches in 2023-24
July 19, 2024
EDITOR’S NOTE: Maryville College was awarded the Collegiate Conference of the South Women’s Commissioner’s Cup for athletic success during the 2023-24 academic year. This is part two of a three-part series examining everything that made it possible.
Back in 2007, the head coach of the University of Tennessee men’s basketball team made headlines when he showed up on the sidelines of a Lady Vols match, shirtless and with a torso painted UT orange.
Then-Coach Bruce Pearl commanded national attention for the act of support, but such cross-sport camaraderie has long been a part of Maryville College Athletics tradition. Under the leadership of Athletics Director Sara Quatrocky, that tradition, along with so many others, coalesced into a disciplined and specific set of goals after she was named the College’s permanent athletics director in 2021.
As the school’s first full-time AD without coaching or teaching responsibilities, she was able to dedicate herself fully to athletics oversight, and it’s not lost on those who report to her that her demanding style of leadership has led to the coaches and players under her purview to rise to the occasion and emulate it.
And that organization, they all agree, not only played a large role in the success of the women’s athletic programs at MC during the 2023-24 academic year, it’s led to a wider net of recruitment and a higher rate of retention among athletes of all sports.
“When I first arrived, it was important to build a department culture from the inside out,” Quatrocky said. “Throughout my career, I had been taught by my mentors to be organized and disciplined so that coaches could focus on coaching. We now have an organic approach to success that everyone has goals around. It focuses on five areas — academics, health and wellness, mental health, sports performance, and game day experience.
“Building up resources in our department was strategic. When people think about resources, they usually think about money first. But I wanted to get people in place who could help build the brand we wanted by helping to lay the foundation. Putting together our athletics administration was one of the most satisfying projects I’ve done in my career. These people love and care about the Scots brand, they believe in me, and they pour into the student experience.
“Our women’s programs have great leaders and mentors who exemplify our brand,” she added. “When we focus on the internal pieces, which is the true essence of the NCAA DIII philosophy, success on the fields and courts takes place.”
Discipline transforms seasons and programs
Quatrocky’s confidence is born from experience. She’s seen internal focus turn to success time and time again, and nowhere is that more evident than in the most recent season by the MC volleyball squad. A month before the season began, Brienna Laskowski was named as the interim head coach. She’d served as assistant for exactly one year, and as a 2021 graduate of William Peace University, she was closer in age to the players she was tapped to coach than many of her peers were.
It was, Laskowski said, both an intimidating and an empowering experience.
“Obviously, hearing that I’d be stepping into an interim role was overwhelming, and before I let myself get too caught up in the what-ifs or the whys, I had to remind myself that God orders our footsteps,” she said. “I knew that He wouldn’t give me something I couldn’t handle or that I wasn’t ready for. I’ve known for a long time that this is what I was called to do, so when the time came, I was ready and confident to step into the role. Don’t get me wrong, I was scared, but God tells us to fear nothing, so I quite literally told myself to suck it up.”
Her players adjusted to the sudden change, however, and more importantly, the administration in the back office worked furiously to support her and the team. There was no attitude of “let’s get through the season and then we’ll figure it out,” Laskowski said: The goal set by everyone, from Quatrocky on down, was to continue a tradition of excellence both on and off the court. Knowing that Quatrocky, Brittney Washington (senior associate AD), Jenny Massey (head trainer/senior women’s athletics administrator/deputy Title IX coordinator), Dana Hummel (MC Athletics office manager) and so many others were in her corner allowed her to focus on the one thing that mattered: serving her players as a leader.
“What was incredible was the sense of trust I felt from them,” she said. “They never hovered or micromanaged. They let me run the program how I saw fit, but they were always close by when I needed them. And the other coaches on staff were just as incredible. They’ve answered all my annoying newbie questions with love and patience. They’ve given me amazing advice on how to handle each new situation I was presented with, they’ve handed down books that helped them through some of their learning curves, and they’ve been my sounding boards when things were tough.
“Because of the people here, I’ve never felt immense pressure to win. Sara talks about winning being a byproduct of doing everything else right, so that was our focus. As a staff, we shifted toward improving academics, getting our athletes stronger, utilizing our mental performance coaches, and upping our intensity in practices. After that, everything else fell into place.”
