The path to a turnaround
Four seasons ago, McDaniel, Johnson & Wales (RI), and Mount Aloysius went a combined 12-62. But on the cusp of this new season, the trio now finds themselves as conference title contenders.
Brian Giesler remembers seeing the switch flip inside that cramped gym in Greensburg, Pennsylvania two years ago.
There he was at halftime, his resilient team from Mount Aloysius College looking back at him, as they all stared down a 49-35 deficit in this AMCC Tournament first-round matchup. Simply being there as a squad sitting at .500 overall was an accomplishment in itself for a program whose last season with more than four wins had come in 2018-19.
But they didn’t want to hear about moral victories at that moment. They had one half to keep their season alive.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a team flip a switch like we did there,” Giesler recalled in a conversation with The Scoop on D3 Women’s Hoops. “And to be fair, that’s probably the first time I saw that group take that kind of a charge.”
The Mounties stormed back. It didn’t matter that they were on the road, inside the 1,000-seat Chambers Hall packed with hometown fans who had watched the men’s team cruise to a first round tournament win only a couple hours before, and were expecting the same result from the women. It didn’t matter that this was the same Pitt-Greensburg team that had beaten them convincingly, 85-72, just six days prior. Nothing was going to hold them back from getting Mount Aloysius its first AMCC postseason win since 2018.
“At one point, we made like nine straight shots, and that didn’t include the free throws in there,” Giesler said, the thrill of the comeback still present in his voice thinking back on it. “We made shots. We beat them in transition and made a bunch of 3s. It was such a fun atmosphere to be in, because up to that point, we hadn’t experienced it.”
The year before, their postseason had begun and ended on the same court, after sneaking into the AMCC Tournament as a four-win team. But the 2023-24 group had only a couple returners from that prior season, and the new faces on the roster weren’t weighed down by past history.
They outscored PSU-Greensburg 24-8 in the 10 minutes coming out of halftime, and coasted to a convincing 88-73 win.
“We took a 10 minute stretch, and all of a sudden, we were the best team in the country, for that 10 minutes,” Giesler recalls. “There’s not really another way to describe how fun that experience was. We had a small cheering section that was there, and it’s a small gym, so it was already loud. Then in that run, we took the air out of the building completely.”
Dino Porcic knows the feeling. A season ago, his team at Johnson & Wales (Providence) made the short trip into Connecticut, set to play on the road against Saint Joseph (CT). USJ, whose starting lineup consisted entirely of fifth-year seniors, had won six straight meetings over the Wildcats, a streak that began two seasons before Porcic even arrived on JWU’s campus as head coach.
While it wasn’t a postseason game, the road duel in Hartford had the same sort of validation element for JWU as the AMCC quarterfinal win did for Mt. Aloysius: at 18-2 (and 9-1 in GNAC play), the Wildcats had already surpassed the preseason expectations placed on them as a team that graduated two starters from a 10-15 squad the year prior. But for a team with three first-years in the starting lineup facing one of the most experienced rosters in the country, a win at USJ would send a message that the Wildcats were indeed as good as advertised.
“I knew it was going to be a tough game,” Porcic, who is entering his third year as JWU’s head coach, recalls. “They had been in the conference championship game back-to-back years, their entire lineup was all fifth-years against our 17 and 18-year olds. They already had the confidence, but once we beat [USJ] on the road, it was like a ‘We’re here, we’ve arrived’ kind of thing.”
That thought process wasn’t out of egotism or an overly-inflated confidence. But it was a clear sign JWU was on the track to something special. With a starting lineup that featured four players in their first or second year of college, the future was undeniably bright for a program that will make its debut in the Conference of New England this season.
“Last year was just so rare,” Porcic recently said. “We knew we had a good freshman group, but you don’t really know until you get into the thick of things. Then Game 1 happens and Grace Jaffray scores 39, and it’s like, ‘Oh, ok, this is the kind of team we have.’”
