When Maryland coach Brenda Frese traveled to Seattle two summers ago to help former assistant Tina Langley unpack as she moved into her new Pacific Northwest home, she didn’t do so with the idea of discovering a coaching tool. She was simply helping a friend who simultaneously was processing the death of her mother, managing a cross-country move and moving up into the power conference coaching ranks.
While Frese was unpacking boxes, she stumbled across a stack of books from Langley’s time as the head coach at Rice — collections of players’ life stories that they had told one another at the start of various seasons.
Langley initially came up with the idea when she became an assistant on Frese’s Maryland staff in 2008. She had spent the previous two years out of coaching and in school while receiving a master’s degree in counseling. But when she returned to the sideline, she suggested to Frese that their Terrapin players could build trust with one another by using one of the greatest lessons she learned in grad school: telling your story.
“One of the things in the counseling world is that it doesn’t matter from where you tell your story: from birth till now or from your high school years or just some of the events that you experienced,” Langley says. “We need…
