LI's Anne Gregory O'Connell gets moment in spotlight after record-setting career at Fordham

Anne Gregory O’Connell can’t help but laugh when she recalls the final minutes of her college basketball career.

Then known as Anne Gregory, the 6-1 forward had averaged an astonishing 15.4 rebounds per game over the course of her four years at Fordham. She needed 19 in her final contest, a consolation tournament game against Queens College at Harvard in 1980, to become the first woman to finish her college playing days with 2,000 rebounds.

Today, this is something that would be featured on SportsCenter. Back then, Gregory O’Connell wasn’t really aware of how close she was to hitting the mark until a Fordham official walked over to the bench with a couple of minutes left and the game in the bag.

“He told us I needed two more rebounds for 2,000,” Gregory O’Connell, a longtime Elmont resident, told Newsday. “All of a sudden, everyone on my team was trying to help me get rebounds. One player just threw the ball off the backboard.

“I got one and then I was trying so hard to get the next one that I went up to get it, I fouled someone and fouled out of the game. I ended up with 1,999.”

Those 1,999 rebounds still were more than any other woman had pulled down in the history of college basketball, a mark that stood for nearly three decades before Courtney Paris of Oklahoma passed her by grabbing 2,034 from 2005-2009.

On Thursday, Gregory O’Connell, 65, was honored for her trailblazing efforts at the 44th annual Thurman Munson Awards dinner to benefit the AHRC New York City foundation. Also honored were the Yankees’ Tino Martinez and the Mets’ Howard Johnson. The Munson Awards are presented to individuals for on-field excellence and the betterment of sports and community.

Eye-opening stuff

It was a well-deserved award, given that it’s way past time that Gregory O’Connell and other pre-NCAA athletes were recognized for their tremendous contributions to the game.

While her statistics and those of others who played before the 1981-82 season are acknowledged by the NCAA in a separate section as pre-NCAA records, they are not recognized alongside the accomplishments of athletes who played after the NCAA took over from the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) as the governing body of the women’s game.

This is a curious and contradictory decision, given that the NCAA counts coaching wins from that era, including record-holder Tara VanDerveer’s 101 AIAW wins with Idaho and Ohio State.

Not only did Gregory O’Connell rule the boards in her time, she led the Rams to a 91-34 record in her four years and totaled 2,548 points, which remains a Fordham record.

She was such a dominating player, veteran NBA play-by-play man Mike Breen said, that she completely altered the way he felt about the women’s game.

Breen, then a freshman at Fordham, was assigned to cover a women’s game when Gregory O’Connell was a senior.

Coming from a family of six boys, he had never seen a girls or women’s basketball game and said he wasn’t expecting much when he went to his first game to learn about the team.

“She completely changed my perception, whatever silly perception I had, of women’s basketball,” Breen said. “The word I use for her is ferocious. I had never seen someone play with that tenacity. She played harder than everyone on the floor. It opened my eyes to how there are great women players out there.”

Second-class citizens

In today’s sporting landscape, where Iowa’s Caitlin Clark draws rock star-worthy crowds and at least three women’s college basketball players are estimated to have NIL deals worth north of $1 million, it’s difficult to fathom how far under the radar women’s basketball was in the pre-NCAA era.

Gregory O’Connell, who grew up in the Bronx playing basketball with her brothers, was thrilled just to be the second woman to get a partial athletic scholarship to the school. Rams coach Kathy Mosolino had to work two jobs, with her full-time job being an administrator in the newly opened Lombardi Center. There were no assistant coaches.

The women’s team scheduled their practices around the men’s team. The travel budget was minimal. One year, the men’s team got new warmups and they gifted the women’s team their hand-me-downs.

“We thought they were great,” Gregory O’Connell said. “They were stripes, maroon and gold stripes. They were ugly when you think about it, but we didn’t think so then.”

When Gregory O’Connell was a junior, Fordham hosted what was the AIAW’s equivalent of the Elite Eight. Her coach’s sister was enlisted to run the concession stand. The Fordham team hosted a dinner party for the other seven teams in the gym. It was an unusually cold day and the athletic department had neglected to turn the heat on, so they all sat around in their coats while they ate.

“We didn’t get much in terms of money or scholarships or gear or travel,” Gregory O’Connell said, “but we really didn’t know how much we didn’t have. I remember the first time we went to a game in Connecticut, and you would have thought we were going to Bermuda. We knew we deserved more, but we didn’t complain about what we had. It’s just the way it was.”

Love & basketball

When Gregory O’Connell graduated, there was no WNBA. She played professionally in Antibes, France for a few months.

Her life changed, however, when she came home for the holidays.

Mosolino recruited her to play for the Gems of the newly formed World Professional Basketball League, and Jim O’Connell, who had been the sports information director at Fordham when she played, recruited her to be his wife.

The World Professional Basketball League folded less than a year later. The marriage had a much longer run.

The two settled on Long Island, where they raised two sons, James and Andrew.

Gregory O’Connell worked in Catholic education for 36 years, including 19 years as a guidance counselor at Holy Trinity High School in Hicksville before retiring in 2022. Her husband, who passed away in 2018, was a longtime basketball writer for The Associated Press and a member of the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.

Now a grandmother of four, Gregory O’Connell was the first woman to have her number retired at Fordham. She regularly keeps up with her former teammates, who have a text string going when they watch the NCAA Tournament.

She said she is thrilled with the rising popularity of the women’s game. She is a big fan of Clark and enjoyed watching her chase the NCAA scoring record, especially because Clark’s run brought some attention to AIAW players.

She said she never looks at everything players have today and wonders “what if?”

“I’m very glad I played in the era I played,” Gregory O’Connell said. “It was a great experience. Everyone says we were trailblazers or pioneers. I kind of like those terms. It’s an honor to think that what we did back then paved the way for the athletes who are around today. I love the time when I played.”

By Barbara Barker

barbara.barker@newsday.commeanbarb

Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.