By Dave Krider
MaxPreps.com
Louise Crocco’s favorite sport as a player and coach was basketball. However, in 1981, she was named athletic director for boys and girls at Cardinal Gibbons (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.) and she was faced with a huge decision.
Crocco had been coaching volleyball, basketball and softball for 15 years. She was able to keep only volleyball “because I had the summer to get prepared,” she explained. “It was a very big decision, because not many women (were athletic directors) and there were none in private schools. My mom (Frances) told me I had to do it better than anybody else (because she was a woman).”
Little did she know that volleyball was going to carry her far beyond her greatest dreams. The 60-year-old legend retired after the 2007 campaign with these phenomenal accomplishments:
* Her 39-year won-lost record of 1,132-123 ranks No. 5 in national history. (Jack Magelssen is No. 1 with a 1,515-220 record at Northern (Portage, Mich.) from 1977-2004.)
* She won a Florida-record 18 state championships, twice capturing six in a row.
* Her teams hold every Florida record except for most consecutive state titles (Boca Raton Olympic Heights won seven in a row).
* She had four undefeated teams: 24-0 in 1976, 31-0 in 1978, 39-0 in 1984 and 32-0 in 2006.
* From 1975-2000 her teams won 364 straight regular-season district matches.
* She was named National Coach of the Year four times.
* She was inducted into the American Volleyball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2005, along with the likes of longtime pro star Karch Kiraly.
The ultra successful coach never set out to become a legend. She told MaxPreps, “I just loved what I was doing, seeing these girls develop into adults.”
Crocco truly has been a pioneer in girls sports. She grew up in Albany, N.Y., where no high school sports were available for girls. When she was a junior (1963), her family moved to Fort Lauderdale where she enrolled at two-year-old Cardinal Gibbons, which offered only swimming and tennis for girls at that time.
She had grown up playing pick-up games with two older brothers and longed to continue those sports in high school. With encouragement from Sister Marie Schramko (girls principal), she helped start varsity volleyball, basketball and softball. She wound up being named captain and MVP in all three sports during both of her high school years.
Before graduating in 1965, Crocco had a talk with Sister Marie, who told her, “You have potential in sports and could be a very good coach.” She liked the idea and spent the next two years at Broward Junior College. She then transferred to Florida Atlantic and graduated in 1969.
Even college at that time was frustrating to a girl who loved sports and wanted to become a coach. She had been given a scholarship to play volleyball and basketball at Broward, but three weeks after she enrolled all athletic scholarships were mysteriously rescinded and no sports were available for girls during her tenure. She never found out why.
“In those times, nobody asked questions,” she said of the lost scholarship. “Girls weren’t even allowed to take coaching courses….I still have all my college eligibility,” she laughed.
However, nothing discouraged this determined young woman. “I started going to every clinic, so I could learn how to teach,” she related. “God was really good to me because I had an innate sense of knowing how to coach.”
With open arms, Sister Marie welcomed Crocco back to Cardinal Gibbons in 1969 and she never left. She re-started the three sports she had played there, because they had been dropped during her college years.
Along the way, Crocco reached one milestone after another. The first one came in 1971 when the girls were given a gym of their own. “We had resistance to girls being allowed to use the gym,” she admitted. “That was a very big step, because we started being accepted. They (male athletes and coaches) knew how much hard work and dedication we had.”
In 1975 the Lady Chiefs volleyball team claimed a very significant district victory over defending state champion Monsignor Pace – a team which had beaten them twice earlier in the season. “From that moment everything changed,” Crocco pointed out. “It started a huge winning tradition which has carried over to this day.”
Her big dream always had been “to have the girls accepted like the boys” and it became reality in her mind during a big volleyball match in the 1976-77 season. She recalled, “We had a packed gym (1,200). We (she and assistant Jude Abrams) looked at each other and said, ‘We never thought we would see this.’ It was such a neat feeling.”
In 1980 she was named co-athletic director with a man, but he left the next year and the entire job fell into her lap. It was a major challenge, because women just didn’t hold those types of jobs – let alone oversee boys programs.
“I think it was a little awkward for men to take directions,” she understated. “I always tried to make suggestions. After the second or third time (if something didn’t get done), I had to get more assertive.”
Crocco obviously was born with thick skin and she developed a fiery competitiveness over the years. Once she was seated behind some referee-baiters during a basketball game. And though she often has been vocal with officials (“I know the rules,” she says), she was not the offender on one particularly “blue” comment, but she was ejected. “I had to leave,” she conceded, “because I didn’t want to cause a problem for the girls. How I am personally and how I coach are two different things. When I coach I am very intense.”
“Intense” is putting it mildly. Longtime assistant coach Paula Ferrante noted, “I sat next to her on the bench. She is very passionate about her coaching and plays every point in a volleyball match. She always lifts her right leg and I’ve been kicked in the head probably a minimum of 10 times. I’ve always got my right arm out. I’ve lost my contacts. She’s got a pretty good wallop and she doesn’t even know she’s done it.”
Was she tough? You betcha! When she led blocking drills, she gladly wore a catcher’s mask to absorb blows from her players’ sizzling returns.
Was she tireless? No doubt! Knowing her team would be playing a big regional match in an old gym with a low ceiling, she and her assistants spent an entire night hanging netting from the ceiling of their own practice gym so their players would understand what height their passes would be limited to.
Jude Adams has a unique perspective, having played for Crocco and then assisting her for 30 years. As a teenager, she also transferred to Gibbons from New York and said she was “really unhappy leaving my friends. Sports kind of saved me. She (Crocco) has a rough exterior, but a soft heart. She turned my whole life around. She made everything like a family.”
As a young assistant coach, Adams conceded, “For awhile I still felt like a player. As the years went by, we worked off each other. It was kind of like ‘good-cop, bad-cop.’ We had each other’s backs all the time. She’s honest, she’s real and they really respect her for it.”
Even opposing coaches have nothing but admiration for Crocco. Lisa Zielinski, who has coached cross-town rival St. Thomas Aquinas for the past 20 years, says, “I have the utmost respect for her and her program for what she has done for volleyball and women’s sports in this area. She is the one who started it all, who set the standard. We’ve had an awesome and unique rivalry. It’s not going to be the same, because I’ve been around a long time, too.”
The Cardinal Gibbons volleyball team truly has been one big “family” under Crocco’s longtime direction. “The kids come back after they graduate, or they meet us at the state (tournament),” she pointed out. “The biggest thing I’m proud of is their love for the program.”
Crocco also points with pride to the fact that all of her assistants have been either former players (15 at least) or relatives of former players. Two others who played for her are head college coaches: Jill Stephens at Florida Southern and Taylor Mott at Flagler College. She has sent hundreds of girls to college on scholarships, always stressing (1) academics and (2) playing time.
She even has coached daughters of former players. That’s why it was so difficult to tell her players she was retiring this year. “It was a very tearful time,” she conceded. “One girl (a freshman) told me, ‘I have been waiting to play for you since I was in first grade.’ Over the summer I had to have a pacemaker put in. The stress during games I could feel much more than ever before. If I can’t give 100 percent, then it’s necessary for me to step down. I will always love coaching.”
Though she will continue as athletic director for at least one more year, Crocco will now have more time to watch sports on television and take care of her cat and two dogs. “I’ve always been very much a farm girl,” she admitted.
Asked about her successor, Crocco replied, “The new coach definitely will be somebody from within our program.” Staying true to her “family” tradition, she wouldn’t have it any other way.
