It isn’t easy being a trailblazer.
Marist girls basketball coach Mary Pat Connolly, who played at the University of Illinois in the late 1970s, can remember spending her summers then in Chicago-area gyms looking for pickup games with the guys.
“They’d be like, ‘Are you here to get your brother?’ I’d say, ‘No, I want to play.’ And you’d sit there and you’d sit there, and when they really needed a player they’d pick you up. And then they’d say, ‘OK, she’s not bad.’
“You really had to work hard to get better at your game.”
Connolly, known then as Mary Pat Travnik, got better and then some.
She was a rebounding leader two times over as a center at Illinois, and was also a scoring leader. After college she was chosen in the eighth round by the Chicago Hustle and played for two seasons in the Women’s Professional Basketball League, which also was known as the WBL.
On June 9, Connolly, along with Hustle teammates and players from other WBL teams, were inducted into the National Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Tenn.
“This last week and the weekend was surreal, like an out-of-body experience,” Connolly said. “When the call came through about two months ago, I didn’t want to say anything, even to my family. I was just like, ‘Is this real?’”
It was just as real as the stories that Connolly told me of those trailblazing days. I’ll pass along a couple.
First, a fun one.
“At the (Hall of Fame induction) we rehashed how we used to steal the Hustle bus and take wild trips,” Connolly said. “I was the driver, I guess.’”
Connolly’s contract to play in the WBL was $8,000. But the real treasure was the friendships. Some of them didn’t last long.
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“It was eye-opening for us,” Connolly said. “Every time (team president) John Geraty would walk in with a brown suit we knew somebody was going to get cut. “We’d be like, ‘John is here in his cut suit.’
“We never realized the business aspect of the whole thing. There were a lot of hard times when you’d be in rookie camp and John walked in and cut some of your really good friends.”
DePaul women’s coach Doug Bruno was the head coach when the Hustle drafted her.
“Mary Pat was a tough, hard-nosed worker,” Bruno said. “There is no question that she wanted it. She wanted it when she was a high school kid at Lourdes, she wanted it at Illinois, she wanted it for the Hustle.”
Connolly started the 1979-80 campaign with the Hustle, was traded to the St. Louis Streak on Christmas Day, and finished the season back in Chicago. The next season, she played in exhibition games with a Phoenix franchise that was disbanded before the regular season.
The end of the WBL soon followed.
For six years Connolly worked at Ryerson Steel as the foreman of an all-male crew, before starting her coaching career as an assistant at Maria.
Connolly had stops at Moraine Valley and Illinois-Chicago, and was also an assistant on the boys side at Marian Catholic. She coached the girls team for one season at Sandburg, before embarking on her greatest coaching adventure at Marist in 2002.
“Oh, I was just so intrigued to start a program,” Connolly said. “There were no skeletons in the closet, I didn’t have to take over from somebody. I could just run things the way I wanted to run them.
“Believe me, I had a lot of great teachers over the years. And from each one of them I grabbed what they did best.”
Marist has won 12 regional titles in its 16 seasons. In 2007-08, Connolly coached the RedHawks to fourth place in Class 4A.
Around 25 former players and assistant coaches from those teams attended a surprise sendoff party for Connolly on June 7 at Marist.
“All these people (from the different years) were walking in and I was like, ‘Am I going to die?’” Connolly said, laughing. “It was like my life was flashing in front of my eyes.
“It’s all really, really just satisfying. It’s wonderful. Something I never expected. And I’m just living through it.”
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No doubt, there is more to come.