City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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The most difficult decision Lauren Power had to make all came down to her family. 

When Germantown Academy Athletics director Tim Ginter called her a month back, the Notre Dame coach figured there was no way she would leave the Irish for their archrival Patriots, whom she’d spent the last five seasons trying to figure out how to beat in their twice-annual Inter-Academy League matchups. It wasn’t until he fully explained why the Fort Washington private school might actually be the right fit for her that she began to think about it seriously.

“I really was like ‘no’ at first, to be honest,” she said. “He called me three days later and told me just about the opportunity to be the associate athletic director [...] I was like, ‘alright I’m listening.’”

Ginter’s pitch was simple: come to Germantown Academy not just for the basketball players, but for her children as well. Power, who’s got a two-year-old son and a two-month old daughter, would have access to the school’s daycare; her kids could both attend GA from pre-K up through high school, an offer that the all-girls Notre Dame Academy understandably couldn’t match. 

“To be at a place where my kids were going to be and have them grow up there and [for] me [to] see that every day,” she said, “that was invaluable for me.”

After mulling it over with her husband, Brian, she decided to take the plunge. 

Which meant having a conversation with her Notre Dame squad she never imagined having.

“I thought I was going to be a lifer at Notre Dame,” she said. “At the end of the day I had to be able to look my Notre Dame players in the eye and share with them that I was making a decision to not only leave, but leave for a place that we battled with twice a year. That was really the hardest part.

“I think at the end of the day, they were happy for me, and they were just a little gutted because it was GA. And I think that was the sentiment. There were tears — definitely tears on my end, on their end — but I think it was like happy, bittersweet tears.”

The Irish went 77-35 in Power’s tenure, finishing as Inter-Ac runner-ups three times, including this past season, making it to the semifinals of the PAISAA tournament in 2019-20. She coached three Division I recruits — Maggie Pina (Boston University), Mandy McGurk (Penn) and most recently Maeve McErlane, who just finished up her freshman year at DePaul. 

Those are strong numbers, but the bar is already set quite high at her new home, which for decades was the class of the high-academic private school league, which has seven hoops programs competing on the girls’ side. Under Sherri Retif, who retired this spring after 25 years, the Patriots won 20 titles, including 20 in her first 22 years, following on the legacy built by Jim Buckley, who went 250-89 in his tenure. 

“When Sherri told me this last season was going to be her last season, we knew it needed to be someone significant to fill her shoes,” Ginter said. “Someone like Lauren who has shown to know the league really well, has shown that she can recruit in this league very well and has shown that she can win in this league, made her an unbelievably strong candidate.”

Since the COVID pandemic, the league has been in Penn Charter’s hands, the Quakers winning the last two titles in the postseason-less conference, going 12-0 this past season, three games ahead of both GA and ND.

Staying within the Inter-Ac means Power has plenty of familiarity with her new squad, which will be led this season by rising seniors Isabella Casey, Sam Wade and twins Jess and Jenn Aponik. They’ll have plenty of new faces as well, with center Kendall Bennett off to Binghamton and several others leaving for other schools. 

“They’re competitors,” Power said. “They have a confidence and swag on the court that really has been unmatched. It took a lot of time for us to say at Notre Dame, like, we could beat these guys. The first two years I was there, we hadn’t beaten them in the last eight years, and there was a bit of a stigma there and we had to overcome that, it was a mental thing. GA represents confident, on-the-court competitors.”

A 2000 Archbishop Ryan grad, Power played at Rider University before a Division I coaching career that took her from West Point to Manhattan and Yale; she then became the director of athletics at Sacred Heart, an all-girls’ school in New York City, before coming down to Notre Dame five years ago in her return to her home area. 

In her role as Germantown Academy’s associate athletics director, she’ll be assisting Ginter, helping him organize and direct the school’s more than 80 athletics teams, which are spread across 19 different sports. Scheduling, logistics, uniforms, she’ll be involved in all of it. And she’s already thinking about the bigger picture.

“Having an understanding of the league already, I think allows me to say ‘this is where we are, and these are some ideas,’” she said, “not just for the athletic department, but as a league too.”