Mo Hirt got Kenyon grads to wear red.
That might be one the ultimate sales pitches for someone with a master’s degree in marketing, but she pulled it off while leading rival Denison’s women’s basketball team to an NCAA Division III national title in late March.
The Bloomington North standout went on to a terrific career in college that earned her membership in Kenyon College’s athletic hall of fame. She may be ironically headed that same direction with the school’s biggest rival, Denison, after delivering a most unexpected championship.
Denison and Kenyon are big-time rivals, located about 40 miles apart just northeast of Columbus, Ohio. For local perspective, imagine a DePauw fan donning a Wabash sweatshirt as the Little Giants make a championship run or a Boilermaker lifer pulling on an IU polo as the Hoosiers won their football title.
But there they were, former teammates and her old coach, for a few days anyway, trading Kenyon purple for Denison red.
“It speaks to the relationships we have,” Hirt said. “They were so supportive that they were willing to wear red after what we did together at Kenyon. My college coach was there. It was pretty cool.”
Hirt just finished her fourth year as head coach at Denison. After surviving a massive health scare last year, she came back with a team that put together everything she had been building toward.
“A lot of things bounced our way,” Hirt said. “Our team was mostly healthy all season … This was a first for Denison, and a lot of credit goes to all the people who helped put us where we are.”
Denison had a solid women’s program for many years under long-time coach Sara Lee, who retired in 2022. That’s when Hirt stepped in. And the road to the title for Hirt was as bumpy as it gets.
“There’s a difference between adversity in basketball,” Hirt explained, “and adversity in reality, like life and death.”
From milk shakes to Oberlin
Back in the spring of 2014, it was time for Hirt to put her degree in psychology and economics to work and leave sports behind.
That wasn’t going to be easy for someone who started playing basketball at the age of 4 on co-ed teams at the Y and was soon waking her parents up at 5 a.m. to get up 500 shots before school.
She played AAU ball under Joni and JC Hulls before taking on a leading role with the Cougars, leading them to a 21-3 season as a senior under Alaina Harrington. Her former coach is now one of the many fans of hers from Bloomington who watched Denison’s title run unfold from afar.
Hirt had an outstanding playing career at Kenyon, graduating as one of its top 3-point and free-throw shooters of all-time. She was named the North Coast Athletic Conference Player of the Year as a senior and is still the school’s all-time leading scorer with 1,819 career points.
It was time to move on, she thought, and settle into the 9-to-5 office routine. She was working at a small 50-person advertising agency in Cincinnati while also earning her Masters at the University of Cincinnati.
“I graduated and thought I had to develop an identity outside of basketball,” Hirt said. “The ball has stopped bouncing and I have to accept that a little bit.”
Despite not playing basketball anymore, she still had an itch that wouldn’t go away. So, she started coaching an eighth grade boys basketball team at Guardian Angels School for the next four years.
“I fell in love with coaching,” Hirt said. “It was me against a bunch of dads, and we helped them win the city championship.”
Parents started asking her to work with their kids on the side, so she also started doing one-on-one training.
“I got paid in vanilla milkshakes,” Hirt joked.
It evolved into Ohio Champion Basketball (OCB) with more formal workouts. Her client list grew to include Division I players from local programs Xavier and UC.
“I thought I would be in the business world and coach on the side,” Hirt said. “But I was consumed the more I got into it.”
Stephany Dunmyer, a Kenyon alum, was hired as Oberlin College’s head women’s coach in August 2019. She was looking for an assistant to help with player development. Hirt’s coach at Kenyon, Suzanne Helfant, suggested she reach out to Hirt.
“It was the perfect opportunity, and she took a leap of faith,” Hirt said. “I didn’t have any experience, so it was helpful just to get my feet in the door.”
During her three-year stay, Oberlin had one of the best seasons in school history in 2021-22, going 21-4 overall and 13-3 in the North Coast Athletic Conference, tying the program record for overall wins and conference wins in a season.
About that time, Sara Lee was ready to retire after a 33-year run at Denison. She put in a good word for Hirt with athletic director Nan Carney-DeBord, herself a former coach at Ohio Wesleyan.
“They took a chance on me, not having been a head coach yet,” Hirt said.
She was off and running.
“She loves the game so much,” Hirt’s mother, Kathy McTigue said. “She loves kids. She’s smart little coach.
“It’s really incredible. She was in marketing for a number of years, and one day, she called and said, ‘I can’t sit in a chair all day.’ She was in her element coaching and training. She’s meant to be a coach. She loves touching kids’ lives. I can’t think of any better profession for her.”
Building a champion at Denison
Lee won a lot at Denison, going 502-347 overall, including a stretch of 19 straight seasons without a losing record. Denison finished 9-14 in Lee’s last year, which came right after the COVID shortened 2020-21 season.
