She loved too many things, and basketball wasn’t one of them.

Marianna Freeman needed music. At night, she reclined on her couch, chose one CD from her book of 500 and turned the volume up loud. She liked jazz best. She closed her eyes as she listened, nodding her head and humming the tune.

She relied on friendships. Nothing left her more satisfied than a long, heartfelt conversation with an old pal. She became a confidante for a dozen women. When they called Freeman, friends said, they stayed on the phone for two hours – and usually cried.

She thirsted for politics, rising to president of the Black Coaches Association and chairwoman of a gender equity task force. She spoke publicly at every chance, especially to children. She was fascinated by art, rapt by poetry and captivated by history.

Basketball got in the way.

That’s why, friends said, Freeman resigned as head coach of the Syracuse women’s basketball team one year ago, on March 18, 2003, after 10 long seasons filled with losing.

That’s also why, some said, the Orangewomen floundered so consistently, going 104-174 during Freeman’s tenure: The coach cared too much about people and politics, too little about winning. She spoke at a conference while her assistants handled recruiting. She lent her ear to a long-lost friend while her players practiced.

Freeman’s nobler pursuits, the qualities that made her a good person, made her a bad coach.

Freeman, now an Orangewomen season ticket holder, refused comment for this story. ‘I did my last interview the day I retired,’ she said. Several calls to her house went unanswered and unreturned.

‘I don’t think she really loved basketball,’ said Caren Truske, a Syracuse assistant coach during Freeman’s first year in 1993. ‘At least, she didn’t love it enough. She wanted to do so many different things, good things, that she spread herself too thin.’

And basketball started to feel like the enemy.

During her first year at Syracuse, Freeman often became frustrated during practices, sources said. Having spent the last 10 seasons as an assistant coach at the University of Iowa, Freeman felt more comfortable recruiting than coaching. She would lean heavily on her assistants when lecturing fundamentals to a full team. She also asked for help game planning because she thought her assistants were more knowledgeable.

‘She had never been all that involved with the day-to-day preparations,’ Truske said. ‘She started to question herself, like, ‘Maybe I don’t know this as well as I thought I did.”

The stress so overwhelmed Freeman that, sometimes, she retreated to her office and closed the door. There, she would take out a coloring book from her desk drawer and slowly fill page after page until she had escaped to a place where basketball could not find her.

She had never strived to be a head coach. She stuck close to basketball because of her love for the people who surrounded it, not out of devotion to the sport.

In 1975, she met C. Vivian Stringer, the head basketball coach at Cheyney University, a historically black college outside of Philadelphia.

An affable, strong-willed black woman, Stringer fascinated Freeman. Desperate to absorb Stringer’s presence, Freeman committed to play for Stringer. She stuck close to the coach at practice and, on weekends, wooed her back to campus to play board games and chat.

Freeman spent the better part of the next 20 years staying close to her idol, even if it meant staying in basketball. On Stringer’s advice, Freeman took a graduate assistant job at Slippery Rock State and a head coaching job at Delaware State. In 1983, when Stringer became head coach halfway across the country at the University of Iowa, Freeman followed her to become an assistant.

At Iowa, Freeman found another way to combine her love of people and her job: recruiting. Freeman pulled in No. 1-ranked classes in 1984, ’86 and ’90, making her a hot coaching prospect.

‘Recruiting is made for Marianna,’ said Felisha Legette-Jack, a former SU assistant and current head coach at Hofstra University. ‘She wins everybody over. She loves people so much, they can’t help but love her.’

She won Jake Crouthamel’s heart during a job interview in 1993. After talking with Freeman for a few hours, the Syracuse athletic director grew so impressed he offered to personally drive Freeman to the airport. Before she boarded her plane, she turned to Crouthamel, looked him in the eye and said, ‘I want to be your next head coach.’

‘In a matter of minutes,’ Crouthamel said, ‘she could make you like her.’

No wonder, then, that the SU administration rallied around Freeman during her first few years as head coach. Freeman’s predecessor, Barbara Jacobs, complained that the athletic department provided her with little support. ‘I retired because the program was an afterthought,’ she said. ‘We got nothing.’ But Freeman, sources said, got everything.

She moved into Manley Field House and made it her home. She requested – and received – a new computer system for coaches. She touched up the women’s basketball office. She improved her team’s practice equipment.

Even as her teams continued to lose – SU went 32-78 during Freeman’s first four years – the administration kept its distance.

