The gym at Our Lady of Sorrows was more than a place to play. It was a place to belong.
It started, as so many good things do, almost by accident. Debbie Donahoe was bowling in the OLS Bowling League in the early 1980s, when two of the program’s founding coaches, Lola Dolce and Sandy DeLuca, were getting ready to retire from coaching. “They’re like, you know, we need a basketball coach,” Donahoe recalls. “I’m like, oh, okay.” She had just had her third child. She said yes anyway.
A few years in, she knew she needed reinforcements—and exactly who she wanted. “Deb Flooks came along, and I said, I need you with me.” Debbie Flooks had played college basketball, had recently married and moved to New York, and was eager to get back in the game. “When Debbie asked me to come coach,” Flooks says, “I was so excited, because I had just moved to White Plains and I knew no one.” What began as a practical arrangement between two women with a love of basketball would become something that shaped a generation of girls in White Plains.
The team they inherited—and then built further—was something special. Beth O’Keeffe. Tanya Castagna. Tiffany O’Toole. “To start out coaching with a team like that,” Flooks remembers, “They were just amazing. They were sponges. They would jump through hoops for us.” That year, they kept being beaten by St. Joe’s in Bronxville. So Donahoe called her friend Eddie Sands and said, “We need a new defense.” He suggested a 1-3-1. “We practiced for two days, went down there and won the game.” It remains the stuff of legend.
But winning, as both coaches will tell you, was never the whole point. What Donohoe and Flooks were building was something bigger than a box score, and they fought for it accordingly. When they wanted gym time, they were told they could have only one day a week for practice. “No,” Donahoe said. “The boys have two days. We’re taking two days.” She was not negotiating. “We fought for the girls way back when,” she says. “We fought for equal time playing basketball.” In an era when girls athletics were still scrambling for basic parity, that fight mattered enormously.
And the girls felt it. The following year, Christine Pinto, Shannon Casey, Eileen Sullivan, Mary Jo Bensel and Jen Bertero moved up from JV to Varsity, basking under the Double Debbie basketball tutelage.
“What I can say about Debbie Flooks and Debbie Donahoe,” Eileen Sullivan says, her voice full with the memories of it all, “is that they had so much faith in us. They mentored us, and they made girls sports matter at OLS. We could not have done it without you. And between the two of you, you had so many kids, and you took all of us on as your extra kids.”
That last part was not an exaggeration. Between them, the two coaches had seven children, and practice often looked more like a family gathering than a training session. “The kids would run around,” Donahoe remembers. “It was like a family. It was wonderful.” The parents were all in too, driving the girls to games, filling the bleachers, showing up the way only true fans do. “More than anything,” Flooks says simply, “the parents were so supportive.”
Shannon Casey remembers the simple, happy feeling of an ordinary practice day: “I would go home after school and have my snack and look so forward to getting back up to school and going to practice. I remember, during practice, having to run up and down the stairs near the 5th and 8th grade classrooms and being so out of breath.” And it was also something more. “I remember playing my butt off, like, really playing hard. We wanted to win, and it wasn’t easy, so the excitement of winning was just the BEST.” As Eileen adds: “We were really competitive. And yes, winning was awesome!”
The bonds that were first built on that basketball court stayed strong as the years passed. The girls grew up, went off to college, and still the connections held. When Eileen Sullivan came home from school, she ended up babysitting for Debbie Flooks—coming every day, bottle of Pepsi in hand, giving Flooks—then on bed rest during a difficult pregnancy—a much-needed break. “She was our angel,” Flooks says. “Eileen was like an aunt to my kids, and they still talk about her to this day.”
Debbie Flooks coached from 1984 to 2000, and Debbie Donahoe continued on, coaching for a full 25 years. Today, in the OLS gym, there is a jersey hanging in honor of the two women who took OLS Girls’ Basketball to new heights. As it should.
