Queen of Her Court : 49er Women’s Hoop Coach Stays in Winning Form With Humor and Savvy

You can tell by my accent I’m not from California. I was brought up in a very large Catholic, Italian family. I was taught by my mom that if I ever wanted anything, I should write it down on a piece of paper, put it under my Blessed Mother statue and pray real hard. Then I’d always get what I wanted . . . . That is the start of Joan Bonvicini’s favorite joke, about how badly she wants to beat USC.

Bonvicini is a funny basketball coach. Her Cal State Long Beach players crack up over her. She laughs at them, too. And at herself. The humor that flows through these days of winning coats them with a special rapport.

“Not too many head coaches joke with their players, because they always feel they have to have that authority,” said Penny Toler, the 49ers’ flashy sophomore guard. “It’s not like that with Joan. That’s why when we step on the floor, we feel at ease.”

There is much more to Bonvicini’s success, of course, than her sense of humor.

Her knowledge of the game and her knack for recruiting talented players have been large factors in turning the 49ers into a national power.

Whatever the reasons, the 49er followers treat Bonvicini as if she were a goddess, not a hard-working, Catholic Italian coach from the East who has a voice no Californian could claim.

Fresh from another victory, Bonvicini walked into a gathering of boosters on a recent night to the chant: “Joan! Joan! Joan!”

These people revered Bonvicini, probably as much because she invites them to her home as the fact that she has the best winning percentage (.828) among the country’s women’s basketball coaches.

Every sentence she spoke was greeted with cheers.

“Cindy played an awesome game,” she said of Cindy Brown, her All-American forward who had just scored 33 points as the 49ers beat Louisiana Tech, 99-95.

“It’s a great team and we’re going all the way,” she concluded, as all eyes followed her from the podium.

Now in her eighth season, Bonvicini has a 199-41 record. This year, the 49ers, who have won 14 straight, are 14-1 and ranked fifth in the nation following Saturday’s 114-70 win over Cal State Fresno.

That was almost as much of a laugher as her favorite joke.

. . . A couple of years ago it came time to play USC in the NCAA Regionals. So I wrote down on a piece of paper, ‘Dear Blessed Mother, ask your son Jesus to let us beat USC and I won’t yell at my team for a month.’ Well, I knew it was a lie, so I threw the note away . . . . At the 49ers’ team meal before the Louisiana Tech game, Bonvicini giggled with her girls, who called her Joan. Although she is 33, she was one of them. She wore a sweat shirt and sipped Coke through a straw.

“Even though she’s a coach, Joan is more like your friend,” Toler said. “She’s older, but she’s like a big kid. It makes it easier when you play for a coach that’s not intense all the time.

“I might dribble the ball and it will go off my foot out of bounds. The next day in practice, she’ll go, ‘I’m Penny Toler,’ and she’ll be dribbling off her foot and everybody starts laughing.”

Bonvicini left for a nap, and in a few hours arrived at the 49er gym, not as a girl but as a woman who believes that a good image for the university and women’s basketball is important.

She had on makeup, earrings, a blue sweater, black pants and black high heels. Her appearance never escapes scrutiny by the hip girls she coaches.

“She’ll be looking real nice,” Toler said. “So we might say, ‘What’s that you got on?’ She’ll go, ‘What, you don’t like it?’ She’ll get real self-conscious and she’ll be asking everybody, ‘Do you like what I’ve got on?’ I think sometimes if she had enough time, she’d go home and change.”

Bonvicini enjoys her players.

Job Keeps Her ‘Young at Heart’

“I just feel very, very comfortable,” she said. “Coaching at the college level should keep you young at heart. It keeps you in tune to what’s going on.”

But there are times, said senior guard Margaret Mohr, when Bonvicini is not one of the girls.

“We know when she gets serious,” Mohr said. “She can turn on the coaching thing real well.”

Bonvicini’s style is not to rant, rave or kick chairs, but when she says, “Ladies, listen,” they listen.

“As I’ve got older, I’ve got tougher on them,” Bonvicini said. “I probably get more upset in a game I know we should win. In a big game, I just want to be very positive. I feel the way I act is going to reflect (on) the way the girls act, so I don’t want to get myself all carried on. If I’m going to yell at them, I’ll yell at them in the locker room.”

