Basketball practice often begins with meditation in rural Susquehanna County.
BEYOND THE SCOREBOARD
An occasional sports feature highlighting the unique stories of local athletes and coaches.
Montrose Meteors head coach Tracie McComb — the first woman to coach varsity boys basketball in the Lackawanna League — brings her team together.
“When you are breathing, I want you to think about what kind of practice you're going to have today, the kind of teammate you want to be, how you want to game plan and get ready for tomorrow,” she said.
The boys lie on the hardwood floor for a minute before they help each other to their feet. There are drills to run, offenses to study and free throws to make.
McComb watches intently from just beyond the three-point arc. The team faces Mountain View the next day, and the Eagles’ defense during the last matchup caused challenges.
McComb, a junior high reading teacher at the school, never sought to make history when she became head varsity coach two years ago.
As junior high coach, she saw a struggling high school program. The players — many her former students — suffered from low morale. She wanted to help, not realizing no other woman had ever been a head varsity boys coach in the league, which includes schools from Lackawanna, Pike, Susquehanna, Wayne and Wyoming counties.
“I didn't think about that at all, and that's not why I did it. I didn't even know that I was the first. That wasn't even on my radar,” she said. “In my heart, I really just wanted to change the program at Montrose. I wanted something for our community, our school, to be proud of.”
Embracing a new coach
When McComb began last year, she was the seniors’ third coach in four years. She worried how they’d handle yet another coach.
“But they truly embraced me,” she said. ”They embraced our structure, our expectations, and they really left a lasting legacy behind that these guys are trying to continue.”
The team went 12-11 last season, marking the first winning record that year’s seniors had achieved at Montrose.
A teacher and a coach
McComb played basketball through ninth grade, but when her high school in Sharon, in western Pennsylvania, started a gymnastics team, she became a varsity gymnast.
She and her husband, Christopher McComb, moved to Susquehanna County, where he became principal of Choconut Valley Elementary School in 2003 and district superintendent in 2018. Their son, Patrick, 20, is a college student. Evan, 16, is a sophomore on the basketball team.
When Patrick started playing basketball in fifth grade, his coach asked Tracie McComb if she would be his assistant. She agreed and hasn’t stopped coaching.
Eventually, she became junior high coach. When the varsity position opened two years ago, those around her gave her the confidence to pursue it. She’s attended coaching clinics, receives advice from mentors and surrounds herself with people she knows can also make an impact.
“Obviously, I never played boys basketball, so I feel like I have to research more,” she said. “I have to work at it more to make sure that I bring the best for my boys. And when there's things I don't know, I've brought people in to practice to help us.”
'Leadership doesn't have a gender'
McComb's 31 years of experience as a teacher can be seen on the court, said Josh Winn, an assistant basketball coach and the head coach of the baseball team.
“She's a teacher through and through,” he said. “She brings that dynamic to the floor, and that's massive for them, because many times for these young men, when they don't do exactly what they're supposed to do, a lot of times, it's because they don't understand. And when they have a teacher, they respond quickly.”
Being the only woman in a gym full of young men sometimes presents challenges — such as in the locker room. She has one of her male assistant coaches make sure it’s OK for her to enter. But Winn says that being a woman is McComb’s “least impactful” trait.
“I think that's the beauty of what's happened here, is that she was hired to do a job, and she does it. And if someone didn't tell you what her gender was based on her coaching style, you wouldn't know. She's just a phenomenal coach,” he said.
Leadership doesn’t have a gender, he said.
“I think that she cares deeply, but I think that there are plenty of male coaches who care that deeply. I think that she sees her relationship with them differently than a man does. She listens at times that a lot of coaches don't,” Winn said. “Everybody on the outside of the gym has opinions about how things should be done and how they should look at the end of the day. The most important thing (is) the young men in your charge. And she shows that every single day.”
Few women coach boys, men
Few women coach men’s sports, especially at the varsity level or higher.
In Crawford County, Becky Leandro was believed to be the first woman to coach varsity boys basketball in PIAA District 10 when she was hired in 2018. Annie Malkowiak became the first woman to coach varsity boys basketball in Westmoreland County in 2023, when she became coach at Mt. Pleasant High School. She was the second woman at the time to coach in the Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League, joining Tanya Garner of Nazareth Prep.
The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association, known as the PIAA, doesn’t track demographic data of high school coaches.
Research from the NCAA Demographics Database, the Aspen Institute’s Project Play and the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport shows that women remain underrepresented in coaching leadership, according to WeCOACH, an organization dedicated to recruiting, advancing and retaining women coaches in all sports and levels.
The research cited by the organization found that in 1972, more than 90% of women’s collegiate teams were coached by women. Today, women coach 41% of women’s teams across all NCAA divisions.
Men are twice as likely to coach the opposite gender as women, according to the Apsen Institute. In the 2022 National Coach survey from the institute, 17% of men reported coaching female teams most often, compared to 8% of women who coach male teams most frequently.
“This speaks to cultural factors and biases associated with women coaching males at all levels of sports — adding to the challenge of recruiting more female coaches,” according to the study.
Fostering respect and 'family identity'
Teammates got up from the benches in the school’s weight room to greet a recent visitor to practice. Each teen shook the visitor’s hand.
“She's dedicated to having quality husbands, quality fathers, quality employees,” Winn said. “She is trying to turn out a young man that is complete, and that is a massive part of what being a coach is.”
About 1,200 students attend the Montrose Area School District. A small school environment often leads to a close-knit community. But teammates say playing for the Meteors means something else: family.
The players know each other on and off the court, from elementary school recess and McComb’s junior high reading class, to volunteering as a team at the annual Christmas festival in Montrose and practicing yoga together with their coach.
Senior Jude Adams serves as a senior captain.
“It's hard to have an identity as a team when you keep having new coaches,” he said. “But we've been working really hard the last couple of years to establish that family identity, and this year especially, I feel we've done a good job of establishing who we are as a program.”
For Evan McComb, being on the team is learning from his family.
She’s “coach on the court, mom off the court,” the guard said. “I think when the job opened up … she just wanted to take things in her own hands and get it right.”
Improving daily
The boys practiced their offense, swinging the ball around the arc and moving the defense that Mountain View was expected to use the next day.
McComb practices a “growth mindset,” just like she does in her classroom. She wants her students and her players to each improve from the day before.
For Montrose, much of this year has been about rebuilding. Four starters from last year’s team graduated, and no one left had a full year of varsity experience. Montrose has a 9-12 record so far this year, with a 7-6 record in the league. Montrose travels to division leader Elk Lake tonight for the last game of the regular season.
McComb brought her team together before the game at Mountain View.
“Don't let victory go to your head, and don't let failure go to your heart," she said. "So tomorrow, we have to have that energy mindset. No matter what happened earlier this week, we're looking ahead. We're looking forward. We're getting ready for our next opponent.”
