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Nancy Darsch, who helped turn Ohio State into a women’s basketball powerhouse and then joined the professional ranks, becoming the first coach of the New York Liberty and leading the team to the W.N.B.A.’s inaugural championship game, died on Nov. 2 at her home in her hometown, Plymouth, Mass. She was 68.
She had suffered from Parkinson’s disease, her sister-in-law, Mary Darsch, said.
Darsch had solid credentials when she joined Ohio State as the women’s head coach in 1985. She had been an assistant to the renowned Pat Summitt at the University of Tennessee — the first assistant women’s basketball coach at the university to be paid — and helped lead the Lady Vols to five Final Four appearances.
She was also an assistant coach for the United States teams that won gold medals in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and in the 1996 Games in Atlanta.
“We were committed to finding someone with a national reputation,” Ohio State’s athletic director, Rick Bay, told The Columbus Dispatch in June 1985. Darsch, he said, had coached “every great women’s basketball player in the country in the past five years.”
In her 12 years at Ohio State, her teams won four Big Ten titles, made seven N.C.A.A. tournament appearances and played in one championship game, in 1993, when the No. 3 Buckeyes lost to No. 5 Texas Tech, 84-82. It was the first time a Big Ten women’s team had made it to the N.C.A.A. championship.
Under Darsch, the Ohio State women had their first televised game, on ESPN in 1990. She brought in one of the first full-time strength coaches for a college women’s team as well as a sports psychologist, an emerging concept at the time.
Source: Nancy Darsch, Champion Coach of Women’s Basketball, Dies at 68
