Diane Richardson is ‘more than a basketball coach’ and has Temple poised for an unexpected NCAA Tournament berth

Diane Richardson has a bunch of sayings. All of them, in their own way, help define the leadership style of the Temple women’s basketball coach, who has helped turn what was a 6-10 team in the American Athletic Conference last year into a team that finished the regular season tied atop the conference standings. The Owls will be the No. 3 seed in next week’s AAC Tournament.

It’s been a remarkable turnaround on North Broad in Richardson’s second season, and the sayings help explain some of it.

Take “prime the pump,” for example. Richardson asks of those around her: “Who are the people that prime the pump? Who are the people that want you to succeed? Who are the people that don’t want you to succeed?”

Let’s start with Richardson. At or near the top of the list of people who wanted Richardson to succeed was a minister grandmother who helped give confidence to a girl who would become a first-generation college student out of Southeast D.C., a girl who used basketball to earn a scholarship, who became a college track champion, who double-majored in psychology and sociology, who used her brain to become a successful businesswoman, who went back to basketball to coach and give back, who became the devoted mother of two special needs children and the adoptive mother of Jonquel Jones, the 2021 WNBA MVP.

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At the top of the other list, the people who didn’t want Richardson to succeed, is a Frostburg State professor whom Richardson said doubted her at every turn, who pointed to affirmative action instead of crediting Richardson with the success she had earned.

Richardson asks all her players to figure out who the people are who prime their pump. It seems like a simple exercise, but it has a purpose.

“My thing has always been goal-setting,” Richardson said. “I may take one of my players and put my arm around them and ask what are their goals. I’m a big morale person.

“You give them responsibility so they can feel the victories, and even small victories build up to big ones, and so I always give them something that’s attainable. The next step gets harder and harder, but they know ‘I’ve overcome the first thing and the second thing, so nothing is out of reach.’

“There’s a button that you can push. And once you find that button … that’s how I lead. I find out what their why is.”

It’s hard to argue the success of the style, given the results.

Richardson’s high school teams won five championships. She was an assistant on the Maryland team that reached the Elite Eight in 2008, reached NCAA Tournaments on staffs at George Washington and West Virginia, and, when she was finally given a college head coaching job, won a Colonial Athletic Association championship in her second season, after taking over a program that went 5-13 in conference the season before her arrival.

In Year 2 at Temple, Richardson has the Owls playing together, for each other, and they’re having fun doing it. They head to the conference tournament in Fort Worth, Texas, as the No. 3 seed with a bye to the quarterfinals after winning a share of the AAC regular-season title for the first time in 11 seasons in the conference. Just three wins separate the Owls, picked ninth of 14 teams in the preseason poll, from dancing.

There are two people in the Temple program who help explain the ethos of what it means to play and work under Richardson.

One is Aleah Nelson, who first met Richardson growing up in Baltimore. Richardson had recruited Nelson to play at Towson, but Nelson started her college career at Cincinnati, where she played sparingly as a freshman and learned that the place wasn’t a fit for her. She went home, and back to Richardson, to continue her collegiate career at Towson.

It was an easy decision for Nelson to follow her coach north when Richardson accepted the job at Temple. Nelson led the Owls in scoring last season and is second on the team this season with 12.1 points per game. The point guard is the engine that makes Temple go. But because Richardson tailors her approach to each player, Nelson always knows where she stands. Take a loss last week at home to Tulsa. Nelson received a technical foul for the way she celebrated in front of the Tulsa bench after scoring in the first half, then later got taken out of the game by Richardson for blowing a couple of defensive assignments.

A few of Richardson’s other sayings apply here, and they’re written on the wall inside Temple’s practice facility: “We are in the business of creating champions ... It’s nothing personal — strictly business.”

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Nelson knows there was nothing personal when she was removed from the game.

“Even when there’s times that she’s been upset with me, she always says, ‘I only say this and do this because I love you,’ ” Nelson said. “I haven’t had a coach really be like that toward me in a very long time.”

Wanisha Smith knows the love well. Smith played for Richardson at Riverdale Baptist School, where she was Maryland’s Gatorade Player of the Year in 2004 before heading off to become a 1,000-point scorer at Duke. She later was an assistant coach at Longwood University, then joined Richardson’s staff at Towson in 2017. Smith, however, left basketball a few years later before Richardson pulled her back to Temple.

“It’s probably one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever made in my life because of who she is,” Smith said. “You can always feel that passion, that care, that she wants you to do well and she’s going to do everything in her power to make sure that happens.”