It was a perfect example of the kind of product that results when a program with great structure—coaching, culture, resources—is combined with a few talented go-getters in an incoming recruiting class.
Down the Atlantic coastline at McDaniel College, that was true of the 2024-25 season as well.
In the 11-member Centennial Conference, which has produced multiple NCAA Tournament teams in every season since 2017-18, simply getting into the six-team conference tournament is significant, and McDaniel found itself on the outside looking in for three straight seasons coming out of the Covid pandemic. But they broke through last winter, going two games above .500 (8-6) to claim the No. 5 seed, while at the same time posting a 17-9 overall record. It marked their most wins in a season since going 21-7 nearly a decade before in 2015-16, and a notable uptick from posting a 6-19 mark three years prior.
When head coach Christin Gowan considers that success and steady climb over the last several seasons, it isn’t “competitiveness” that stands out. From her view, that was already there. But it took time for the recruiting to catch up, as McDaniel, like the others in the Centennial, chose not to recruit off-campus during the pandemic. Once things returned back to normal on that front, and several of those newcomers matured, the wins started coming along a bit more frequently as well.
“I’ve always felt like we were really competitive,” said Gowan, who took over at McDaniel in 2019. “Even three years ago, when we only had the six wins, I think we lost five games by six points or less. We were right there. We knew we had a lot of seniority coming back [last year]. We had Lil Overcash who led us in minutes played and was just a glue player. Having her, and her leadership was awesome, because she had been there four years and played in every game during that time. She was a rock and a centerpiece for us.”
But they still needed a ball-handling guard to complete the package, and much like JWU, found that in a true freshman. Lauren Cavoli came in and took over the point guard duties, averaging 6.7 points and 2.4 assists per game in her very first college season.
“She was really the piece we were missing two years ago,” Gowan said of Cavoli. “We thought, ‘We’re right there. We’re competing. But we’re falling just short.’ Down the stretch, we didn’t have that dynamic playmaker that could make something happen. Not for themselves necessarily, but they had that will to make something happen for someone.
“The day she committed, I was like, ‘That’s what we needed guys. That was the one missing part.’”
For all three programs—Mt. Aloysius, JWU, and McDaniel—the overall story through the last two or three seasons has been similar. Each finished 2021-22 as the second-to-last team in their respective league, none having closed conference play with a winning percentage better than .250.
But that couldn’t be further from the preseason outlook ahead of this current season. All three are amongst the expected contenders for their conference’s title, and a trip to the NCAA Tournament feels within reach as all three return significant amounts of their production from a season ago.
Gaining that ground within an established conference isn’t the result of any sort of overnight fix. There’s a need for consistent energy even when the ball isn’t bouncing favorably, and it’s a necessity to stay patient, while at the same time not extinguishing the relentless pursuit of ending up on the right side of the scoreboard.
But then again, there are players that come into a program and seem to change everything around them for the better from Day 1. They don’t come along often, and yet when they do, they are the players who change programs. Most of the time, their presence fasttracks the road to closing the gap, and that’s evident well before they even step onto campus.
Gowan had that with Cavoli last season, filling the “missing piece” for McDaniel. For Gielser, he found that in Molly Kosmack, whose 23-point, 23-rebound double-double as a freshman lifted Mt. Aloysius to that memorable AMCC Tournament win in the spring of 2024. And for Porcic, Grace Jaffray came to Providence last winter and quickly put herself in the running for National Freshman of the Year, finishing the season with the fourth-most points in all of Division III at 25.4 per game.
“With recruiting, sometimes you’ve got to be lucky,” Porcic said of finding Jaffray, the 2025 D3hoops.com Region 1 Rookie of the Year. “This was definitely one of the cases. In my first year here, one of my assistants saw her at a random showcase. Not many people were there, and she just texted me, ‘Coach, I don’t know what exactly you’re looking for quite yet, but I think you’d like this kid.’
