Berenato has cooked up great career

Pitt sophomore captain Jennifer Brown raced to the sideline to corral the loose ball, crashing… Pitt sophomore captain Jennifer Brown raced to the sideline to corral the loose ball, crashing into the chairs of the visitors’ bench, catching her balance halfway down to the floor in the process — a great hustle play. Quickly, she hopped up, continuing to play the ball out-of-bounds.

And this was just in practice!

But that is the only way head coach Agnus Berenato will have it. To her, competitiveness is a value of the highest order.

“We learned to compete at a really young age,” Berenato, 48, said. “In my backyard I played with my brothers and sisters … everybody came to our house, and there were sometimes 30, 40 people, and it was only a little slab, you could only play three-on-three or four-on-four at the most, and if it was four-on-four, someone was going over the fence.”

On that concrete slab that her father installed, Berenato learned to play basketball as a child, and four decades later, she sits at the helm of the Pitt women’s basketball program with 300 wins as a collegiate coach. But the path from the stone court to career milestones was one Berenato wasn’t even planning to take.

“I never wanted to be a coach, honestly. I wanted to be in campus ministry,” Berenato admitted.

Following her interest in faith and religion, Berenato transferred to Mount St. Mary’s College — now University — in Maryland, where she played under former NBA player and current ESPN analyst Fred Carter. It was Carter who first noticed Berenato’s knack for coaching.

“He was the one who really taught me how to play basketball. I mean really taught me, and he gave me a passion for it,” Berenato said of her former coach. “And he kept saying, ‘You know, when you coach some day, Agnus.’ He would always talk to me like a coach.”

But sure enough, upon her graduation in 1980 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, it was Carter who told Berenato about a job opening that fit both of their plans, and in fall 1980, Berenato got a job at Holy Cross High School, where she taught religion and coached basketball.

“I only did it one year, and then I knew, oh man, I’ve got to get out of the classroom, coaching is for me,” she said, adding, “but really, it was because of him. He’s the one, my junior and senior year, but I fought him, there was no way I was going to be a coach.”

After only one year of high-school coaching, and at the young age of 23, Berenato got her first college head-coaching position at Rider University for the 1981-82 season. That year, Rider went 26-7 — still the most successful season in school history — and Berenato began what would become a life-long career.

Ironically enough, after four years at Rider, she had accumulated a respectable total of 60 wins, but that number was topped by her 66 wins as the volleyball coach at Rider.

In fact, she is second on the career-coaching wins list for the school, and can also claim the highest single-season win total as a coach, going 25-12 in 1983 — not bad for having no volleyball background.

“I had to learn it. I faked it on my interview, I really did,” she said with a grin.

After the 1984-85 season, Berenato left coaching for a year to focus on family, as she and her husband Jack had the first two of five children — eldest daughter Theresa Marie, followed by son Andrew.

It wasn’t long before Berenato was back on the sidelines, as an assistant coach at Georgia Tech. After two years, she became the head coach, and her success continued in the ACC.

“It became a home, and I thought that either I would retire there, I would die there or I’d get fired there. I loved Georgia Tech, I loved Atlanta,” she said.

But as much as she loved Georgia Tech, she also acknowledged some difficulties the school presented with recruiting.

“I believed in the education of Georgia Tech, but it is a technical institute, so it’s very, very, very difficult to recruit. The average SATs are phenomenal, and the choice of majors is very limited,” she said about her former school.

“It taught me a different way of coaching, I became a technical coach. Everything was angles … You’d say to a kid on the free-throw line to follow through, and they’d say, ‘How many spins do you want on the ball?'”

Her tenure with the Yellow Jackets included 223 wins and was highlighted by a win in the 1992 Women’s National Invitational Tournament, which capped a 20-13 season, one of her two 20-win years in Atlanta. It was after the second, in 2002-03, that Pitt came calling, but it took some convincing from her husband to even respond to Pitt. That turned out to be the hard part.

“The chancellor sold me right away on his values of education and athletics and that we can have the best of both worlds … and the people that I met, it was those people that made me believe that at this university, women’s basketball could be something special.”

On May 1, 2003, Berenato became the head coach at Pitt. Since her arrival, the program has gone upward, winning 11 games already this year, up from six in her first year.

That 17th win at Pitt, an 85-81 victory at Georgetown, marked the 300th win in the career of Berenato. But good luck getting her to celebrate.

“I just think it says I’ve been in it longer than most people,” she said. “Truly, it means absolutely zero for me. For us, I hope we get 300 wins here at the University of Pittsburgh.”

Beside the emphasis on competitiveness that she instills in her team, she also likes to make the team like a family, something else that is very important to Berenato.

“I love to cook for my family, and when I say family meals, I don’t call it entertaining, but like, if you were in the area, you could just stop in or my staff could stop in. When I cook — and if I’m home, I’m going to cook — I’ll always have enough food for 15 or 20, even though there’s only seven or eight of us there,” she said.

“I love to be in my home,” she said.

What she said rang true on a number of levels. Clearly, Berenato is a woman of faith and devotion to her family, but also, the level of caring she has for her job is astounding.

“Home” to her could mean the Berenato house, or “home” might mean the Petersen Events Center. Whichever one it is, there is a deep love for it under the competitive, intense exterior — the kind of love that would make you want to dive into a bench for her.