Under Melissa Graves, a bigger purpose for BU women’s basketball
The Terriers lost two consecutive Patriot League Championship games to the same team. How does a program, and a coach, process that?
BOSTON — It’s 7:57 a.m. on what is surely the warmest late October day in the history of Boston when Melissa Graves steps into Case Gym. She and an assistant coach are among the last to arrive for this Tuesday practice, and on the side courts to her left and right, an assortment of 18- and 19-year-olds, green as ever, hoist shots up before the 8 a.m. start. On the main court, a sophomore who’s already a team captain and a senior who’s got the world on her shoulders practice mid-range pull-up jumpers.
Here at a mid-major school like Boston University, the practice gym also doubles as the gameday gym. So, as the head coach of BU women’s basketball enters through a line of double doors, the four red banners honoring the program’s past accomplishments hang above her. Regular season titles, conference championships, WNIT berths and NCAA tournament appearances. In that order.
No one around here needs reminding that both the second and last banners could be embroidered with the digits ‘2023’ and ‘2024’, but aren’t.
Two seasons ago, just Graves’ second as head coach, the Terriers lit the Patriot League fully on fire. They ran away with a 17-1 conference record, dismantled league opponents by an average margin of over 17 points and became one of the most dominant teams in recent league memory. Then Holy Cross walked into BU’s house for the Patriot League Championship game and dropped a meteorite onto Case Gym.
“The only way I can describe it,” associate head coach Brianna Finch says now, “is you got punched in the gut.”
The Terriers returned to that crater with an ultra-young and almost completely new team, one that Graves somehow got ready in time to dominate the non-conference slate, only for a slew of injuries and the inevitable growing pains to arrive in the middle of Patriot League play. Still, Graves and BU found the light at the end of that twisted tunnel, willing themselves back to the doorstep of March Madness.
Then, in the end, the same thing happened. A loss in the title game. To Holy Cross.
It all begs the question — how does Graves, still going into only her fourth season as a head coach, even process all of that?
Well, here she is, only a couple steps into the gym, letting out a high-pitched scream. A friend of the program is here. “How are you?!” Graves asks, throwing both arms around a former player from her time as an assistant at Yale. They chat before practice officially starts. About half an hour later, they chat again, their backs turned to the court as practice continues around them. The season, it’s worth remembering, starts in less than two weeks.
But if you spend enough time around BU women’s basketball, you learn the game can usually wait.
“As important as basketball is,” Melissa Graves says, “there are other things in life that are bigger.”
Melissa D’Amico and Matt Graves met sometime around 2018. D’Amico was an assistant for the Wake Forest women and Graves an assistant for the Belmont Abbey men. In the early stages, they went to a lot of each other’s games, as two basketball coaches dating an hour apart in North Carolina would.
But this also happened to be around the time Melissa started PlayBOLD, a non-profit that helps build basketball courts in underprivileged areas around the world, specifically in Africa. She grew up in the church and “had developed a heart for the poor,” she said on the "They’ve Got Now" podcast last year, so she started going on mission trips to places from Haiti to Moldova during her time at Yale. Her players often asked her how they could get involved, so Melissa started PlayBOLD as a platform for them to do that. Matt accompanied her on a mission trip to Eswatini in 2019, where the charity was building a court.
And ultimately, Matt Graves says, “that’s kind of when I knew she was the one for me.”
They agreed to follow the other wherever a first head-coaching gig opened up. And so, not a week after the pinnacle of Melissa D’Amico’s head coaching career — the press conference introducing her as the new face of BU women’s basketball — she got married and became Melissa Graves. Less than a month later, she found out she was pregnant with her daughter. Things went well that first season in 2021-22. BU went 12-6 in the Patriot League, was the No. 3 seed in the tournament and lost in the semifinal. The timelines, however, meant that Melissa Graves returned from maternity leave to coach that semifinal loss just 12 days after giving birth.
Then, towards the beginning of the next season — before the 17-1 conference record, the countless broken records and the ending that won’t soon be forgotten — Melissa Graves got pregnant again.