“So we brought her up to one of our clinics here on campus. I saw her play and thought, ‘This kid can play right now for us. Like immediately.’ We were the first school she visited. She loved the school, the campus, the city, and actually ended up doing like three more visits [to JWU] afterwards.”
What Porcic had said about her ability to play right away for his team at that first clinic stayed with her, even as other top D3s in the area showed similar interest in the Blue Hill, Maine native. And that, along with her love for the campus itself, led to an unexpected twist in Jaffray’s recruiting story midway through her junior year of high school.
“It got to January, and she called me,” Porcic remembers. “She said, ‘I know you said I could play right now…I could graduate this year as a junior in high school and come to college next year.’ It was a no-brainer for us. That’s obviously a tough transition, completely skipping your senior year of high school. But I was talking to her AAU coach after she committed. He told me, ‘Coach, I think you just got an All-American.’”
He wasn’t the only one telling Porcic that. After Jaffray committed, several coaches from D1 and D2 schools that had also recruited her mentioned to Porcic how special they thought the 5’9 forward to be at the college level. Playing her entire freshman year as a 17-year old, Jaffray was a steady presence in all 23 of JWU’s wins, as the Wildcats improved their win total by 13 in a 12-month span. She averaged 32.5 minutes per game, made 63 3-pointers, led the team in steals, and added 8.3 rebounds per game for good measure.
“Of course there are people in her ear, telling her to go into the portal, and she’s like, ‘Nope, I love it here. I’m happy here,’” Porcic added. “We’re really lucky. I think it shows what kind of culture we build here. As a staff, we’re super close with the players. We want to build those relationships.”
That anecdote speaks well beyond Jaffray and to a larger aspect in JWU’s recent success. “Culture” might be an overused buzzword, but when it’s genuine, it’s clear to see. Having that is what keeps an All-American-caliber player like Jaffray firmly planted in the program, and what allows a team to go from 10 wins to 23 even with a young roster and no real change in the surrounding landscape of the conference.
Every coach will say that having that sort of foundation is critical to success. But the importance is amplified in the quest for a turnaround, where chemistry and roster retention are typically precursors to actual wins on the court. Gowan has certainly seen that from her recent teams at McDaniel, with continuity going hand-in-hand with chemistry, allowing the Green Terror to take continued steps in the right direction.
“It certainly shows through in our chemistry because the kids who started playing together as freshmen a few seasons ago are now going to be juniors and seniors, which is really cool,” Gowan said. “Four or five years ago, we were in dire need of people to come in and play. Now that they’ve gotten all of that experience under their belt, I think it shows through with the early-season chemistry. It makes it so much easier for the freshmen to come in and play because now they’re fitting into a system. There’s not so much pressure on them.”
Over time, that starts to show itself in the confidence across the board. When Gowan thinks about that, she’s drawn back to a night early in the 2023-24 season, when McDaniel welcomed York (Pa.), a team that had handed her squad one of its nine single-digit losses the year prior.
“We were down 13 late in the third quarter, and we came back and won it in overtime,” Gowan recalled. “For them, that was the moment where the mentality shifted, because we had only ever lost those games. For them to really see it and believe it, you could see the wheels were turning.
“Then it became the expectation of, ‘we’re supposed to win’. Anytime they lose a game now, they’re disappointed. You want to value their effort. Sometimes you’re not going to come out on top, and that’s okay. But getting them to really expect that from themselves has been a big mindset shift. When you lose all those close games, it’s kind of like, ‘Here it goes again.’ Now that they’ve learned to win over the last few years, it makes it that much easier for a freshman to come in and say, ‘This is what we do here. This is how we do things.’”