How does it translate to a coworker rather than a player?

“Her biggest thing has always been she’s not a micromanager,” Smith said. “She expects you to do what you’re supposed to do, and I think that’s a beautiful thing because she trusts us and we’re going to do everything in our power to make sure we get our jobs done.”

There’s a freedom that comes with that, Smith said, and the assistant coach feels empowered. Smith wants one day to be a head coach, and these years under Richardson, she said, have been a crash course in how to lead a program.

“She’s more than a basketball coach. She’s more than a mentor,” Smith said. “People call her all the time to get their kids overseas, to get them jobs. She is that person. She is that anchor. She’s just so freaking great for this game.”

Temple’s turnaround hasn’t been a linear, upward trajectory. There were bumps. Richardson inherited a team that wasn’t fully hers. There were some carryovers on the roster from Tonya Cardoza’s tenure.

“We had some kids on the team that were just not with us,” Richardson said of last year’s group.

Two of them were dismissed from the team, and two others voluntarily left the program.

“I’ve never been in a situation like that,” Richardson said. “I’ve never given up on a kid, ever. I just couldn’t save two and lose 12. They were pretty good basketball players, but not very good people. It hurt me, but I just couldn’t do it.”

Were regrets starting to creep in? This is a woman they call “the Queen of the DMV,” a region she left to go chase something more. Richardson specializes in people, her degrees in psychology and sociology on their way to being capped by a Ph.D. in performance psychology — a thesis has already been defended. She had made so many right decisions along the way, and maybe this was a wrong one.

“Maybe not self-doubt, but I wanted to get into a better situation to help more kids,” Richardson said. “It seemed like I had gotten into a worse situation.

“I’m retirement age. I could be home drinking lemonade on my porch.”

Home is still in Maryland, where her husband, Larry, lives with the family’s two children with special needs. Richardson has a house in Roxborough and gets home from time to time.

Why is she here, though? She doesn’t need the money. A successful investment career before coaching made sure of that. Richardson says she wants to continue to impact lives. She sees herself in her players, and wants to show them how to use basketball and not let basketball use them.

This crop of Owls? They’re being shown the way.

“They’re confident. That’s what they needed,” Richardson said. “They may not have been making these shots when they got here. But confidence is the biggest thing I can give. I’m not an X’s and O’s person, but I can motivate you to do things you’ve never done before.”

On the opposite wall from the “nothing personal” mantra inside the practice gym is another: “Confidence controls performance.”

“She does a lot of things that my 22-, 23-year-old self questions,” Nelson said. “Like, ‘Why would we do that?’ But the whole time, you know she has a bigger plan.”

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It should come as no surprise that the woman who doesn’t drink alcohol and listens to the same gospel playlist — featuring Kirk Franklin, Mary Mary, and CeCe Winans — before every game isn’t much of a tattoo person.

But Richardson does have one tattoo. It says a lot about her.

Before her Towson Tigers embarked on the 2018-19 season, they were picked eighth out of 10 teams in the conference’s preseason poll. In a circle one day at practice, the players flipped a challenge onto their coach. If they were to do the unlikely, to win the CAA championship and reach the NCAA Tournament, Richardson had to get her first tattoo.

Towson entered the conference tournament as the fourth seed and made a run to the final, knocking off Drexel, 53-49, before cutting the nets down.

It’s small, and it’s on her back, in a spot no one ever sees, but Richardson kept her promise.

The tattoo says “All I Do is Win.”

Why such a boastful statement? It’s a celebration of her successes and also a hidden reminder of how far she’s come.

“I grew up this little kid in the ‘hood, and people said I’d never make it out because of my lineage,” Richardson said.

Richardson wears her latest championship ring, from that 2019 CAA championship, on her finger. The others are in a case, but this one stays on her hand, where she can see it and feel it.

“I’ve got to do everything I can to get these girls a ring,” Richardson said.

She’s on a mission to fulfill that. It could happen as soon as Wednesday. It won’t be easy. It never has been.

Whenever times get tough, Richardson says she reverts to her lists and her goals.

Remember that Frostburg State professor, the one who doubted and discredited Richardson? Years ago, Richardson was welcomed back to the Maryland campus to accept an alumni achievement award. On her drive to the ceremony, she saw the professor walking on a sidewalk. Richardson pulled her Jaguar next to him and lowered the window.

“How do you like me now?” she said. “And I drove off.”

Off to the next thing, another doubter left in the dust.