“Big things start to happen to you,” she says. “And it is bigger than a game. It is bigger than one loss.”
It’s difficult to truly encapsulate what happened inside Case Gym on March 12, 2023. Yes, you just had to be there. But the lasting image from one of the wildest games you’ll ever see was the best team in recent program history swiftly leaving its own building as Holy Cross started a party at midcourt. There were tears — a lot of them — before the Terriers even made it out. “You know, I’ve coached thousands of games,” says Finch, the associate head coach. “But I was just heartbroken for that group of players. Because we all knew how dominant we had been throughout the season.”
When Graves is asked how long after the final buzzer everything first truly hit her, she responds plainly: “It was immediately.”
She waited outside the locker room with her staff, her husband and her then-one-year-old daughter. She needed to regroup before she did anything. Finally, she spoke to a heartbroken team, most of which, whether the players knew it or not, had played their last game together. Eventually, Graves made her way up to the press room and seemed rather put together. “I took a long time,” she says with a laugh.
It would not have taken a rocket scientist to conclude that she was not, in fact, all that put together.
It took Graves weeks to get over it. She’d lost before, of course, but now she was a head coach, and one only in year two. “I put it all on me,” she says. She asked herself what she could’ve done differently and beat herself up over the smallest of mid-game adjustments she hadn’t made, things like being more aggressive on defense earlier in the game, things that Finch says never decide entire games. But it’s pretty hard for someone with the title of “head coach” to escape responsibility.
“She’s responsible for all of these young women, their development and everything,” Matt Graves says. “And she doesn’t take that very lightly.”
Graves remembers waking up in the middle of the night constantly. Matt would ask if it was the baby. No, she told him. It’s the game. She genuinely wondered how she would get through it, how she would recover from such a loss. Something she struggled with as a student-athlete, when a bad day on the basketball court would mean a bad day everywhere else, returned. Melissa Graves needed perspective.
But there was Arya Graves, who had only just turned one. There (kinda) was Cameron Graves, who was on the way. Melissa Graves now had a family to go back to. Matt Graves describes it as the ability to “recalibrate.” The buzzer had sounded on the basketball season, and it left about as empty a feeling as you can get. But there was still a pretty big responsibility to go home to.
“Like,” she says, “I am keeping a human alive.”
She posted a video of Arya riding the swings at the park for the first time. About a month-and-a-half after the loss, it was her and Matt’s anniversary. Then, in early June, Cam was born. “That puts life in perspective,” Melissa Graves says. It also puts a season that ended in the championship game into a slightly different light. “In order to keep your job, you need to win,” Matt Graves says. “And we’re obviously very aware that if we don’t win, we won’t be any place very long, and therefore we can’t provide for our family.” And there was obviously — for a coach who very nearly went undefeated in conference play and won the regular season title in her second season — no danger of being shown the door.
Melissa Graves lost the game. She got through it because, for one thing, she had built a life that went beyond it.
The BU athletic offices reside in a three-story brick building directly across the street from Case Gym. 300 Babcock Street is home to just about everything. Every sport (except men’s hockey) and every branch of the athletics administration operates out of the second floor, which is accessed by a single flight of stairs. Thus, the first office to the left as you exit the stairwell is passed hundreds of times a day.
It belongs to Melissa Graves. And the door is very rarely shut.
The matriarch of Terrier women’s basketball understands what being the matriarch of Terrier women’s basketball means. “It automatically creates this facade,” Graves says. Players — and even staff members — will stop and perch themselves at the doorway when they come to speak with her. You can come in, she tells them. But Graves, who played her college ball at Notre Dame in the late 2000s, gets it. “I was the same way with Muffet,” she says.
Still, this creates a fundamental problem. BU is in the Patriot League. It is not a sports school. It is, however, one of the premier academic institutions in the country, and it is precisely that which Graves loves so much. She remembers struggling to find an identity outside of basketball when she was a player and, of course, she now knows why that’s so unhealthy. Student-athletes at BU have a lot of studenting to do, and that’s a good thing. Except if said student-athletes only know their head coach when she’s coaching them on the court, that would kind of defeat the point.
