A look inside the office of UD’s Women’s Basketball head coach
Photos by Mark Campbell
OUR UD | Tina Martin coached her first basketball game in 1976.
At 12 years old, she had only just learned the sport herself, watching the boys at recess play something she didn’t yet understand and recruiting her older brother to teach her everything he knew.
But when the referees at the Junior High Summer League Tournament in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, wanted to cancel the game because her coach was running late, the seventh grader stepped up and offered to take his place.
“But you’re a player,” they said.
“Let me coach,” Martin replied. “I can do it.”
She did. And they won.
Today, Martin is approaching her 400th win at the helm of Delaware Women’s Basketball. As head coach since 1996, she has taken UD to dance in the NCAA Tournament four times and to compete in the Women’s National Invitational Tournament seven more.
She speaks of UD’s biggest wins with joy and of her players with love. Her philosophy on coaching is to find out what motivates individuals to be better, to develop the whole student-athlete, and ultimately, to strengthen the chemistry of her team.
It’s that ever-elusive combination of perseverance and passion, of teamwork and talent, of hard work and humility, that serves as a common thread to every win under her belt.
She saw it in 2001, the year the Blue Hens beat Vermont for the America East championship. She witnessed it just minutes before the game, in the locker room, as Megan Dellegrotti, HS03, the 5’4” leftie point guard and “possibly fiercest player I’ve ever coached” told the team, “We will play our best. We will listen to our coaches. And we will win this.”
And they did—69-64 in overtime—becoming the first team to go to the NCAA Tournament in the history of women’s basketball at UD.
Martin saw that same spirit again in 2012 and 2013, in a team so determined to make history that they went undefeated in the CAA for two straight years.
“Elena [Delle Donne] might be the greatest player to wear a Delaware uniform, but she had a lot of help,” the coach says of the team whose players graduated with more than 6,500 points, 3,200 rebounds and 1,100 assists. “The chemistry was as perfect as you can ever get. The ladies believed in each other, trusted each other.”
It’s that “just right” chemistry that Martin aspires to reach each year.
“Every year is different. Every team is different,” she says. “That’s what makes it so fun.”
