Only three NCAA Division I women’s basketball coaches have won back-to-back national championships: UConn’s Geno Auriemma (2002-04, 2009-10, 2013-16), Tennessee’s Pat Summitt (1996-98, 2007-08) and USC’s
Linda Sharp (1983-84).
Then there’s South Carolina’s Dawn Staley (2022, 2024) and Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer (1990, 1992), who have won two in three years (with Staley also capturing three in eight, beginning in 2017). Kim Mulkey waited seven years between her first and second titles at Baylor (2005, 2012), and then another seven years between her second and third Baylor titles (2019) before four seasons passed between her third and fourth championships (2023), with the final one coming at LSU.
The legacy of Notre Dame’s Muffet McGraw stands a notch below that group because it took her a whopping 17 years after her first to win her second (2001, 2018). Still, it was all the more sweet. VanDerveer experienced a similarly sweet feeling when she won her third 29 years after her second (2021).
Is such a feeling of sweetness possible for Maryland’s Brenda Frese in 2026?
The Terrapin head coach has already waited longer than McGraw, and it’s unclear if a second national championship will follow her 2006 triumph. 19 years have passed. And each one of them has been heartbreaking.
Frese’s legacy as the greatest women’s or men’s coach ever at a proud basketball school—and one of the greatest ever overall—is nevertheless cemented because she has consistently led her program to prominence. Only once over those 19 years have the Terps missed the NCAA Tournament.
That happened my freshman year at Maryland, which was the year after the departures of Kristi Toliver and Marissa Coleman, who, as freshmen in 2006, were two of the three best players (along with then-sophomore Crystal Langhorne) on the team that delivered the program’s lone natty.
That 2010 season is, to this day, the last time the Maryland men have achieved a higher seed than the Maryland women entering the postseason. Memories of the 2010 men’s season, such as rushing the court after Greivis Vasquez’s clutch shot to beat eventual national champion Duke, which preceded a No. 4 seed and second-round appearance in the NCAA Tournament, were quickly replaced with the arrival of Alyssa Thomas in 2010-11 and new memories of women’s basketball excellence and, at times, dominance.
But that second national title for the Terrapins has yet to come, and just as falling short stung in each of Toliver and Coleman’s remaining three years, most especially when they had one last chance as seniors and lost to Louisville in the Elite Eight, it has stung time and again.
Those times included being overwhelmed by Auriemma’s eventual four-peat Huskies in the Sweet 16 to repeatedly seeing über-talented teams’ great chances slip away because we just didn’t play our best basketball. (That includes the time we didn’t even get the chance to try and play our best because the tournament was canceled in 2020, when we likely would have been a No. 1 seed.)
I don’t want to sound like a broken record. I’ve bemoaned the championship drought before, even during seasons when it may not have been relevant to talk about the Terps as national championship contenders.
Entering the 2025-26 season, we’re in a familiar position: Maryland is expected to be really good, beginning the season at No. 10 in the preseason AP poll, but not expected to get over that hump and compete with the legitimate title contenders. A pessimist would say, “Give it a rest! Winning a national championship is really rare, and you don’t have to point out the drought every year your team doesn’t win one. And face it, they’re probably not going to win again this year.”
As a college sophomore, I actually had a journalism assignment to make a person-on-the-street news video and chose to interview people I saw standing near the national championship trophies at then-Comcast Center during a men’s game, asking them about how frustrating it was becoming that Maryland hadn’t won a men’s title since 2002. I distinctly remember an older gentleman reminding me that not many schools can say they’ve won a basketball championship in men’s and women’s basketball before telling me they would eventually win again; I just had to be patient.
Perhaps, 15 years later, I’m beginning to take his advice. Not every program measures success and happiness by winning it all. Perhaps the best thing to do is to not get my hopes up too high and instead enjoy the ride to what will likely be a Sweet 16 or Elite Eight exit.
Frese has certainly found ways to savor every moment of her Maryland tenure, which can be seen in throughout the program’s YouTube show “Under the Shell,” which has documented the team’s behind-the-scenes interactions and the incredible bonds that have been formed between the members of the Terp family. No one will ever be able to take away the fun that has been had amid the heartbreak.
And still, Frese is certified with a national championship. How many coaches can say they won a Division I national title at age 35? And how close it came to never happening! What if Toliver had missed that shot? Duke was on the losing end, and to this day they’ve never won it all.
But there is a hunger in College Park.
We do want to be one of those programs that defines success as winning championships.
Every year, there is magic in the air as we make our late-season push, overcoming our early-season growing pains and appearing poised to do damage in the tourney. Then we reach the tourney and the magic continues, all while the doubters chatter that we’ll never make it past the true juggernauts. Last year, we shocked the world by pushing South Carolina to the brink in the Sweet 16 without Bri McDaniel. An optimist would say that with McDaniel likely to return at some point, Kaylene Smikle and Saylor Poffenbarger back, and Yarden Garzon and Oluchi Okananwa now on our side, we can be better than last year.
So much better that the Terps end the championship drought at the nice, round number of 20.
I will admit that I thought the addition of Gracie Merkle was going to put us over the top, but she decided to return to Penn State after temporarily committing to transfer to Maryland. To me, having that 6-foot-6 or taller center would have been huge. But we’ll see. Maybe we can make it happen without her.
And don’t discount the return of Mir McLean, whose defense was critical to last year’s epic double-overtime second-round win over Alabama, nor the additions of freshmen Rainey Welson (the No. 34 Hoop Gurlz recruit) and Addi Mack, who dropped a staggering 4,687 points in high school to rank second in Minnesota girls’ basketball history.
We’ve got talent, and Smikle and Poffenbarger showed a lot of spunk in their first year in College Park, helping inject new life and allowing Terp fans to see the upside of the transfer portal. Meanwhile, spunk is McDaniel’s middle name, and Garzon and Okananwa have certainly proven themselves to be intense competitors as well.
Now we just have to take it one game at a time and play our best basketball when it matters most, just as Toliver did when she hit “The Shot.”
