Xavier Nation Magazine: Making Connections
New women’s basketball head coach Melanie Moore says all roads in Ohio lead to Xavier—including her own.
Bill Thompson, Xavier Nation Magazine
12/26/2019
It’s not exactly a straight line from Glandorf to Cincinnati, but the northwestern Ohio village is close enough to I-75 that it would have been easy for Melanie Moore to set the cruise control if she’d accepted the scholarship offer to play basketball at Xavier after graduating from high school in 1995.
She did not, however, and instead turned east for Siena College in New York, another Catholic school. But almost 25 years later, she said yes to Xavier’s next offer and became the eighth head coach of the women’s basketball team, replacing Brian Neal, who resigned in March after six years.
This is Moore’s first head coaching job after 17 years as an assistant at Siena, Indiana State, Dayton, Princeton, and, most recently, Michigan, where she was associate head coach last season, her seventh year on Kim Barnes Arico’s staff.
Moore passed on top jobs over the years, but the pros outweighed the cons when she studied the Xavier position. She was ready when Athletic Director Greg Christopher made the call.
“It was diving into what Xavier is about, its mission, big-time athletics,” says Moore.
“The BIG EAST is a basketball conference, and it’s been done here before, the tradition of our program. We’ve been to two Elite Eights [2001 under Melanie Balcomb, 2010 under Kevin McGuff]. And the school, the academic piece, it’s smaller and reminded me of my small town. It reminded me of Siena. Everything felt like home. I said, ‘Well, why not? This could be the perfect place for me.’ And now it’s home. I wake up every day thrilled to put on that X and can’t wait to win the day.”
If history repeats itself, the glory days are coming back. The last time something felt like home was when Moore reconnected with a fellow Ottawa-Glandorf High School grad. That was more than 11 years ago, and now Melanie and Joe Moore have two kids (Tristin, 8, and Ayla, 6) and a house in Montgomery.
“We knew each other in high school,” Joe says. “She went off and played college basketball in New York and I stayed in Ohio. In our late 20s, we reunited. It makes the courtship a little easier when you know exactly who the person is, who her family is.”
That sounds a little like Christopher’s search for a new coach, even if he didn’t really know Moore. By the time he decided she was the right choice, he had a pretty good idea of the person.
“When you do this [look for a coach], you have a list of 10 to 15 attributes...that are important to us,” he says. “You look at Melanie’s background and you layer it on top of [the attributes] and say, ‘Boy, the two mesh very nicely.’ She had played at a high level herself [Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Rookie of the Year and two-time league Player of the Year at Siena], so she was going to have instant credibility walking into the locker room. She had a taste of pro basketball [a year each in Luxembourg and Israel], which every kid in that locker room is hoping to do.”
But it was Moore’s coaching family tree where Christopher struck pay dirt.
“She had some big public experience at high levels [Michigan],” he says, “but she also had schools like Siena and Dayton that feel a lot like Xavier. And she had won at every single place she had been, had been part of winning programs.
“And the last point, which I put great, great value on, is who have you learned from? Who were your mentors? She was with Courtney Banghart [at Princeton, now the coach at North Carolina] and Kim Barnes Arico [at Michigan], who led complete turnarounds, taking programs that were not successful to a high level of success. So you start saying, ‘Yep, yep, yep...it’s a good fit.’ It’s exactly what we were looking for.”
The fingerprints of Barnes Arico run throughout the BIG EAST. Former Michigan assistant Megan Duffy, who was head coach at Miami for two seasons, is the new coach at defending champion Marquette, and Joe Tartamella coaches St. John’s.
“I think she’s probably glowing with a little pride for us to be part of her coaching tree and having impacted each of us,” Moore says of her former boss, who drove from Ann Arbor to attend the introductory press conference at Xavier.
“Ultimately, she prepared us for this step. How she runs her program day-to- day, she prepared me for this position. And I’m thankful to her every day.”
Barnes Arico’s statement upon Moore’s hiring shows mutual admiration and affection: “[Moore] helped us build this program to what it is today, a consistent winner year in and year out. We wouldn’t be here without her tireless work and commitment, which she brings to everything she does. She has really developed during her time here as she embraced every new responsibility. She has really become a complete coach, and I know that she will be successful as a head coach.”
Another Big Ten coach adds a similar vote of confidence. Ohio State’s McGuff, who compiled a 214–73 record at Xavier in nine years, believes Moore is the right fit.
“Mel has recruited against the best teams in the country to get top-flight talent, so she has practical experience,” says McGuff, who is XU’s winningest coach. “One of the things that’s going to be really exciting—and it’s good and bad—is that Connecticut is coming into the BIG EAST, so there’s a lot of hype around the league. I think she’s going to be able to sell that. It’s also going to make the climb harder because she has to go through some excellent programs to make progress, but it’s going to be a huge selling point for her, a big deal.”
Moore will have to apply every lesson she’s learned to lift Xavier out of last place in the BIG EAST, where it has finished for two years. She has some talent in veterans Aaliyah Dunham, A’ri Gray, and Ashley Gomez and has added three recruits. Maybe more importantly, she has the support of her boss.
“I don’t believe John Wooden would walk in here and take us from 10th place to first place in 2020,” Christopher says. “So Melanie Moore’s not going to do it, as much as I love her. That said, I also don’t believe after watching us the past couple of years that we are the 10th-place team in the league. So can you come in and make an immediate impact simply by organizational changes, by philosophical [changes], a new schematic approach? That will move us incrementally. Whether or not we make the long-term move is going to be about recruiting.”
It turns out Moore has a plan for that, one that echoes a familiar refrain of the past few years, but she’s not asking for billions of dollars to implement it. “We will try to build that fence around Ohio and not let [top players] leave,” she says, laughing. “Ohio is a hotbed for talent, from youth basketball to high school to AAU ball. We produce tons of DI talent. When Xavier was successful in the past, they had talent from Ohio.
“We need to get players who are looking elsewhere to say, ‘I want to put on that X uniform and I want to hang a banner like they did in the past.’ We want them to embrace the idea of playing close to home as part of your college experience. That means more people in the stands. Heck, you can have your own section.”
Moore knows the value that connecting (or reconnecting) has on family and community. Now she has to convince the state’s top players that all roads lead to Xavier.
