PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Keith Mondillo is the head women’s basketball coach at Division III Gwynedd Mercy University. He has served in that role since 1995, and for much of that time, he has also been the school’s athletic director. Mondillo has won nearly 500 games with the Griffins and led them to nine NCAA Tournaments.
You can listen to the full conversation above, on the KYW Newsradio original podcast "1-on-1 with Matt Leon."
KYW Newsradio caught up with Mondillo to talk about his time at Gwynedd Mercy, including a year of return to the court following a hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They also talk about how he got into coaching in the first place, what it is like to be a part of the Philadelphia basketball community, and why he enjoys recruiting so much.
The following is a lightly edited excerpt of the episode.
Matt Leon: How much fun has it been to just kind of be back into a full relatively close to normal grind of a college basketball season?
Keith Mondillo: You wouldn't think you'd miss it as much as you did, until you went through last year. Everybody gets up and down on their teams as the season goes along.
But we didn't have that last year. We had a handful practices and two games, we had a senior night, and then we had a senior night for the team that we played. So getting back to this, and especially with our players.
Luckily, on being fully vaccinated, it's made it a lot easier. That doesn't mean we've haven’t had some of our student athletes get sick. But yeah, this year, man, it's been a tremendous year since 2019-20, seems like an eternity ago.
We played the ECAC tournament. And the day after that tournament was over, everything shut down, and no one knew was going to be as long as it was. So yes, I am very grateful for the season.
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If we're looking for a silver lining to the year...you kind of remember the little things that you may be starting to take for granted? And once they're taken away? You get a new look at it.
It's really the interaction with the students that you miss, you know, developing a team coming over a hurdle, trying to figure out how to get by that hurdle. Just constantly developing throughout the year.
This season, especially in October, when we started practice, it was like starting all over again. We had a bunch of freshmen last year that really didn't get any core instruction. So we essentially have two freshmen classes, and this year, we have no seniors, (just) juniors, our leadership, and then we're kind of teaching our sophomores and freshmen almost as one class right now.
So yeah, this year was a total rejuvenation of my batteries in order to coach for this year.
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