When she played at UConn a generation ago, on the charismatic team that ignited the massive, enduring success story, Carla Berube was known as all business, no talk.
“She did everything you were supposed to do,” coach Geno Auriemma says. “Played great, a great teammate, but she was so quiet, you didn’t even know she was there. And those people, they surprise you when, all of a sudden, they go into something where they have to talk, direct, interact and be the voice.”
At quiet moments, on the bus, in the locker room, she could break out loudly in song or start laughing for no apparent reason, to get others to lighten up. Today, we find Carla Berube in charge at Princeton. Her office at Jadwin Gym. She’s still got all her intensity, still knows when to let a playful side come out.
“She’s really direct,” says Bella Alarie, the Tigers’ Ivy League player of the year. “But she’s goofy at times, which is funny, because you wouldn’t know that at the beginning. But as we’ve gotten to know her better, our practices are intense and really focused, but she does know when to have a laugh with us.”
So, what does the goofy side of Carla Berube look like these days?
“She has to make a half-court shot the day before every game,” says senior Taylor Baur. “Like she baseball-throws it from the Tiger [logo] to that hoop. Some days, she’ll make it in 10 tries, but some days it takes a long time. But she’s really superstitious, so she has to make it before we start practicing.”
If ever a coach has every reason to be herself, whether taciturn or goofy, in new surroundings, it’s Carla Berube. Hers is a winning formula that keeps on winning. She won 72 of her last 73 games at Oxford (Mass.) High, the only loss coming to Rebecca Lobo’s Southwick-Tolland team. At UConn, from 1993-97, Berube scored 1,381 points and her teams were 132-8. Then she became head coach at Tufts, winning 80 percent of her games across 17 seasons, twice reaching the NCAA Division III championship game.
“This couldn’t be a better fit. Let’s go. I’m making a call right now,” Auriemma told her when the Princeton job opened, and Berube, who had coached elite talent with USA Basketball, decided now was the time to move to Division I.
“When I watched her on the sidelines, I started to understand,” Auriemma says. “She’s got such a great demeanor. She has such a great way with people and the way she coaches players, and it’s not much different than the way she was here. Just a little more outgoing. I thought, ‘Man, who’s better prepared for that job?'”
After replacing Courtney Banghart, who moved on to North Carolina, Berube has Princeton at 13-1, recently cracking the AP Top 25, poised to continue Ivy play at Dartmouth on Jan. 31. The Tigers play at Yale on Feb. 14.
“At Tufts, I was young when I got the job there, and I was sort of building from the ground up,” Berube says. “This was going to be a challenge for me just because it was going to be something new, to come into an established program, a talented team that has already won Ivy League championships. A challenge, but I thought it would be a really good transition. I felt like I could come in here and not start from ground zero, but just put my voice and my spin on things.”
Berube’s new players were scattered all over the world when she was hired last May; she contacted them all. “I just told them I was really excited to coach them,” Berube says. “I told them about my passion, that I wanted to enhance the program we have here and have fun doing it. … The fun part can be lost sometimes, but that comes from competing with your best friends.”
She asked for their help in getting acclimated to Princeton, where players sit in lecture halls where Albert Einstein’s voice once reverberated, and in how to communicate its virtues to recruits. “And they’ve been awesome,” Berube says.
So Berube, her wife Meghan and three young children, ages 6, 3 and 8 months, settled into the Princeton community, and she got down to basketball business, joining her defensive-minded approach to a team with plenty of offensive talent. They’ve embraced each other.
“They’re driven on the court,” Berube says. “They want to be great. They’re passionate about the game. It’s a great recipe for success, talented, driven, and they really care about each other. During the holiday break, I had a little time to relax and think about where we’re at, and it just felt right. We’re just really happy.”
Berube’s career has paralleled the growth of the game. After UConn, she played in Hartford for the New England Blizzard of the American Basketball League, then caught the coaching bug after a brief time out of basketball.
“When I first started out, it was hard to find girls as competitive as I was, who wanted to be great and competitive and get in the gym,” she says, “but in high school I was very lucky and I had that in my team there. I searched for that same thing in college and didn’t have to go very far. … I want to surround myself with great people, so I’ve always had great assistant coaches and was able to recruit the type of student athletes that I like to coach, who were tough and scrappy and love to play the game.”
At Princeton. Berube has found players ready to play in her image — hard-playing, relentless on the boards, unselfish. The Tigers defeated George Washington, coached by Berube’s former Huskies teammate, Jen Rizzotti, on Nov. 10, then beat Seton Hall and Florida Gulf Coast. Their lone loss was at Iowa, in overtime. How does one who so seldom loses handle it?
“When I was younger, it took a toll on me,” Berube says, “because it’s a little harder to put in perspective. Our one loss, it taught us a lot, showed us our weaknesses where we needed to get better. You can do that with wins, but losses really open up your eyes. I think I’m better at it now. I’d rather not have them, but they don’t take a big toll on me.”
Her players weren’t born when Berube was part of the history made at UConn. Can it be 25 years since the No. 1 vs. No. 2 showdown with Tennessee? Since the Final Four in Minneapolis?
“I feel very fortunate to be part of that program at that time,” she says, “and they really took off after that. I think it opened people’s eyes as to how great women’s basketball is, and not just in Connecticut. Now, you hear girls all over the country say, ‘It’s always been my dream to play at Connecticut.’ Twenty-five years ago, it wasn’t anybody’s dream to play at Connecticut. It was my dream. I take a lot of the lessons I learned from Coach and from Chris Dailey, and it’s kind of the foundation of who I am, relationships, communication, focus and just how determined you have to be and how tough you need to be every time you step on that court.”
The Courant’s Alexa Philippou contributed to this story.
Dom Amore can be reached at damore@courant.com.