But players aren’t always happy, no matter how congenial the coach.

“Sometimes when you’re not playing, you think she doesn’t appreciate you,” Mohr said. “But she really cares about you as a person. You are not just a basketball player to her.”

Bonvicini sees herself as a role model for her players, someone other than, say, Magic Johnson.

“I try to think that they try to emulate me,” she said. “Hopefully, I can teach them a little bit more than making a bucket or playing defense. I do think they learn how to handle pressure and work hard and go through goals.”

And to appreciate her favorite joke.

. . . I started a second note. I said, ‘Dear Blessed Mother, ask your son Jesus to let us beat USC and I won’t yell at my team for a week. Well, my hand’s shaking. I know it’s a lie, so I throw the note away . . . . Bonvicini was a tomboy while growing up in Bridgeport, Conn.

“When I was 5, my sisters wrote a letter to Santa Claus that was published in the paper,” she said. “They wanted a Tiny Tears doll and I wanted a Red Sox uniform, a gun and a tank.”

“My parents just let me be me, they never tried to change me,” said Bonvicini, who got all three gifts.

Even today, Bonvicini vows to remain the same.

“I don’t take myself very seriously, and I try to think that I’ve never changed,” she said. “I’d hate to think of myself as stuck up--I’ll never be like that.”

It is that easygoing personality that she believes makes her such an effective recruiter.

“A lot of coaches don’t like to recruit,” she said, “but I really enjoy talking to families and players.”

She never thought she would be a coach.

A health science major, she had planned to work for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Instead, she came to California, worked as a computer programmer and took a job for two years as assistant basketball coach at Cal Poly Pomona.

“I found I loved coaching so much,” she said. “It was just fun.”

Stays on Top of Her Game

She keeps up with her profession zealously.

“I read everything,” she said. “I’ve gone to zillions of clinics and watch basketball all the time on TV.”

She has impressed Glenn McDonald, one of her assistants and a former player with the Boston Celtics.

“She knows the game pretty well,” McDonald said. “She sees what’s going on and adjusts to it.”

At Southern Connecticut State College, Bonvicini was a point guard and an honorable-mention All-American.

“She was a good player, and that makes a difference,” Toler said. “I might throw a pass away, but she’ll say that’s all right, because she can see what I was trying to do.”

Toler got a taste of Bonvicini’s playing ability one day on the coach’s backyard court in Long Beach.

“She thought she could beat me,” said Toler, a quick, whirling-type player who can dribble and shoot like no woman could when Bonvicini played in the early 1970s. “But on her court, she’ll throw something up that you know’s not supposed to go in, but it goes in. She beat me the first game, then I beat her. But she said, ‘Penny, if I was young, I’d blow you out.’ You can tell she must have been good. She’s still pretty good for her arm being messed up.”

When her arm got messed up, she would have had a hard time finding anything amusing--even her favorite joke.

. . . I write another note. I say, ‘Dear Blessed Mother, ask your son Jesus to let us beat USC and I won’t yell at my team for a day.’ I’m sweatin’ now, it’s really pouring down my face. I throw the note away and go in my kitchen and get a paper bag. Then I go in my bedroom, get the Blessed Mother statue and put it on the top shelf of the closet and close the door . . . . The worst thing that ever happened to Bonvicini happened in the summer of ’78. She tripped on the leg of her bed and when she tried to break her fall, her right arm went through a window.

An artery and two nerves, as well as muscles and tendons, were cut so badly that she almost lost the arm. There still is not much feeling in her hand.

“They had to retie everything,” she said.

She could not tie her shoes, and it took her six months to learn to write. But the real trauma came one day when she drove past people playing basketball.

“That was the only time I cried,” Bonvicini said.

Eventually, she was able to shoot a basketball again and play good enough to unbelievably beat Penny Toler.

She laughed at the thought of it, but not as much as you will probably laugh at the punch line of her favorite joke.

. . . I sat down and wrote my final note. It said, ‘Dear Jesus, if you ever want to see your mother again, let us beat USC. ‘