Julia Duggan named as Lebanon Valley College’s new women’s basketball coach

If basketball was one of Julia Duggan’s top priorities growing up near Ocean City, New Jersey, understand that baking wasn’t too far behind – so much so that when she was in high school and her older sister Amanda was about to get married, Julia took on the task of making the wedding cake.

The result, according to a 2012 piece in the Press of Atlantic City, was a three-tiered creation that took her two and a half days to fashion. And if all the wedding guests seemed to enjoy it, forgive Julia if she was left with mixed feelings in the moment.

“I died a little inside when they started cutting the cake,” she jokingly told the Press.

Suffice it to say that she quickly got over it.

“That’s also the part you enjoy,” Lebanon Valley College’s new women’s basketball coach said in a recent phone interview, “because you see just the happiness on everyone’s face while they’re eating it.”

This will be Duggan’s first head-coaching job, after serving three years as an assistant at Division III power Christopher Newport and three years prior to that at Endicott, a school in Beverly, Massachusetts. That follows a playing career that saw her accumulate over 1,500 points and 1,000 rebounds as a forward at Ocean City High School, and over 1,000 points and 800 boards at Division I Rider. She also played a season each in France and Germany.

Even as the 30-year-old has made hoops her career, baking has remained on the (wait for it) back burner.

“I still bake every once in a while,” she said. “I have to find a balance between baking and eating my product, and also going to the gym and keeping the weight off.”

She is well aware of the parallels between her vocation and her avocation – about how coaching is, as she put it, a matter of “finding all the right ingredients, and … trying to find that perfect product.”

Goodness knows, the cupboard is hardly bare at LVC, where Duggan succeeds Diane Decker, now at Arcadia. The Dutchmen, 19-7 and MAC Freedom regular-season champions in ’24-25, welcome back their top three scorers in guard Riley Hevelow (15.1), forward Brielle Reidinger (12.6) and forward Kailey Eckhart (10.8), all seniors. Junior guard Abbie Reed also made 22 starts.

Read More: LVC women’s basketball meets moment, will enter MAC tournament as #1 seed

Duggan, still in the process of making the move from Newport News, Virginia, since her hire on July 3, has spoken to all her players over the phone, and watched them on video. She was heartened by what she heard, impressed with what she saw.

“I really like the way they all connect with each other,” she said.

That was particularly evident on the defensive end, where the Dutchmen limited opponents to 23.1 percent 3-point shooting last season, the ninth-stingiest rate in  Division III, and 32.5 percent overall marksmanship, which equaled the division’s 19th-best norm.

“I’m not looking to come in and overly rock the boat or anything like that,” Duggan said.

Rather, she wants to make “some tweaks here and there,” even to that vaunted defense. LVC will do more pressing and trapping, the style favored by the man under whom she worked at Christopher Newport, Bill Broderick. That will involve playing more people, the better to keep fresh legs on the court at all times.

“The girls are, I believe, more than capable of playing at that clip,” she said, “so I’m really excited to see that.”

Certainly her new players figure to be hungry. After finishing the regular season fast and entering the Freedom playoffs as the top seed, the Dutchmen were upset on their homecourt by DeSales – a team they had already beaten twice – in the semifinals. DeSales then fell to Stevens in the championship game.

LVC will have to replace guard Cristina Fernandez, who led the club in assists, steals and blocks while serving as its “hype man,” as Eckhart, an ELCO graduate, put it late in the regular season. 

But the new coach has a wealth of experience upon which to draw, and has seen various recipes for success. Broderick, who in 12 seasons at CNU has gone 308-47 (with a national-title game appearance in ’22-23, Duggan’s first year with the program), is in her eyes a guy who establishes “a really great connection with his players.”

“I feel like that’s where it starts,” Duggan said, “where you have that good connection and you show love for the players off the court, (and) it’s really easy to get them to do it on the court.”

Brittany Hutchinson, under whom Duggan worked at Endicott, was likewise a great communicator.

“We’re in the generation of ‘why,’” Duggan said. “A lot of kids want to know, ‘Why am I doing this? Why are we doing this?’”

Hutchinson, she said, was able to spell things out without sacrificing any authority – the result being that her players were more than willing to put in extra preparation time. And the results showed on the court. The Gulls went 49-27 in the three seasons Duggan spent in Beverly.

From her coach at Rider, Lynn Milligan, Duggan learned the value of perseverance. The Broncs struggled her first three years on campus, but broke out her senior season (’16-17), going 24-9.

Even as the team was going through tough times, Duggan said, Milligan was “always there for us. It made it easier for us to keep getting into the gym extra, coming to work out, shooting on our own, really giving our all in practice, getting in there for film, going to these games and giving it our all.”

By contrast her high school coach, Paul Baruffi, enjoyed great success, going 429-129 in 20 years. The four teams on which Duggan played went 89-28, including a 26-5 senior year that saw her average a double-double (16 points, 11 rebounds) and the Red Raiders win the South Jersey Group 3 title. 

Certainly, she said, Baruffi brought a great deal of “spunk” to his job.

“He was like a bull in a china shop,” she added, “and I really appreciated that, because that was his way of getting the players to also run through a wall for him. Practice, he never let up. We were running. We were doing a million shooting drills. We were lifting. He invested so much time and energy into all his players and all his teams, and he did it with so much Italian attitude, and I absolutely loved it.”

So all of that is baked into Julia Duggan. That is what she is bringing to the table in Annville. 

“I’m really looking forward to getting to know them,” she said of her new players, “and finding out what they’re looking for, both individually and as a team, and hopefully propelling them past the point they were at before.”

No doubt they are thinking in the same terms. No doubt they are reading from the same menu. The question is, how will the finished product look? That’s all that really matters – being satisfied with the end result. Everything else is just icing on the cake.