But when those components do fall into place, and the results are demonstrated on the field of competition, there’s nothing like it. The Maryville College softball team, led by Coach Jill Moore, was one of two women’s squads invited to participate in NCAA Division III post-season tournament play, but those bids were at-large ones, meaning that the College was selected specifically for its seasonal accomplishments.
Sitting in the Garnet Room of Cooper on May 13, Quatrocky was on the edge of her seat, literally, while she and members of the MC softball team watched the at-large bids being announced. It wasn’t a given; despite the incredible run that saw the team bring home the tournament championship trophy, the team was dependent on the good graces of the NCAA for an extension of the season.
Her right hand on Moore’s shoulder, her left clasping Washington’s, she erupted in full-bodied applause with everyone else gathered for the big moment. Moore, on the other hand, collapsed, and as the words “they are joined by Maryville College” reverberated in her brain, the entirety of the season’s ups and downs was never more clear, she said.
“People see the wins, they see the conference championship, but what they don’t see are the 7 a.m. lifts three days a week in the fall and throughout the winter,” she said. “What they don’t see is the extra cage time at 10 after a night class, or staying after practice to hit another bucket of balls. The nonglamorous things and the hard work are what make the recognition and support we’ve gotten so much better, because that’s what it takes. We don’t work a 9-to-5 shift; all day, every day, it’s work, and we do what we have to do in order to be successful. And one of the great things in our department is having an athletics director like Sara. She knows how hard we work, and it makes it a lot more enjoyable to do your job when you have people who know you’re putting the work in.”
All about the relationships
And that hard work, women’s basketball Coach Darrin Travillian added, is what makes the difference in the Athletics Department’s ability to recruit talented players. There’s long been a tradition of winning embedded in the MC culture, but installing a permanent athletics director built a structure around it, and that structure, combined with what Maryville College offers as an academic institution, continues to make MC a destination instead of a second- or third-place option for student-athletes who want to succeed.
“The reality is that if a student-athlete is interested in bells and whistles, we’re not winning that fight,” Travillian said. “The one we’re going to win is the experience we can give you, the attention we can give you, and the history of championships we have alongside our plan to keep hanging banners. We have moved the needle not only in women’s basketball, but in all sports.
“I have a brand new locker room, and we have one of the best film rooms you’re going to see at schools of any level. We can point to the fact that the gym in Cooper has undergone all of these upgrades, and we’re still a work in progress. But if that’s what it takes to sell Maryville College to a kid, we’re not going to be able to do that. What we will do is provide a personal touch, provide experience, and after four years you’re going to leave here a different person. You’re going to leave here a better person, and those are things that matter more than the other bells and whistles.”
Because for Maryville College Athletics, the bells and whistles aren’t the facilities or the amenities: They’re the people, and the loyalty the coaches have for their particular sports and the Athletics Department as a whole is reciprocated. When he arrived at MC on July 1, 1989, Pepe Fernandez — coach of the men’s and women’s soccer teams — was sitting in the fabled catbird’s seat. Soccer had yet to explode in popularity, and even the University of Tennessee didn’t have a women’s soccer team. (The Lady Vols would first take to the soccer field in 1996.) As a result, Fernandez could recruit players from across the state who were hungry for a collegiate soccer experience, but as the sport caught on and bigger schools put together teams, he kept coming back to what’s always served him well: cultivating a meaningful experience for every Scot who puts on a jersey.
“We talk about being diligent with all the small things and working on relationships. If there were 100 soccer balls in Blount County when I first got to Maryville College, I probably had 50 of them in the equipment shed,” Fernandez said. “But more and more kids started watching soccer, and more and more kids started playing FIFA (a hugely popular soccer video game series that had sold more than 325 million copies as of 2021), and that expanded the level of knowledge the kids were coming in with. They were thinking of the game more, and they were coming in with higher expectations, and as we grew as a college, their expectations also grew exponentially.
“That’s where we’ve had to maintain our edge as an athletics department and as a school. I tell recruits that, one, this is a great place to live; two, you’re going to get a fantastic education; and three, you’re going to get to play for great people in great programs. If a student is looking for those three things, then Maryville is a home run, and it can be an easy sell. And if you look at the numbers, our female athletes come here, and they do not leave. Sometimes, they’ll have to weigh their options because of a serious financial decision, or if they decide they want a major that we don’t have, but the retention of our female athletes, at least on the soccer side, is that they rarely transfer. It’s amazing how they come here, and how they stay.”
