It’s the landmark closest to George Washington’s campus in Foggy Bottom. But on his first day as the Colonials women’s basketball coach back in September of 1989, Joe McKeown couldn’t find the Lincoln Memorial, where he was supposed to meet his new team for a 6 a.m. workout.
“I couldn’t find it,” said McKeown who came to GW after three seasons at New Mexico State. “I had just moved here from New Mexico, I didn’t know where I was, just wandering the streets.”
Nineteen and a half seasons, 14 NCAA Tournaments, and three children later, McKeown is familiar with Lincoln — he drives over Memorial Bridge from his home in Fairfax every day — and he has all but added himself to the list of monuments in the city. He’ll reach 500 career victories by beating Duquesne in Pittsburgh on Saturday, cementing his status as the area’s winningest women’s basketball coach.
“We had a girl who would double dribble every day,” said McKeown of his first season with the Colonials, in which they were 14-14. By his third they were Atlantic-10 champions. “We used to bet at lunch whether or not we would catch her doing it.”
The Colonials went on to win at least 20 games in 16 of the next 17 years. They’ve been A-10 regular-season or tournament champions 12 of the last 14 seasons. All that success afforded McKeown the opportunity to consider moving on to a bigger conference or the WNBA.
McKeown said it was none other than Red Auerbach who talked him out of becoming head coach of the New York Liberty, and he also considered taking over at Vanderbilt right around the birth of his youngest child five years ago.
“Fortunately, we started a family when we got here,” said McKeown, who with his wife, Laura, has three children: Meghan, Joey and Ally. “You think, ‘My kids, this is their home.’ You keep that in the back of your mind over the years when you think about moving.”
Joey, who is 13 and autistic, is McKeown’s greatest challenge.
“Some days you just try to survive,” said McKeown, 51. “Other days you can get ahead but then something will happen. When you deal with those issues, you realize that basketball’s just not that important, even though that’s what we do to feed our family.”
But on the verge of another conference title and hopefully a top-four seed in the NCAA Tournament, he has no plans to retire just yet.
“When you set the bar high like we did here in the 1990s, you want to keep feeding it,” said McKeown. “You never want to see it slip, that’s always my biggest fear.”
