Developing the whole student-athlete is a team effort
Megan Duffy is starting her fourth season as head coach of the Marquette University women’s basketball team. She was a student-athlete at the University of Notre Dame and is in her 14th year of coaching. She sat down for an interview with Jennifer Maney, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Marquette University. This interview was conducted via Microsoft Teams on Oct. 3, 2022. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Jennifer Maney: How do you feel that you live that message or the vision of what it means to be at a Catholic, Jesuit institution?
Megan Duffy: I think first and foremost, I’m a leader of young women and young people. And so the driving force of leading and service and giving back is my fuel every day. I get the opportunity to impact young women through the game of basketball. But a lot of what we do stems from teaching them life lessons as well. Some of the themes we talk about on the basketball court every day are about being selfless, we’re talking about being a great teammate, supporting one another.
Something that’s really unique to women’s basketball in general is people come from all different backgrounds and walks of life. So one of our main themes with our team is we accept every individual on our team and part of my job is to connect all those pieces back together to make a dynamic winning program and team and all that. You know for sure to expect faith in some form, even if you don’t clearly define it. I grew up Catholic, but I didn’t really have a lot of exposure to the Jesuit charism or the Ignatian criticism until I really intentionally stepped into that here on campus and went to the Faber Center and immerse myself so I could get some of the vernacular and the themes.
Maney: Are there ever really intangible and tangible ways that you do what you just talked about, where you have an opportunity for an Ignatian moment? To what extent have you stepped into that?
Duffy: Being at a few different Catholic universities, I think a lot of the same principles are in place, but one of the things that I’ve picked up with the Jesuit order, I think it’s just spoken about more of just developing that whole person, the service and gratitude piece of it really comes to my mind that we use here with women’s basketball. So I just think I probably understand it a little bit better because it’s something that aligns with who we all want to be. We want to be great people. We want to serve. We want to just be appreciative of where we’re at. And I think what’s coming out from my voice connects back to what our entire university is trying to accomplish, whether it’s through our academia setting or athletics. I think it’s a very powerful community.
Maney: Do you think about how that message gets delivered after a win versus after a loss?
Duffy: We’re incredibly competitive. Our jobs as coaches and leaders are to win basketball games, but I think the greatest leaders in anything are the ones who can take the task at hand and incorporate all the values of life into your mission and your vocation. That’s what I tried to do. I might not be happy if we lose a game, but again, we’re losing a game because maybe we weren’t tactically right or the other team was better that night. But that doesn’t change how we treat our players as people and as young women and individuals. And again, sometimes a win or loss can center you back to your core values of what you believe in.
Maney: So you talked about the fact that you’ve got young women coming here from all over and all different walks of life. I think you do service with your team and I wonder if you had a chance to think about a cause.
Duffy: Yeah, we’re really committed to getting out into our Milwaukee community. We have people from all different backgrounds. So some of our women who are now in a pretty incredible opportunity being a student-athlete and being on a full athletic and academic scholarship. Sometimes they’re going back into their inner city communities and, you know, you’re touching the next generation. And so there’s great perspective with that with some of those student-athletes who realize, “hey, that was me as a young girl.” And then there’s other players on our team who have a little bit more privileged life who are seeing this side of things in a different light. One of the things we intentionally started to do two years ago, when some of the social injustices were going on and there were a lot of things we couldn’t control as women basketball players on campus here at Marquette and we kept bringing our conversation to the two words of “change” and “unity.” And, as young leaders on our campus, we wanted to try and bring that to the forefront, and anything we did was service. I ended up asking our team and leading our team through is “hey, you can see what’s going on, you can see what’s happening in our community, what do you guys want to do to bring about this change?” And it wasn’t coming necessarily from Coach Duffy. I was just leading the conversation with it and we came up with a few basic themes of we’re so appreciative of what we have here in our situation. How do we give back to our youth and our young girls for them to have role models and then it just kind of spiraled from there. Ultimately our team found that connection with minority groups. I think for me the biggest thing was we empowered our team to really commit and buy into what type of service they wanted to do and it not be about a show.
Maney: You know, we talk a lot here about cura personalis. How do you as a coach find ways to balance that?
Duffy: I think cura personalis has affected me the most with how I coach and how I teach because we don’t want our student-athletes to only be defined as athletes. We want them to be defined in many different ways. We’re constantly taking the pulse, and making sure all sides of their life are taken care of. The demands of playing a sport at the Division 1 level are extremely high. As soon as we get done with practice, we want to be able to turn it off and switch gears and get into that student mindset and work hard to find our passions in the classroom and get our work done. And then that third piece is kind of the bucket I call developing that whole woman is keeping our mental health in a good spot. And so, to me, all of that comes into play and I got the great job of trying to take 12 to 13 young women and make sure that balance of their life is all lined up and it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of time, but one of the things that I love about it is building those relationships that we’re talking about.
Maney: I think that if you’re gonna really live the mission of an institution that has a charism like ours, you probably should be able to incorporate that into not just what you just described with your students, which is key, but other decisions that you might make. Have you thought about how that might influence you on things you might have to decide or policies or hard decisions or something like that?
Duffy: When you have a group of core values that fall into the Jesuit mission, I think it’s going to allow you to make better decisions. And I know for me, I’m put in a lot of situations where it’s hard to keep everybody happy. It’s hard to know if you’re making the right decision, but when you take a step back and reflect on your core values, I think there’s a lot more clarity in your decision making. At the end of the day, you want to serve and care for your group of people, and that’s my women and my staff. So again, you’re making decisions based on not always the individual, but that whole person in that whole group, And if we’re driven by that and make decisions on that as a coaching staff here, I think most cases we’re going to be leading them in the right direction.
Maney: Do you find it hard sometimes to balance team versus individual?
Duffy: It’s a great question. We spend a lot of time on defining individual successes and failures and team successes and failures, because, again, the strength of our team will be how strong each one of our individuals becomes, and so our jobs are to continue to inspire and mold and motivate and breathe life into those individuals. Another thing with this generation is learning how to accept defeat and failure. It can be very overwhelming to figure out how to bounce back and push forward. I have a strong passion to help our women continue to make strides as individuals, but at the same time you have to be thinking about those other teammates around you and not let too many people fall behind. So you’re constantly reminding your players of, hey, we want you to be the best version of yourself you can be, but also get back to that service mentality and bring somebody along with you. That’s the blueprint to coaching.
Maney: Let me end with a kind of a practical question. In my classes I use a lot of silence — very Ignatian. I use a lot of reflection because I think this generation, especially with social media and noise and business, and being overbooked, I think they need space. Do you ever use any of those sort of Ignatian strategies either in your practice, after practice, at some of your team meetings or something that if I walked in would look or feel like that.
Duffy: I’m learning more about this because our world is sports. It is non-stop. It works seven days a week, tons of hours and it’s just a go, go, go business. I’m learning through this generation, and a little bit of the mission at Marquette, of that time for quiet and silence and reflection and meditation. And I find myself learning from our players that they need their time and their space. Probably more than I do and it’s actually helped me say, “OK, you can take a step back, take a deep breath, take these five or 10 minutes and express your gratitude for where you are in the present.”
Maney: That’s awesome.
Duffy: And they’ve actually helped me as a coach.
