Delaney-Smith chose to only interview at those places that took Title IX—which had just reached its ten-year anniversary—as seriously as she did.

“[When schools] would ask me if I was interested in coaching their team, I would ask them, ‘What is your men’s salary, and what’s your women’s salary, and what’s the equality like?’’” Delaney-Smith explained. “[Other schools] didn’t care as much, I didn’t think, [as] Harvard did. So in 1982, when Harvard asked me to apply for the job, that mattered to me.”

But when Delaney-Smith got the call to interview at Harvard, nagging stereotypes made her decision anything but clear.

“I would say that I grew up in a family that had a misperception of Harvard,” Delaney-Smith said. “I thought it was rich, preppy, entitled, [and] geeky.”

Despite her hesitations, Delaney-Smith came to Cambridge for an interview—a visit that changed her entire mindset. After meeting with the two captains, Pat Horne and Kate Martin, along with the rest of the team, Delaney-Smith was sold.

“Everybody I met was the opposite of the perception I had,” Delaney-Smith said. “I just did [the interview] because people told me professionally I should, and so I was surprised that I fell in love with it that day. Then I wanted the job, and Harvard takes its time choosing who it wants, so they tortured me a little, I think.”

Delaney-Smith ended up getting the job, and, from that point on, she never looked back.

The now-collegiate coach picked up right where she left off, paving the path for women’s athletics.

DiVincenzo, who followed her from Westwood High to Harvard, spoke to the continuity in Delaney-Smith’s actions between the two schools.

“In college, she was always doing the same thing [as in high school], challenging [even when] she was up against larger and older friend groups,” DiVincenzo said. “The guys had a longer history and a deeper bench to call from, but she was always trying to get the women on parity with the men. She would never accept anything less.”

She backed up her pleas for equality with success on the court.

In the 1981-1982 season, the year prior to her arrival, the Harvard women’s basketball team amassed a 4-21 record, going 1-5 in the Ancient Eight.

By 1986, the team won the Ivy League title—the first in program history.

One decade later, Harvard earned its first bid to the NCAA Tournament—a feat topped two years later, when Delaney-Smith’s squad took down No. 1 seed Stanford in the first round of March Madness. The 71-67 victory was the first time in tournament history that a top-seeded team had fallen in the first round—an event that Delaney-Smith called a “phenomenal experience.”

Delaney-Smith transformed a program that had once been consistently below .500 into one in which winning was considered the norm. Since that inaugural title just five years into her tenure, Delaney-Smith has added 10 more banners, six NCAA Tournaments, and four WNIT appearances.