Notre Dame to honor Philly’s own Muffet McGraw for her legendary coaching career in South Bend

High in the rafters of Purcell Pavilion at the University of Notre Dame hang two national championship banners, ringed with gold and navy blue, paying homage to the 2001 and 2018 women’s basketball teams.

On Sunday, they will be joined by another banner, one that honors the woman who orchestrated both: former head coach Muffet McGraw.

The longtime coach with deep Philadelphia roots, who retired in April 2020, will enter the Ring of Honor before Notre Dame’s game against Purdue Fort-Wayne, adding one more achievement to her list of many.

In 33 years as Notre Dame’s coach, McGraw, a St. Joseph’s University graduate who coached at Archbishop Carroll High School and was a St. Joe’s assistant before heading to South Bend, steered the Irish to nine Final Fours, seven national championship games, and those two titles. A four-time national coach of the year, McGraw was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2017.

But as much as her career was built on a winning track record and the transformation of the program, McGraw’s legacy is built on much more: her voice and her players.

» READ MORE: Muffet McGraw retires as a Notre Dame coaching legend, finding a voice that reaches beyond basketball | Mike Jensen

Every woman who has been inducted into Notre Dame’s Ring of Honor previously played for McGraw. This weekend, McGraw’s banner will join those of Natalie Achonwa, Skylar Diggins-Smith, Kayla McBride, Beth (Morgan) Cunningham, and Ruth Riley-Hunter — as well as that of Niele Ivey, the player who later inherited the program she helped McGraw build.

Coming off of a national title with a chance to repeat the following year, McGraw initially intended to retire after the 2018-19 season.

“I thought we were going to win the national championship, and I was going to retire,” she said. “That was my plan. And then we didn’t win. And then everybody left to the WNBA.”

For McGraw, departing with her five starters didn’t sit right, so she decided to return for what was bound to be a rebuilding year. From the start, she knew it would likely be her last, but she couldn’t be sure.

By the end of the season, though, “probably” had indeed turned into “definitely.” It was a moment that her husband, Matt, had seen coming since the 2018 championship.

“Pretty much that was it, at that point in time. Because you’ve been at it since 1977, coaching high school, college,” Matt McGraw said. “It was about time, from her standpoint, that she looked and said, ‘I think I’m ready to move on and do something different.’ ”

In February 2020, McGraw met with athletic director Jack Swarbrick to inform him of her decision, with intentions to tell the team in March after they returned from spring break.

But college students across the country didn’t return to campus after spring break, required to stay at home as COVID-19 quarantine measures took effect. After the players’ imminent return to campus grew increasingly unlikely, McGraw and Swarbrick elected to break the news over Zoom.

On April 22, 2020, McGraw explained to her players her choice to retire. Then, McGraw slid out of the frame, and Niele Ivey moved in — the mentor handing the program to one of her mentees while the players watched from home.

When people ask McGraw how her team reacted to the announcement, she doesn’t have a good answer for them. The participants’ microphones were muted on the Zoom call, so she couldn’t gauge their true reaction.

Senior Abby Prohaska remembers being caught off guard by the announcement but appreciative of the swift handoff to another figure the players trusted.

“It was very sudden. None of us had any idea what was happening,” Prohaska said. “Having Niele slide in there was very comforting because all of us know her.”

McGraw, too, was pleased with her replacement: Ivey had already spent 17 years at Notre Dame as a player and assistant coach before joining the Memphis Grizzlies staff for the 2019-2020 season. The longtime coach was confident that her successor could manage the program.

“I thought we were going to win the national championship [in 2019], and I was going to retire. That was my plan. And then we didn’t win. And then everybody left to the WNBA.”

In Ivey’s second season, the Irish are off to an 8-2 start, including some dominant wins. There is little doubt that she commands the respect of the team and coaching staff, but she still leans on McGraw for guidance.

In the year-and-a-half since McGraw handed over the reins to Ivey, that support has come in varying forms. It began with outdoor, socially distanced meetings in the summer months of 2020, then morphed into more texts and phone calls during the height of the season. This year, Ivey’s schedule has been packed with in-season and recruiting duties (not to mention watching her son, Jaden, star at No. 1 Purdue). But she hopes Christmas will afford more downtime to spend with her mentor.

McGraw, who was Lehigh’s head coach from 1982-87 before she took over at Notre Dame, still texts after every game, reminding Ivey of her unwavering support, and it would be a great understatement to say the second-year head coach appreciates it. Ivey, who was on the roster for McGraw’s first title and on the coaching staff for her second, has now considered McGraw a mentor for the majority of her life.

