DENVER – During the Golden Years of MSU Denver Athletics, there was no time to sit back, evaluate and enjoy.
"We were just plugging away, and that's how we always did things," said Joan McDermott, who presided over the most successful era in school history as the athletic director. "We were focused on the process. It's not about the wins, it's about the journey and doing things the right way, cranking and grinding.
"You didn't have time to stop and think about it while it was happening. You knew it was a special time, but you didn't really think about it while you were in the middle of it."
There was, of course, a whole lot of winning from 1999 through 2015, including four NCAA Division II national championships – two each for men's basketball and women's soccer. But beyond that, McDermott's lasting legacy still reverberates today.
She will be recognized on Oct. 2 as part of the latest class of inductees to the MSU Denver Athletics Hall of Fame.
The 7 p.m. event at the Auraria Event Center will follow MSU Denver's 3 p.m. home volleyball match against Westminster and is part of Homecoming Weekend. A social hour is scheduled for 6 p.m. followed by the dinner and program. Tickets to the program are $50 for adults and $20 for kids 12 and under.
Also being inducted in the star-studded class is former basketball national player of the year Brandon Jefferson, former softball star Christie Robinson and former volleyball coach Debbie Hendricks.
Men's basketball became the department's signature sport just after McDermott became athletic director, and she was heavily involved with the hiring of coach Mike Dunlap. She built the program with Dunlap, and it never wavered while she was in command – the national titles came in 2000 and 2002 and the program played in the national title game in 2013 and the national semifinals in 2014.
It was one of McDermott's goals to resurrect the softball program, which happened in 2008 and provided Robinson a path to MSU Denver glory. And it was McDermott who hired Hendricks, who immediately set the program on course for its still-continuing streak of 20 consecutive trips to the NCAA national tournament.
Previously a volleyball and softball coach, McDermott's next-to-last match as the Roadrunners' volleyball head coach was a win over Hendricks and her West Texas A&M team in 1998. It was supposed to be Hendricks' last match, too.
But a year later they reconnected at the NCAA tournament. Hendricks was looking to get back into coaching. And the MSU Denver job was about to come open again.
"We were sitting next to each other, and she said to me, 'Joan, I think I made a mistake,'" McDermott recalled. "And I said, 'How would you feel about moving to Denver? I'll never forget it when she said, 'You know, let's talk about that.'"
McDermott's knack for hiring just the right coach goes beyond mere circumstance.
She hired a hard-working junior college coach to take over the women's soccer program in 2002, and Danny Sanchez turned in the first of two national championships in 2004 and had a six-year reign in which he compiled a record of 128-11-7, including 76-1-3 in conference games, before he left for Division I. A six-time RMAC coach of the year, the 2004 national coach of the year, and a four-time regional coach of the year, Sanchez was also named the top women's soccer coach in RMAC history.
Men's basketball coaching legend Mike Dunlap left for the NBA after 2006, but the program maintained its championship level under McDermott hires Brannon Hays and Derrick Clark.
The men's soccer program reached its peak under Ken Parsons, hired in 2004, with a run that included two trips to the NCAA Tournament and an undefeated league season in 2007.
She hired legendary Tanya Haave as women's basketball coach in 2010 and Haave took immediately took her team to a regional championship and is now the program's all-time wins leader.
When softball was brought back in 2008, McDermott hired Jen Fisher – and in her third season Fisher led the Roadrunners to a 53-6 record and a trip to the national semifinals before leaving for Division I. McDermott also hired current coach Annie Van Wetzinga, the program's all-time wins leader.
The list goes on and on for McDermott, a two-time national athletic director of the year honoree.
"You looked for coaches who were smart and knew the game, but who could also really get after it," McDermott said. "And Metro isn't a traditional campus, so you really have to attract the student-athletes. It's a very unique place.
"You have to embrace the campus. You couldn't shy away from it. You didn't have dormitories. I tried to have people in mind (for potential openings), but sometimes it just developed. There are certain things you look for, but it's not black and white. It's truly an art, and there are some intangibles involved.
"You really have to build culture within the team, and I tried to do that in the department where we were supportive of each other's programs. That was our family, and our student-athletes supporting one another was so critically important – because a lot of students on the campus didn't know we have athletics."
A native Californian, McDermott first came to MSU Denver as both softball and volleyball coach in 1988. She was 50-37 coaching softball (the program was disbanded after the 1990 season, one year after McDermott left) and she led the Roadrunners to NCAA Tournaments both seasons as volleyball coach while compiling a 69-23 record.
McDermott returned to MSU Denver in 1996 to coach three more seasons of volleyball, going 67-41 with two more trips to the NCAA Tournament before moving into administration.
"(Former athletic director) Bill Helman was really the architect of the athletic program at Metro State," McDermott said. "He told me to come back and coach for a few years and that he was looking at retiring. He said he would train me … and it worked out really well for me.
"Being an athletic director was always the goal for me, always what I wanted to do – although some days I wonder why. I always wanted to do it, but I couldn't get there right out of college because the opportunities just weren't there. I started coaching and I fell in love with that, and I thought maybe I would just stay in coaching. But the dream (to be an athletic director) never went away."
McDermott, now the athletic director at Division I San Francisco, was and still is a pioneer as a female athletic director in collegiate sports.
"The women who were already in those roles were so strong, and they were so good to me – they encouraged me and were so positive, saying, 'Joan, you can do this,'" McDermott said. "I had male role models on our campus, too, in Bill Helman and Joe Arcese and Dr. (Stephen) Jordan. It was the vision of Joe Arcese to take the program to a high level, and when Dr. Jordan came in (as university president) we had been rolling, but he challenged me to go to another level, and that was really good.
"It was hard at first being in the same room with a majority of male athletic directors. I didn't know what they'd think of me, but now I consider many of them my good friends. We really did develop a mutual respect."
It's been said that, each March and each late November, MSU Denver Athletics didn't schedule department-wide meetings. That's because teams and administrators were planning on being at championship-level events.
"That was the expectation," McDermott said. "The conference season was always important, always in focus, but we had an eye on the postseason, too."
But as it ultimately always is, it was about more than winning.
"The further away you get, the less it is about wins and championships and it's really about the people and the relationships that are built," McDermott said. "I have friends for life through everything we went through and accomplished at Metro State, and I'm very appreciative and just have a ton of gratitude for the opportunity I was given there. It was a group effort all way, a true team effort."