‘Perhaps I should have stepped in sooner,’ Crouthamel said. ‘Marianna tried to do things the way she had experienced them with Vivian. That doesn’t always work, copying another person’s style.’

‘Marianna patterned her approach to recruiting very much like Vivian did, with all of her assistants doing the grunt work. That didn’t work well here. That’s where I should have stepped in and suggested that she do more of that work. But I didn’t want to intrude.’

Instead, Crouthamel offered Freeman a multi-year contract in May 1997, after a 6-21 season. ‘That was difficult,’ Crouthamel said. ‘ I probably debated doing that for two or three years. I was convinced the next four years would be better.’

And they were – barely. Syracuse continued to lose, only doing it a bit more respectably. In 1997-98, the Orangewomen went 12-15. Then 10-17. Then 10-18. Then 12-15.

Through the losing, Freeman searched frantically for answers. She yelled at her players more during practice and, when they played poorly, she barred them from their locker room. She stayed up late into the night breaking down film. She sought advice from successful WNBA coaches and Syracuse men’s coach Jim Boeheim.

And when nothing else worked, she escaped. She turned her music louder and kept her office door closed. She sought out close friends, this time so she could confide in them.

Freeman let her politicking blossom: a graduation speech at home in Delaware, a leadership conference in the South. She let her coaching responsibilities disintegrate. Assistants shouldered the burden of the recruiting and players sometimes monitored their own workouts.

In April 2000, the Syracuse women’s basketball team marched into Crouthamel’s office and demanded a new head coach – or at least the reappearance of their old one. The players told Crouthamel they needed Freeman to spend more time coaching, said two players who attended the meeting.

‘We felt, well, not quite neglected,’ said then-junior Jazmine Wright, ‘but like we were at the bottom of her list.’

Coaches disagreed. ‘Those kids had too much leeway in making a decision like that,’ Legette-Jack said. ‘They had everything they could have – Nike shoes, two hour practices, coaches that cared about them – and they still wanted more.’

After the meeting, Crouthamel told Freeman to give it to them.

‘She was aware that she had to spend more time with the program and in the office,’ Crouthamel said. ‘There was concern that she was overly extended. It’s hardly a fault, but she wanted to help people maybe to the point where she overextended herself.’

Players held the meeting to refocus Freeman. But, sources said, it ended up centering the players instead. Bonded by common angst, the group that headed into Crouthamel’s office held another meeting just months later. This one, attended by players only, demanded better effort for the season to come.

The 2001-02 Orangewomen, loaded with experienced seniors, finished 18-13 and made the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 14 years. The Black Coaches Association named Freeman the Female Coach of the Year.

‘(The players) were the ones who changed for that year,’ said Leaf Newman, then a senior guard. ‘(Freeman) basically did everything the same. She liked winning, but I’m not sure she was as desperate for that as we were.’

Even during her team’s run to the NCAA Tournament, when others focused solely on basketball, Freeman kept a comfortable distance from the game. On road trips, she played music so loudly on her headphones that players could hear it from three seats away. She engaged her team in conversations about current events not found on the sports page.

Newman, an aspiring singer, went to Freeman one afternoon to ask advice about the future: She should follow music or basketball?

‘Go with music,’ Freeman said. ‘You’ll be happier.’

‘We had an unusual relationship for coach and player,’ Newman said, ‘because it never had too much to do with basketball.’

Freeman treasured such connections most. Former players marveled at how eagerly the coach helped them after graduation. She seemed more passionate, sources said, about guiding players to safe neighborhoods and good jobs than she had been about guiding them to wins.

‘She cared a lot about making them good people,’ Truske said, ‘and not as much about making them good players.’

Freeman admitted as much little more than a year after her first NCAA Tournament appearance. After one final season of losing, she called a press conference to announce her resignation.

‘I don’t have that son-of-a-B type of attitude that sometimes you need to have, to push and push and push and be concerned just about you and the winning,’ Freeman said then. ‘It was never that for me. It was providing an opportunity for a young person to get an education. It was teaching them black history.’

Freeman, friends said, will look for another job that allows her to pursue similar goals. She might teach. She might counsel young people. She might throw herself further into politics.

She won’t coach.

‘I can’t imagine she’d do it again,’ Stringer said. ‘I think she’s done with basketball, with the winning and losing. She has a higher calling.’

Said Truske: ‘Marianna has got to step away from the game and focus in on the things she really loves.’

Published on March 16, 2004 at 12:00 pm