“I always call her ‘Coach,’ ” Ivey said. “She’s somebody that I admire and respect and I adore. I just have her on this pedestal, and I just see her as a leader still, my coach, my mentor. So I don’t know, I don’t think I’ll ever not call her ‘Coach.’ ”

Over the course of McGraw’s career, she led the Irish in a slew of marquee matchups — none more heralded than those against Connecticut. The Huskies are still led by their longtime coach, Geno Auriemma, who grew up in Norristown.

Maybe it’s no coincidence that two of the best college coaches in history have roots in the basketball haven of Philadelphia. McGraw, who was born in Pottsville, attributes some of her competitive mentality to the city — and the Big 5 — that shaped her. At different times, she and Auriemma were both assistants on Jim Foster’s staff at St. Joe’s.

“People in Philly are very honest and very sarcastic,” she said. “And so you couldn’t be sensitive. You couldn’t. You had to be tough all the time.”

McGraw and Auriemma clashed, on the court and sometimes in press conferences. But she acknowledged that there is respect between the two.

“We’re not going to be gushing about each other ever,” McGraw said with a laugh. “But conflict’s OK.”

The programs met on eight occasions in the NCAA Tournament, each time in the Final Four or national championship game. They faced each other in conference standoffs before Notre Dame moved to the ACC, at which point the schools often played as nonconference opponents.

» READ MORE: The NCAA women’s tournament landed in the spotlight for inequity | Mike Jensen

“Those to me were the most fun games,” McGraw said. “I hated game day, always. And I put a lot of pressure on myself. But those games I really enjoyed.”

She attributes that to the fact that her team usually entered those matchups as the underdog; in fact, she struggles to think of a time they were favored. And McGraw much preferred that underdog mentality, enjoyed rallying her team to defeat the bigger foe. Those games were exciting to play, and exciting to win.

But meanwhile, as McGraw’s list of coaching achievements grew and her teams continued to succeed, the pressure compounded, reaching new heights during the last six or seven years of her coaching tenure.

“The more you win, the more pressure you feel,” she said. “And, I mean, it was hard. It was really hard. Because then after the game, instead of being excited and celebrating, you’re relieved that you won. And that’s a terrible place to be.”

As McGraw reflects on her career, she measures the success of a given season carefully, intentionally. Her teams finished as the NCAA Tournament runners-up five times in her career, and she marvels over the difference in the public reception to winning it all and coming up just short in the final game — a game that only two teams in the country make it to.

“Your goal is winning a national championship, but you don’t want to be in a position where you say, ‘If we don’t win, it wasn’t a good year,’ ” she said. “It’s still going to be a good year. We got to the final game.”

McGraw made it to that game seven times, including in 2019, the same year her comments calling for more women in leadership roles went viral. During the Final Four press conference, McGraw declared she wouldn’t hire men on her staff, emphasizing a desire to see more women in those positions across the board. Unsurprisingly, the comments drew a dissenting remark from Auriemma.

The next day, to reach McGraw’s seventh national championship game, the Irish beat UConn. It was the last Final Four win of McGraw’s career.

Since retirement, McGraw has done something new: created her own schedule. She sets aside time every morning for a run with her neighbor, a cup of tea and a Sudoku puzzle.

“I don’t do anything before 10:30,” she said. “I love it.”

Her afternoon hours are usually filled with preparations for a course she teaches at Notre Dame or for meetings regarding her work at ESPN. She appears on ESPN programming on Thursdays, traveling to and from Connecticut on Wednesdays and Fridays.

During the early stages of the pandemic, McGraw began organizing food drives in the local community, an effort that has since become national. She works with Habitat for Humanity and will be leading the Muffet McGraw Women Build in 2022. Her class in Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business is called Sports Leadership: How Leaders Help Teams Flourish, and much of the curriculum centers around discussions of gender equity.

McGraw’s commitment to being a voice for women has never wavered; she serves on the advocacy committee for the Women’s Sports Foundation and is involved in a variety of other discussions to continue using her platform to help other women.

In 1987, McGraw arrived at Notre Dame hoping to build a program. But even she could have never imagined that she would become such a powerful figure. In South Bend, a silhouette of a woman crouching in pumps is now emblematic of Muffet McGraw.

Following the announcement of her Ring of Honor induction, fans continued to clamor for a statue, hoping to further immortalize their beloved icon on Notre Dame’s campus.

Despite her pride in her Philadelphia roots, McGraw doesn’t intend to leave South Bend any time soon. But the construction of a Muffet McGraw statue would ensure she’ll be watching over the house she built forever.