In Love and Basketball, It's Teamwork That Wins

By Preston Williams
Thursday, December 4, 2008

Not often do you walk into the home team basketball coach's office and see pictures on his desk of the visiting coach you just passed in the hallway. Stranger yet is when that visiting coach keeps stuff in the home coach's desk and can rummage through it whenever she pleases.

That's what happens to basketball coaches when their knot-tying is not limited to sneakers.

Six years ago, Paul VI Catholic girls' basketball coach Scott Allen hired Valerie Phillips to be his junior varsity coach and varsity assistant. They soon became close friends. Then best friends. Then an item. Then husband and wife in September 2007.

And even now, with "Coach Val" in her first season as head coach at Chantilly, the Allens' basketball lives are intertwined. Because coaches were prohibited from instructing their own teams during fall league, Scott, 33, coached the Chantilly girls, and Val, 30, coached the Paul VI girls.

The Allens bought a house last summer in the Chantilly school district (with the tacit agreement that Scott not try to lure any girls in Val's area to his school) and pop in to each other's practices whenever they can. He still copies her on team-related e-mails. And Paul VI and Chantilly competed in the same tournament in Philadelphia in the fall.

When their teams scrimmaged last month, Paul VI players jokingly booed Val when she entered the gym. In the days leading up to that scrimmage, the Allens heard their share of jokes about Scott sleeping on the couch if his team ran up the score.

"Should we kiss and make up here before the game even starts?" Val asked her husband at the scorer's table as the teams warmed up.

The Allens' relationship and ultimate romance -- they met through the father of one of Allen's former players, whom Val was assisting on an AAU team -- endured the challenge of coaching in close quarters and rolling with the up-and-down grind of season after season. They shared in all of Paul VI's accomplishments and disappointments and were able to compartmentalize their professional and personal roles, even sleeping in separate beds on a team road trip after they were married.

That's all well and good. But Varsity, with a keen interest in domestic tranquillity, first and foremost his own, can't help but wonder whether coaching separate varsity girls' basketball programs might prove more stressful on a marriage than coaching in the same program.

What happens when one coach comes home after a big win, say a Paul VI triumph over Bishop McNamara, and the other after a disappointing loss, maybe a Chantilly nail-biter against Centreville? Does the celebration of one coach trump the hand-wringing of the other? What if both teams pull upsets or get upset on the same night? Who shares details or vents first? It's bound to happen -- during the regular season, Paul VI and Chantilly, six miles apart, will play on the same night 13 times.

Will coaching different programs enhance their relationship, because they each will bring different experiences to the family room, or, given their experience of coaching together, will the separation make it more difficult to truly share the game they both love?

After all, there was nothing more fun than the bus ride back to school after a satisfying win, or dissecting a victory or even a loss over wings at a favorite hangout. Paul VI has won the Virginia Independent Schools state championship five of the past seven years.

"I'm used to coming out of the JV locker room and maybe winning a game, and varsity losing a game by two, and me not being able to be excited about the JV game," Val said that night at Paul VI before the scrimmage. "But I know how to deal with that. I don't know if I'll know how to deal with that this year, though, because it's a very different weight on my shoulders. We're now both trying to accomplish the same thing at the same level."

"I'll probably have to be there more for her, because she's going to go through experiences as a head coach of a program that I went through my first year," said Scott, in his seventh season at Paul VI. "There's a lot of times you don't know what you don't know. That's something that I look forward to having to help her with and understand that that's going to be part of the deal, because there were a lot of times over the last six years where I have come home and she has seen that side of me."

For years, Scott and Val -- he's a small-town boy from Fair Haven, Vt., and she's a city girl from Pittsburgh -- were the people that everyone thought should be a couple but weren't. When they finally started dating, in February 2005, it was their little secret.

"Nobody knew. Nobody," Val said. "And the funny thing about it was everybody assumed we were, and we never were. And the minute we started, nobody ever assumed we were. It was the funniest thing."

After discussing the budding relationship with Paul VI administrators, Val told the Panther players in November 2005 that she and Scott were dating. Scott was concerned that the disclosure would hinder Val's role as the players' confidant. He thought they would see her as Coach Allen's girlfriend and not as the same Coach Val they had always trusted.

Those fears were unfounded. But their courtship and marriage did tinker with the team dynamics some. If Scott would yell at Val during a game, a common occurrence between head and assistant coaches in the heat of the moment, Val said she would see a He talks to his wife this way? look come over some players' faces. She would smile at the girls to remind them that these were basketball coaches communicating in a pressure situation, not husband and wife bickering on the bench. (Other couples have worked through similar situations: Bishop O'Connell girls' basketball coach Jimmy Brown has been assisted by his wife, Megan, for the past five years.)

Both Allens are vocal on the bench, with Val known as a loud stomper and Scott as a loud whistler. Each is likely to ask the other to list five things their team needs to work on. Val acknowledges that she is stubborn enough to occasionally stiff-arm even solicited advice. She admires her husband's coaching smarts; he admires how she can get the most out of her players and foster a team atmosphere.

"I think our marriage is able to grow because we can relate everything into one," Scott said. "We grow as basketball coaches as we grow as husband and wife. We're able to do both together. I think that's a huge part of our marriage. I think it's going to be a shared thing because we're going to want each other to be just as successful as the other person."

"If I'm playing the same night he is and I miss that time that he's going to beat a rival in the conference, that's going to bother me, to not be there when that happens," Val said. "But I'm not going to be any less excited for him than I was if I was sitting right next to him. When you're husband and wife, you want to share in those big moments."

Varsity Letter is a weekly column about high school sports in the Washington area. E-mail Preston Williams at williamsp@washpost.com.