AI-assisted summary Longtime Cincinnati basketball coach Mary Jo Huismann receives The Enquirer’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Huismann, who coached at Mother of Mercy and Talawanda, has the second-most wins in OHSAA history.

She is a member of multiple halls of fame and has impacted countless athletes over her 50-year career.

OXFORD − After 50-plus years as a head basketball coach in Cincinnati, Mary Jo Huismann has made an impact on countless lives.

Sometimes, it’s the players she least suspected to influence who are thankful years later.

Siobhan Zerilla moved to Cincinnati and played one season for Huismann at Mother of Mercy before playing at Wilmington College. In 2004, Zerilla helped lead the Quakers to the Division III National Championship. When Huismann ran into her down the road, she was a contractor in Florida after a career at Wilmington that landed her in the school’s Hall of Fame.

“She (Zerilla) comes up and gives me a big hug. She says to me, ‘you know you changed my life?’ She’d be the last person in the world who would ever think I did anything for them,” Huismann laughed. “She said, ‘you told me to go to college. I didn’t wanna go. I went and really liked it. You changed my whole life.’

“You get comments like that. You’re proud of that.”

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A lifetime of impacting athletes on and off the court, Huismann is this year’s recipient of The Enquirer’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

It’s far from the first time Huismann has been recognized for her coaching career. A 1965 Mercy graduate, Huismann ranks second in OHSAA history in career wins (769) with 696 at her alma mater (1972-2018) before 72 more at Talawanda High School (2018-2024).

The recipient of several city and league coach of the year awards, Huismann is a member of the Mercy Hall of Fame, Buddy LaRosa High School Sports Hall of Fame and Greater Cincinnati Basketball Hall of Fame. She earned the John Wooden Legacy Award from the Ohio High School Basketball Coaches Association in 2024 and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Sports Foundation.

Huismann’s coaching career began long before the Mercy sidelines

The majority of Huismann’s coaching wins will live in OHSAA lore, but many were racked up without an official tally. As a junior at Mercy, Huismann and her classmates weren’t allowed to talk in the hallways and they had just three minutes to maneuver the five-floor building to get to their next class. She was, however, allowed to coach the softball team.

She played college basketball at Briar Cliff in Sioux City, Iowa before returning to Cincinnati. Between stints at UC and Capital University, she coached basketball, volleyball, tennis, track and softball before returning to Mercy in 1972.

Huismann wasn’t the first head girls basketball coach at Mercy, but she was the first who wanted to practice every day. With seven different parishes feeding into the high school, there were nearly 900 students and plenty to build two freshmen teams, plus JV and varsity squads.

The Girls Greater Catholic League was soon formed, then Title IX came in 1975.

“The league starts up in a year or two and it really becomes a force,” Huismann said. “We started charging for games (50 cents to $1), then a lot of people came. It was interesting.”

Huismann led three Mercy squads to the Final Four, finishing as the state runner-up three times (1980, 1989, 1990).

“It’s interesting who goes and who doesn’t. Your best teams don’t always go,” Huismann said. “You all have to get along; you’ve got to hustle. We got to the state final because they gelled and worked together. That’s the important thing.”

Mary Jo Huismann, a pioneer for women’s sports in Cincinnati

Huismann is not one to bask in the limelight, but it follows her nonetheless with decades dedicated to growing women’s sports.

The early years included trying to get women’s sports scores in the newspaper, fundraising for new uniforms for her UC team, which had an overtime game against Miami end in a tie because the men’s team needed over an hour to warm up.

Huismann organized summer leagues to grow the game and helped bring AAU basketball to Cincinnati as a volunteer coach.

She was often one of the only females on state coaches’ associations and Hall-of-Fame committees but stayed because representation was vital.

“I didn’t want to leave because there were often only two women. Even of the four women’s basketball coaches, two of them were men. You fought through that,” Huismann said. “I stayed because you gotta have a woman there. It’s important.”

From ‘gut-punch’ to glory at Talawanda High School

Huismann and her co-workers spent over a year preparing for Mercy to close. It didn’t make it sting any less when the school ultimately shut its doors in 2018.

“You’re telling yourself it’s gonna be OK, because that’s what you’re telling the kids,” Huismann said. “There weren’t very many Mercy people who went over (to Mercy-McAuley). Gut punch is a good word.”

Juggling the decision to coach elsewhere or hang up her whistle, Huismann ultimately landed at Talawanda after acing an interview that had eight people peppering questions.

Talawanda won just twice in Huismann’s first season in 2019. By the second year, the tide began to turn at 9-14, then 10 wins in year 3. Huismann led Talawanda to back-to-back SWOC titles in 2022-2023 before ending her illustrious head-coaching career in March 2024.

Huismann’s competitive drive, knowledge and tough love as a coach led to many victories over the last half-century.

But those get easily overshadowed when the years pass and she sees how her work has turned student-athletes into hard-working adults, and hard-working adults into loving parents and supporters who remember the coach that helped mold them.

When she won her 700th game in January 2020, a sliver of Talawanda’s gym typically reserved for fans of the opposing team, was filled with Mercy alums.

“They all came out. They drove all the way up here so we better win,” Huismann laughed. That made it even better.

“It’s all about the people. It’s why you coach.”