Hirt got to work, putting her stamp on a program that would reflect many of the traits that made her successful as a player.
“We had to set good foundation,” Hirt said. “The team was not having a crazy amount of on-court success, so the culture needed reframing. I put a lot of stakes in the ground.
“As a first-year coach, you don’t know what it’s going to be like. You never know until you sit in that seat.”
It meant she was now the decision maker. While she’d ask others for advice, in the end, the final decision fell on her shoulders.
“It was a big adjustment to me,” Hirt said. “As an assistant, you can pull a player aside, put an arm round them. As head coach, you can’t always be like that. It’s tricky. There’s a learning curve.
“And in-game situations, what play are we calling, when are we calling timeout? Over the last four years I’ve gotten better learning to thrive under pressure.”
She started out focusing on building the right culture, giving the players a seat at the table as to the core values, the “guiding lights” that would define the program. One was Hirt’s gym rat mentality.
“It came natural to me,” Hirt said. “We had kids who came in and two hours later, left. They were not doing the extra things. Those are habits that had to happen. That’s what it takes to be great as a basketball player.”
If she was all in, the players had to be, too, in how they handled everything, from academics to trusting each other. This year’s team encompassed all of that.
“To watch the joy, heart, energy and intensity that they played with,” Hirt said. “The kids were so passionate and fiery, and they enjoyed being with each other.”
‘Out of the blue’
In the summer of 2023, Hirt noticed she had a persistent dry cough. She was tired all the time, which was not good for a college coach needing all the energy someone in her early 30s needed to get though the 16-hour days.
“I was pounding Monster energy drinks just to stay awake,” Hirt said.
Her mom, a doctor of dermatology, encouraged her to see someone.
“Sure, OK, I said,” Hirt recalled. “I wasn’t worried. They told me if I wasn’t better to come back in a month.”
She started having pain on her left side, so she went back and underwent a chest x-ray. She went back to work, getting ready for practice with the first scrimmage just two days away.
Then, the phone rang.
“They said they found a softball sized mass in my chest,” Hirt said. “Oh, my gosh. I had to process that.”
The diagnosis was Stage 2 Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“It was out of the blue,” McTigue said. “Halloween Day.”
A bit later, Hirt was picking up the phone again. She called her mother.
“There was silence on the other end,” Hirt said.
McTigue was seeing a patient at the time, but she immediately dropped everything, canceled the rest of her appointments and hoped in the car to be with her daughter. Treatment couldn’t wait.
“But I’ve got a scrimmage,” Hirt recalled saying at the time.
McTigue was at her bedside for 18 days.
“I didn’t leave her at all,” she said. “She handled it very, very well.”
McTigue was a big help in her recovery and treatment, able to speak the language with the doctors in Columbus, Ohio.
“I was able to be her advocate,” McTigue said. “I stayed 24-7. I didn’t leave her side very often. It was important for me to be able to communicate and talk about the treatment and also to her about what was happening and help her understand what was going on.”
As 2023 turned into 2024, the chemotherapy didn’t take. Hirt had to undergo a stem cell transplant in June, wiping out her bone marrow, then replacing it. Radiation treatments followed.
Hirt kept coaching through it all. It was her sense of purpose to keep fighting. She missed five games and parts of a few practices early in the season, but was always there after that.
“The best part is that it gave me something to look forward to,” Hirt said. “Every couple of weeks, I’d go in for treatment. I was looking forward to being around people, having a sense of normalcy.
“It was scary to go through the chemo, wearing a mask with my immune system compromised, losing my hair.”
Coaches are constantly stressing their bodies each season. Some of the energy she’d normally spend coaching, scouting, recruiting and powering through lack of sleep now had to be channeled for a different purpose. Cancer does not go away without a fight.
“It’s always in the back of my heart,” McTigue said. “She’s struggling emotionally. But she just kept going. We supported her all the way, but as a mother, you’re always worried the stress will be too much.”
Good news soon arrived. She was declared in remission.
A (nearly) perfect regular season
When Hirt first took over at Denison, she inherited a walk-it-up team scoring around 56 points a game and playing a 2-3 zone. They went 10-16. She watched the other top teams in the conference fielding faster, more athletic teams.
“I knew that was something we had to get to,” Hirt said.
That meant bringing in players who could fit her style, playing her dribble-drive offense and pressing the way she wanted. The current junior class of eight powered this year’s team. She knew if her key players could stay healthy, they could be good.
Unranked and under the radar, they began the season putting up 104 points in the opener. At 7-0, they traveled to perennial power DePauw for the North Coast Conference opener and got down double digits before rallying for a 59-52 win.
“When I played, we never won at DePauw,” Hirt said. “I thought, ‘Wow, our team played with resilience and intensity. I think we’ve got a group.’”