It’s easy to overlook the work that it takes to produce a shift to that degree. From an outsider’s perspective, it’s tempting to see a team reaching levels the program hasn’t touched in years, or even decades, and consider it solely the product of some big change between the previous season and the current one. But the reality is that in most cases, those breakthrough seasons don’t come about quite as abruptly as they may seem. Instead, it’s often the product of coaches and players alike working diligently for multiple seasons in obscurity. Plenty of times, the win-loss record doesn’t reflect the amount of work being put in. And that part of it is never easy.
“The last two years have been a lot, because I went through plenty of struggles in those couple years there, just as a human being,” Giesler said. “There was a lot of self-doubt, a lot of asking, ‘Am I good enough to do this?’
“I remember I had a coach tell me at the end of the 23-24 season, ‘I didn’t know what I thought at that point [early on] of your program here. But you’ve done some things that have really impressed me. I’ve gained a lot of respect.’ It stood out, because it was coming from somebody I didn’t know and was an outside perspective.
“It gives me more pride to know that what I was feeling three years ago probably wasn’t true. I think that’s where I feel way more comfortable saying, ‘OK, I know we’re capable of doing this. I’m capable of doing this. Now we’ve got to go out and do it.’”
So where do these teams go from here? How is this recent success maintained, and not just a peak followed by a descent? That’s the task at hand now. Each of these three return significant amounts of their production from last season, an indication that another step up could be on the way. Between the end of 2021-22 and the 2025-26 preseason, each has risen by at least 228 spots in Scott Peterson’s national ranking model, with JWU’s jump from No. 399 to No. 35 being the largest of the trio.
“It’s definitely an exciting time here at Johnson & Wales,” Porcic said. “This is a program that once went to the NCAA Tournament back-to-back years when Corey [Boilard] was the coach. So it’s definitely a place where you can succeed. I think we’re showing that now.
“We’ve still got a lot of work to do obviously, we’re a young group and we understand that. But this is a group that doesn’t really care how young they are. They love basketball and they love to compete. Honestly, it makes my job really fun.”
At McDaniel, Gowan also brings back a strong core and the continuity of past years has set her team up to contend at a high-level in what appears to be a wide-open Centennial Conference title race.
“I think they’re all really goal-oriented so they’re going to look ahead, and say, ‘This is what’s expected, this is what I can do, this is what I bring,’ and hyper-focus on that. I think everybody has a pretty clear understanding of what we need them to do to be successful. Everybody is valuable, whether you’re playing two minutes, 20 minutes, or 40 minutes. Just show up and do exactly what we’re asking you to do for that period of time. I think everybody has bought into that, and it shows.”
And in Western Pennsylvania, Mount Aloysius is continuing on its push in the AMCC. They will still be young, and their only senior—Molly Richards—likely won’t be on the floor for a few weeks, as she is the star of a Mt. Aloysius volleyball team that looks destined to win in the AMCC. But once it all comes together, Giesler believes this group is capable of more, having already increased its win total in each of the last three seasons.
“I don’t know what our ceiling is,” Giesler said a couple weeks into preseason practice. “I’m still trying to figure that part out. But I think it’s there. I feel really good with where we’re heading, with our recruiting class this year to spark with this junior class, which has two who are on pace to be 1,000-point scorers. We know we have the talent in the room to have a chance.”
I want to thank Brian Giesler, Dino Porcic, and Christin Gowan for their time and insight as I put together this feature. There were several anecdotes, analysis points, and items of note that didn’t make it into this story, but I hope this feature highlighted these three programs and their upward trajectories over the last few seasons in a way that gives credit to what an incredibly tough thing all three have done.
I also think it shows just how close so many programs are to similar levels of success. Each year, you truly never know which team will put all the pieces together at the right time to produce a breakthrough season. I remain impressed by every coach who takes on a challenging situation, and the same is true for the student-athletes who commit to playing for these programs, intent on being part of the group that climbs higher than the teams that have come before.
This week countless programs across the country will begin a new season, and with it, the pursuit of success will continue. I look forward to hearing the stories that come about along the way.
Great stuff Riley!