Not much catches Brenda Frese by surprise these days. That comfort is a byproduct of meticulous preparation entering her 25th season as Maryland women’s basketball coach. She’s accounted for practically every variable through 631 wins, a national championship, three trips to the Final Four and 22 NCAA Tournament appearances with the Terrapins.
So trepidation hit when Frese walked into Athletic Director Jim Smith’s office over the summer for what she thought would be a routine discussion about finances, only to see university president Darryll J. Pines awaiting her arrival as well. This can’t be good, Frese recalled while settling into a chair.
Moments later, her attention turned to a video screen where her mother appeared to reveal the actual motive behind the meeting. Frese was going to be inducted into the Maryland Athletics Hall of Fame in October, two weeks before the season opener against South Carolina in Paris.
“It just was never on my radar,” Frese, a two-time National Coach of the Year, told Hoops HQ. “Obviously not the reason why I coach. I’m just really grateful for the fact that I’m still here. To be able to celebrate it with the team, the staff, my family, it’s going to be really special.”
That Frese is among the longest-tenured active coaches at one school underscores a remarkable run of consistency since taking over during a time of considerable transition. She immediately followed retiring legend Chris Weller, the second women’s basketball coach in program history and the first inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame.
Frese also arrived seeking to prove she belonged on the same stage as the likes of Tennessee’s Pat Summitt, UConn’s Geno Auriemma and Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer. Each had won multiple national championships before then-Maryland athletic director Debbie Yow hired Frese.
Yow was the first female athletic director at Maryland and the first in the ACC. She served as a mentor to and staunch ally of Frese in an age when opportunities for women in major college athletics lagged well behind that of male counterparts.
Smith credited Yow for having the foresight to give Frese a chance despite a limited body of work to that point. Frese’s only stint as a head coach at a major program before Maryland was one season with Minnesota in 2001-02. Her only other head-coaching job was at Ball State, where she spent two seasons.
“You can probably survey a lot of her former players, and they’re going to tell you she is the role model for what you want a coach to be,” said Smith, who’s in his second season as Maryland’s athletic director. “How she helps these players develop both personally and professionally.”
One of those players, Marissa Coleman, will be joining Frese in this year’s class of the Maryland Athletics Hall of Fame. Coleman, a Maryland native, was a starter on the Terps’ NCAA championship team in 2006 that vaulted Frese into the upper echelon of her profession in her fourth season at Maryland.
Assembling that roster further established Frese as a master recruiter. She was able to convince Crystal Langhorne, the starting center, to select Maryland over UConn and Tennessee. Laura Harper decommitted from UConn to enroll at Maryland. Harper was named Final Four Most Outstanding Player as a sophomore on the way to the Terps’ first national title.
Frese’s recruiting chops yielded other program luminaries such as Alyssa Thomas, Shatori Walker-Kimbrough and Brionna Jones. Thomas led Maryland to the Final Four in 2014 and graduated as the Terps’ career leader in points and rebounds, regardless of gender. Walker-Kimbrough and Jones starred on back-to-back Final Four teams.
Frese also shepherded Maryland’s transition to the Big Ten in women’s basketball. She went 18-0 in the conference during the Terps’ inaugural season in the Big Ten, and her teams did not lose more than four conference games during Maryland’s first nine seasons in the league. Her career Big Ten winning percentage (76.8 percent) is the highest among active coaches in the conference, men or women.
“It is something I’m most proud of – you’re talking about the consistency,” said Frese, one of five active coaches to win a national championship. “It’s really hard, especially when you talk about the ever-changing landscape now. These rosters are one-year rosters, so it’s important to be able to have that culture built so you can sustain the consistency.”
The Terps have finished below Frese’s standard over the past handful of seasons, in part because of injuries. Last season they had three players out with ACL tears. Another player had season-ending knee surgery after seven games. Still Maryland went 24-9, losing in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
This season Maryland has the No. 7 freshman class in the country, per ESPN. The centerpieces are guards Jordyn Jackson and Trinity Jones, both of whom were five-star prospects and ranked among the top 11 players nationally.
The Terps also bring back senior leading scorer Oluchi Okananwa, whose interaction with Frese in last season’s NCAA Tournament produced a viral moment. During a 74-66 loss to North Carolina in the second round, Frese spoke passionately to the 5-foot-10 guard, leaning in almost nose-to-nose, as Okananwa came to the bench.
Shortly before the third-quarter exchange caught on camera, Okananwa had missed a layup and free throws in addition to traveling.
“I believe in you, but you’ve got to want this moment,” Frese told Okananwa, who finished with a team-high 21 points.
The interaction generated millions of views on social media and sparked a conversation about coaching disposition. It also happened to align with Frese’s commitment to embracing social media as a means to stay connected with the modern generation of young athletes. She is especially active on X, frequently uplifting current and former players by reposting their accomplishments.
“I know she’s going into the Maryland Hall of Fame, but she also has a women’s basketball Hall of Fame resume,” said Debbie Antonelli, a widely respected college basketball analyst who has known Frese since she began her coaching journey as an assistant at Kent State (1993-95). “She checks all the boxes on many, many things. It’s successful maneuvering through decades while raising her family, which I think all of us moms always point back to that. To be able to have that kind of success and raise two incredible young men with her husband is amazing.”
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