So Graves forces the issue. On the whiteboard above her desk, there is barely an X or an O. Instead there are two charts, one of them assigning all 16 players on the roster an assistant coach to meet with one week, the other assigning them a time to meet with Graves herself the next week. Sometimes the individual meetings with Graves take place on the medical table after practice and last 20 minutes. Sometimes they go on for two hours in Graves’ office. Doesn’t matter. They happen bi-weekly, which, combined with the alternating bi-weekly meetings with the assistants, means at least one staff member is meeting with every player on the roster once a week. On Mondays and every other Thursday, Graves has three different meetings with players.
“She understands what it’s about,” Finch says.
Above the illustration of this two-week cycle is one word, underlined in black marker. ACADEMICS.
“The cool thing about these meetings,” sophomore co-captain Audrey Ericksen says, “is we rarely talk about basketball.”
Grades are discussed. Internships are suggested. Home is asked about (and for a roster with players from North Carolina, California, Iceland, Spain and Russia, that can be a ways away). There’s the small matter of the future, too, which, even if it is built around basketball, can not and will not just be about basketball. “We’re always pushing them,” Graves says, “to try new things and find other interests.”
The other purpose of the meetings, though, is simply to check in.
Sometimes that leads to Ericksen, in the end-of-year meeting after her freshman season, finally opening up about all of the frustrations she experienced, and Graves asking her simply: Why didn’t you come talk to me? Other times, it’s forward Anete Adler trudging in after learning she tore her ACL and telling her head coach she wants to quit. “Most coaches will get discouraged by that,” Adler says. “So I really appreciate that she stayed next to me.” Graves, always armed with perspective, reminded Adler that life is simply hard. Everything happens for a reason, she recalls telling Adler. You might need to go through this hard piece to get ready for the hard things in life. Adler isn’t fully back yet, and likely won’t be ready for the start of the regular season, but she says she’s getting better and better every day.
“I cannot tell you,” Graves says, “how proud I am of that kid.”
It is always, at the end of the day, bigger than basketball. Graves is actively aware of this. She’s noticed specific periods of the season in which the two parts of being a student-athlete combine to be a bit too much. One of them, rather inconveniently, is towards the end of the regular season and into the postseason, when the basketball couldn’t get any bigger. Still, Graves either grants an extra off-day or turns a practice into a film session or a walk-through. Another period is in the middle of October, when first-semester midterms all come to a head at once. During that time this year, BU’s trio of captains — Ericksen, All-Patriot League senior guard Alex Giannaros and junior forward Anastasiia Semenova — approached Graves. What do you think about an off-day? they asked.
Guys, Graves recalls telling them, I was thinking the same thing.
So practice on October 10th was canceled. “A really easy decision,” Graves says.
Says Finch: “She has a very good grasp of the balance of life for our student athletes, which, ultimately, is one of the things that drew me to coming here and working for her.”
“She understands what it’s about.”
By this point, we’re about 40 minutes into this 8 a.m. practice. BU women’s basketball was just repping half-court sets. It did not look good. Practice is organized as a competition between Red, Gray and White teams — they can earn points by scoring, forcing turnovers, grabbing offensive rebounds, anything of the sort — meaning most drills end with a winner. The prize, of course, is an exemption from the 12-second sprints down the court and back.
There are no winners this time. So everybody runs.
Melissa Graves is very aware — she rips the stat off the dome multiple times — that three quarters of this roster are freshmen and sophomores. It’s a far cry from two years ago, the 17-1 season, when three quarters of the team were juniors and seniors, when Graves unapologetically admits that coaching was easier. But she is not worried about this. There may be seven new players this year, but there were eight new players last year. And that team made it back to the Patriot League Championship game.
Which, looking back, is kind of a miracle. BU was ravaged by injuries, such that it was forced to throw freshmen who probably weren’t even supposed to play into the deep end. Most of the injuries also occurred in the frontcourt, meaning the Terriers basically could not rebound. It got pretty bad by the middle of Patriot League play, when BU dropped a home game to Bucknell and its conference record fell below .500 for the very first time under Graves. The locker room was bummed out. The air was starting to get sucked from a group of players that suddenly looked in over their heads. “It was just shock,” Finch says, “and realization that we need to be better.”
