Tigers Coach Richardson has a true love of the game

By Kyle Hobstetter on March 5, 2019

Diane Richardson was always a Towson University fan. For the past 20 years, she lived just 30 minutes away and kept tabs on TU.

So when the women’s basketball head coaching position came open in 2017, the longtime college assistant and high school coach jumped at the chance to be a Tiger. 

“I absolutely love it,” Richardson says. “I’ve been an assistant coach for a while, and this area is my home. So when I found out the position was open, I thought I was ready to be a head coach and it would be awesome to be able to do it in my hometown.”

In her inaugural season Richardson’s Tigers struggled, finishing with a 9-21 record. But in her second season, the Tigers are sitting at 17-10, with two games left in the regular season. 

Not only has the team almost doubled its wins from last season, the Tigers also have the most wins in a season since the 2008-09 season. The team has 11 Colonial Athletic Association (CAA) wins, the most since the 2007-08 season. 

After being picked to finish eighth in the CAA Preseason Poll, the Tigers finished the season fourth, and Richardson was named CAA Coach of the Year. And while the team’s success may come as a surprise, Richardson and her staff aren’t shocked at the turnaround. 

“We knew that if we got the girls prepared we would get wins,” Richardson said. “So during our practices, our main thing was skill development. We worked on them getting better, because we know the formula from that was going to be wins.”  

Along with building the team’s skill, Richardson is quick to attribute the Tigers’ success to the team’s growing chemistry — despite adding eight new players to the roster. 

That upgraded team chemistry was on display on Dec. 22 against Marshall. The Tigers were down by 12 at halftime, but ended up winning the game. The win started a season-high, six-game winning streak, and made Richardson look at her team and say, “I think they get it.”

“They understand that we have to all be in this together to win to overcome some of the obstacles and challenges we had last year,” Richardson says.

Before coming to TU, Richardson held assistant positions at West Virginia, American and George Washington universities as well as at the University of Maryland. But along with her extensive coaching background, Richardson is a successful entrepreneur and businesswomen. 

She founded the American Security Companies and served as COO. Richardson also was vice president of Bank of America’s the National Neighborhood Lending Marketing Team. And for several years she was president and CEO of RCI Financial.

“ I’m really passionate about this. I want to change lives. ”

But her love for basketball never subsided. During her time at Bank of America and American Security Companies, Richardson donated money to help build girls basketball in the area. 

This led to her coaching an AAU team one summer. In her words, “The bug hit me.”

While working at Bank of America and running her own company, she served as coach as Riverdale Baptist High School in Upper Marlboro, Md., and won five national championships. 

Through her success at Riverdale Baptist, Richardson was offered an assistant position at American University. Although she was excited to be coaching full time, she looked to her husband Larry for advice on the move.

“I said, ‘Honey, I’m really passionate about this. I want to change lives,’” Richardson says. “He kind of looked at me funny. I said, ‘I’ll walk away from the business, because it’s doing pretty well. I just want to coach.’

“He said, ‘If that’s what you want to do, I got your back.’ So he’s been my No. 1 fan ever since.” 

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It’s hard not to understand Richardson’s passion for coaching. In high school she had no plans to go to college because it was too expensive. 

A scholarship led her to Frostburg State University, where she played basketball and ran track and field.

Her scholarship enabled her to compete in and win the 1979 NCAA Regional Championship in the 200- and 400-meter races. She was asked to join the 1980 U.S. Olympic Track and Field Team — which didn’t compete because the United States boycotted the 1980 Olympic Games (held in Moscow) to protest the U.S.S.R. (present-day Russia) invasion of Afghanistan.

Richardson graduated from Frostburg State with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology, later earning a master’s degree in management from Central Michigan.

When asked why she initially wanted to get into coaching, she simply says that she wants to give girls a chance at a scholarship — just as she did.

“I went from not planning to go to college because I couldn’t afford it, to a coach taking me aside as a basketball player and telling me, ‘You could be really good,’” Richardson says. “I wanted to do that same thing. As a result we have a lot of ladies who graduated and became lawyers, doctors, coaches and everything in between. And it makes me feel good because that’s why I wanted to get into basketball.”

 

This story is part of a series of stories marking TU's Week of Black Excellence.