They took it one game a time and soon found themselves 17-0, ranked eighth in the nation and heading down the road to No. 10 Ohio Wesleyan. There they suffered their first loss, 72-65, leaving the Battling Bishops atop the league.
But Denison went on to win out the regular season, fittingly capping it off with a 72-70 win over OWU, scoring with four seconds left to finish 13-1 and NCAC champions for the first time since 2015-16.
While DePauw knocked them off in the conference tournament opener, their resume still earned them a selection into the NCAA Division III Tournament for the first time in a decade and as a host to the first two rounds.
Run to the title
Denison dominated its playoff opener, 82-47 over Southern Virginia, forcing 29 turnovers. A 63-54 win over Trine put the Big Red in the Sweet 16 for the first time.
“We had such a home court advantage the first two rounds,” Hirt said. “The other sports teams showed up. When I first got to Denison, you wouldn’t find much more than parents and friends in the stands.
“Now, the entire community was there. People from Granville, fans and administrators, the college president was into it. The kids built such a community, not just with basketball or at school, but doing different things outside of sports.”
Her parents, Kathy and Ed, were at every postseason game.
“Oh my gosh, I would schedule patients and they would keep going and I’d have to keep cancelling and rescheduling them,” McTigue said. “It was a lot of fun.”
The next step was the regional finals at Washington & Lee in Lexington, Va. Denison beat NCAC foe John Carroll for a third time, 86-67, before facing the third-ranked host Generals, who were 31-0.
“I had never played in an environment like that,” Hirt said. “The arena was sold out. The kids were counting our misses in warmups. If anyone airballed, they let her have it.”
But for a group that had never been through it before, there was a preternatural calm about them.
“The team was smiling, having a good time,” Hirt said. “They had the energy they needed to beat them on their home floor.”
Washington & Lee’s Mary Schleusner was everything she was cracked up to be. The 2,000-point scorer, DIII’s all-time career leader in rebounds and the eventual national player of the year piled up 27 points, 29 rebounds and three blocks. But Denison and its own 6-3 tower, sophomore Anelly Mad-toingue (15 rebounds, six blocks), overcame everything in a 77-64 win.
Denison was headed to the final four.
The lineup was led by two All-Americans in juniors Abby Cooch and Ada Taute, two of the program’s best since they stepped on campus. Violet Mitchell, a kid at the end of the bench last year, got to work on a list of improvements and joined the starting lineup as one of the most improved players Hirt said she’s ever coached. Mad-toingue, the defensive stopper and a freshman in Molly Dorighi, who went 14-of-16 at the line vs. W&L, rounded out the lineup.
Hirt had brought her team to a tournament in the same gym at the end of December and had a prophetic thought.
“We put it on the schedule two years ago,” Hirt said. “We said, ‘Let’s play here and earn the right to come back.’”
The band of followers was growing. Alumni were pulling out old Denison jerseys and plenty of people were willing to make the six-hour drive to the finals.
“When the team saw them, they were so pumped up,” Hirt said.
Once again, the experts doubted Denison in its final four game against Wisconsin-Oshkosh, a power that had been to the final four the year before. The other game had defending champion New York University and its 91-game win streak vs. another undefeated, Scranton.
“Everybody was talking about somebody else,” Hirt said. “We got to fly under the radar a little bit. The focus was not on us, but we knew what we were capable of doing.”
It was a clash of styles – No. 4 Oshkosh 417th in pace, Denison 25th. The Big Red rolled, 82-61.
“We knew we had to dictate the pace, and we did a good job of speeding them up,” Hirt said. “We had just watched Scranton beat NYU, and I knew we could beat both teams.”
The game with No. 2 Scranton was a rock fight early between two first-time finalists, with Denison up 19-11 at half after holding the Royals to just one point in the second quarter.
“It was a very defensive game,” Hirt said. “Not a lot of shots were falling. Scranton had just shocked the world and had a 32-game winning streak. Both teams were so close and right there.”
Scranton scored enough in the third to go up 34-33 after 3. Cooch then hit consecutive 3s to tie it at 39 before a 14-0 run put Denison safely ahead 50-41 with three minutes left. History was made.
“She pulled a championship out of her hat,” McTigue said. “I don’t know how they did it. They just kept on winning. The kids on that team were phenomenal, from the kids who sit to the kids who start.”
The moment offered great perspective for McTigue.
“A year ago, she was in the middle of her treatment,” McTigue said. “We just took it day-by-day. I never dreamed, I never imagined it would happen. Everyone there wearing red, it was so much fun.”
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: The long, winding road for Bloomington’s Mo Hirt to a national title
Reporting by Jim Gordillo, The Herald-Times / The Herald-Times
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