The head coach, however, was fine.
After all, when she’s asked how being the mother of two toddlers has helped her coach over a dozen young women she commonly refers to as ‘kids,’ she says one word over an exasperated laugh: “Patience.”
Graves sounds almost incredulous talking about that loss to Bucknell. She is quick to point out that, on the road a game earlier, BU had taken a quality opponent in Lehigh down to the final possession without superstar forward Caitlin Weimar, and on said final possession, a foul on BU should’ve been called and wasn’t. “Like, whatever,” she says. “I still felt like we were in a good place.”
She also saw that other conference favorites, like Holy Cross, were enduring losing streaks. “The way the league was going, I could see it!” she says, shifting to a more convicted edge. “And I wanted to make sure they were noticing that.” So, at the lowest point of her team’s season, Graves gathered her players and pulled out the Patriot League standings. She went 10th place through first, asking them who they thought was at the bottom. BU, as it turned out, was only three games behind the leaders. “I just wanted them to see it and understand, we’re never out of it,” she says.
The Terriers proceeded to win three straight and five of their last seven. They finished the No. 3 seed. When it was all said and done, they were one of the final two teams standing.
BU did, of course, lose to Holy Cross in the title game. Again. But perspective was far easier to come by this time around. “I was disappointed, a thousand percent,” Graves says. “But it was easier to get through because I was just proud of the team. I didn’t even think we probably should’ve been there.” A team battled its own youth, its own lack of health and, at one point, its own lack of belief and still came out the other side. The type of things that build character. That prepares one for life after basketball. That are bigger than one loss.
And now, as she watches her entire team run sprints after a particularly ugly drill, Melissa Graves is preparing to do it all again.
To be clear, BU women’s basketball wants to win the Patriot League Championship this season. The phrase “RUN IT BACK” is printed on the Terriers’ practice shirts. Graves admits that, as a coach and a competitor, she isn’t satisfied. Players like Giannaros, the co-captain and star senior guard, and Aoibhe Gormley, a sophomore who played a big role down the stretch last season, openly admit they’d do anything to win a championship. This is no rec league. The Terriers have real expectations and real ambition.
Still, Graves is at peace with what is likely to happen for a team this young and this experienced. She makes a roller coaster motion with her hands and says simply: “I expect a lot of this.” In her weekly meetings with Giannaros, who is so competitive and under so much pressure to perform as BU’s best player and unquestioned leader that she often struggles to handle her team’s growing pains, Graves explains to her that it’s going to be a ride. There’s no avoiding it.
Perspective and patience, as always.
Graves (almost) never gets mad in practice. She doesn’t stop drills to issue out corrections or critiques much, either. There’s an impossible flow to BU’s practices — you can tell players are making mistakes, but the Terriers simply keep moving. A team that messes up a lot operates like they don’t mess up at all. Whereas some coaches lurk, waiting to erupt when a mistake is identified, Graves’ voice is a metronome, barking out encouragement and praise during the middle of drills. “When you talk about constructive criticism versus compliments,” she says, “it’s got to be majority compliments.”
Somewhere in the middle of the 90-minute session, a pass hits Ericksen squarely in the face. The contact creates a cartoon-like sound, and the sophomore captain falls in a heap on the floor. It’s a pretty good metaphor for how this practice is going.
No panic. Everyone in the gym laughs. They’ve got a long way to go, but it’ll be okay.
The next day, they won’t even be basketball players. Instead, they’ll be cooks at The Boston House, preparing meals for families of children with cancer as part of their monthly day of community service. At a school like this, it turns out, there’s plenty of places that will make a big loss or two feel quite small.
Eventually, they’ll play a basketball season. It’ll probably go pretty well, if this staff’s history is any indication, and it will probably last a good while into March. How far into March, of course, is the question. But BU women’s basketball knows one thing for sure.
“The ball stops bouncing at some point,” Melissa Graves says.