Maria Conlon’s still got game.
She’s 37 years old and the mother of an 8-year-old daughter. She works a full-time job and owns a CrossFit gym. She’s playing with two screws and a plate in her ankle which she destroyed while playing in Iceland two years after she graduated from UConn.
But there she was Wednesday afternoon, out on the basketball court at Notre Dame Catholic High School in Fairfield, patrolling the perimeter, banging in threes and occasionally driving the lane and pulling up for the jumper against her Lancers, the top-ranked girls basketball team in the state.
Her assistant, Heather Lee, who played at Seymour High after Conlon did, is also out on the court. So is another assistant, Kwame Burwell. Conlon’s 6-foot-5 cousin Chris Smith is out there, too, with players trying to shoot over him. So is Kristin Mooney, who played with Lee at Western Connecticut.
“I told them we have the best scout team in the state,” Conlon said, laughing. “They’re not going to play against a team all year long that’s as good as the five of us. I’m pulling up for threes and they’re not even guarding me. Kwame’s dribble-penetrating, throwing behind his head and kicking it out to me.
“I’m like, ‘Man they didn’t read the scouting report, they don’t know I’ve still got the state record for three-point shooting.'”
The players didn’t really know her background when she became their head coach this season, that she played for the UConn team that went to four Final Fours and won three straight national championships and was the starting point guard for two of those titles in 2003 and 2004.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “As long as I can transfer knowledge to them, they shouldn’t care who the heck I am.”
Notre Dame has only lost once, to Hudson Catholic, a top New Jersey team, 61-48 on Jan. 25. The Lancers are 15-1, top ranked in Class L. In the last 10 years, they have been to the Class M state championship game twice (in 2013 and 2016) and lost both times to Cromwell. But they have never won a title.
Their top player is 5-8 sophomore guard Aizhanique Mayo, who’s averaging 19 points per game.
“My teammates are really good,” Mayo said. “We get along well. We move the ball well. Our chemistry is good.”
Their offense was clicking last week, scoring 88 points against Masuk, 85 vs. Joel Barlow. Things are going well. But before this season, Conlon, who lives in Shelton, wasn’t really sure if she was interested in coaching anymore. She had been an assistant at Southern Connecticut for coach Joe Frager when the Owls won the Division II national championship in 2007. She had been an assistant at Notre Dame for two years for her former Seymour High coach Eric DeMarco before she decided not to coach last year. She had just opened her CrossFit gym. She was working full time as the managing partner for the Maffe Financial Group in Glastonbury. At that point, she just wasn’t feeling the coaching thing anymore.
“I hit a crossroads where I thought I don’t know if coaching is for me,” she said. “Kids are different now, very different than I was. I’m used to being that blue collar girl from the Valley, I work hard, I play through injuries, I don’t complain, I don’t talk back to coaches.”
But when DeMarco retired, she was asked about taking over the job. And she realized she missed it.
So here she is.
When she hit a three Wednesday, Burwell yelled out, “All day.”
“I like it because from a coaching perspective when I’m out there playing, I can see stuff live that you don’t notice sometimes when you’re standing on the side,” she said. “And when your coach is making shots or running up and down with you, sometimes when you’re pointing stuff out, they’re more inclined to listen because they’re watching you do it all the time. You’re in the trenches with them a little bit.”
Conlon is also a proponent of a more free-flowing offense.
“I’ll tell them, ‘Here’s the template. Kind of draw around it and add to it as you see fit when you’re reacting in the game,’ rather than, ‘Here’s the template and here’s exactly where you have to draw on this template,'” she said. “What it’s doing for them is increasing their basketball IQ.
“If you look at the AAU circuit, it’s all one-on-one play. How can I break you down and score on you, one on one? How many times do you watch UConn — or Oregon the other night — how many times are they breaking somebody down one on one to score? They’re not. They’re all scoring in the flow of their offense.”
She is a student of the game. Her team has been to UConn practices. She still talks to Frager. She’s listening to podcasts of Jim Boeheim breaking down a 2-3 zone while she’s on the road for work, driving to Rhode Island.
“I kind of geek out a little about stuff like that,” she said.
And she’s always talking to her former UConn teammates — Diana Taurasi, Ashley Battle, Jessica Moore, Morgan Valley and Sue Bird chimes in occasionally — via group chat. Valley is in her first year coaching at the University of Hartford, so Conlon went to see one of her games last week.
“[Taurasi] gave me crap [when I took the job],” she said, laughing, ” ‘Why do you want to coach high school? Are you crazy?’ Now they are [excited]. ‘Oh, you’re No. 1.'”
Lori Riley can be reached at lriley@courant.com.
