During the period she was sidelined with stress fractures in both legs as a player for the Marymount University women’s basketball team is when Maddy DeCou got the coaching bug.
Unable to play for a significant amount of time, DeCou was on the bench observing and gaining valuable knowledge in how Ashlee Rogers coached the highly successful Division III Marymount team.
“I saw and heard the game in a different way, and that’s what got me interested in someday being a coach,” said DeCou, who recently was hired as the new girls head varsity basketball coach at Washington-Liberty High School.
At W-L, DeCou succeeds Liz Altmaier, who moved to Europe after one season as the Generals’ head coach. DeCou was an assistant under Altmaier, so she knows the program and many of the returning players. Washington-Liberty is expected to return five starters for the upcoming winter campaign.
DeCou will be the team’s fourth head coach in six seasons and plans to stay a while. She lives in Arlington, which is one of the reasons DeCou was interested in coaching at Washington-Liberty. She also began her coaching career with the Arlington Travel Basketball program and with local AAU teams. DeCou met and coached some of the current W-L players in AAU or travel ball.
“We had a very athletic and energetic team last season that could shoot the threes, and we turned the corner by winning some games and having success,” DeCou said.
The Generals won eight games last season, lost four times by four points or fewer, and finished second in a holiday tournament. That was after a three-win campaign the year before and only one victory in 2020-21.
“It was exciting to see the team turn the corner last season,” DeCou said. “We want to keep that going.”
The Generals’ five returning starters are expected to be Ava George, Julia Kelly, Frances Shapiro, Harriet Shapiro and Eve Jungman.
The high-school head coach job is the second for DeCou. She was the head coach for one season at Annandale High, but left because she wanted to coach in Arlington and under Altmaier.
DeCou was a standout player at Boiling Springs High School in Pennsylvania, where she graduated in 2016 and was recruited to play at Marymount, as she did for two seasons. She was a member of the 2017-18 Marymount team that finished 25-4, won the Capital Athletic Conference tournament, then finished 1-1 in the NCAA tourney.
At Washington-Liberty, practice for the 2023-24 season begins Nov. 6. Some early games on the Generals’ schedule will be against Centreville, Oakton and Robinson, three top teams in their regions last winter.
The season is scheduled to begin Nov. 28 on the road against Westfield High School.
