Don’t tell Carly Thibault she can’t do something.
Al Lewis attempted to influence Carly in high school by bringing her back slowly from injuries.
Mike Thibault tried to do it years ago when he encouraged Carly and his son, Eric, not to follow in his footsteps and become a basketball coach.
Carly’s passion for basketball won out on both occasions.
Instead of allowing injuries or doubters derail her dream, Thibault realized her goal and earned a scholarship to play basketball at the Division I level. Instead of taking the advice of her father, Thibault opted to bypass a career as a sports psychologist and take up her father’s “hobby” and become a college basketball coach.
Thibault plans to bring that can-do attitude to Starkville as the latest addition to Mississippi State women’s basketball coach Vic Schaefer’s coaching staff.
“I never really thought about doing anything else,” said Thibault, who was introduced Monday. “I probably was a lot better in a lot of other sports, but I just always loved basketball and I was always in the gym. It was always a family atmosphere for me with my dad and my brother. My mom was around it, as well, so it was always with the teams that my dad coached that we got to be around it and had a love for it from the start.
“I always got to see my dad go to quote, unquote work every day, and it really wasn’t work. It was his passion and he loved it. It never really felt like for him. I loved that. He always looked forward going to work, and I feel the same way. I feel like going to the gym every day is a blessing, and I can’t believe I get paid for it.”
Thibault spent the last two seasons as an assistant coach at Eastern Michigan. Prior to that, she spent time at Florida State, where she served as director of recruiting operations and managed the team’s recruiting database and communication plan and assisted with the administration of the program’s basketball camps.
Thibault played basketball at Monmouth from 2009-13. She finished her career third in school history with 166-career 3-pointers. She capped her career by earning third-team All-Northeast Conference honors and the team’s Coaches’ Award in 2012. She also was named the NEC Scholar-Athlete of the Year her senior
season.
Schaefer said he loves Carly’s passion and enthusiasm and feels she has done a lot in the game in a short amount of time. In doing his research about her, he talked with numerous people, including her father, and feels like he hit “another home run” in replacing Elena Lovato, who left to become head coach at Division II Arkansas-Fort Smith. Thibault completes a staff that includes associate head coach Johnnie Harris, assistant coach Dionnah Jackson, director of operations Maryann Baker, graduate assistant Christina Richardson, and director of scouting/video coordination Skylar Collins.
“We don’t know anything but winning, and how do you win? You work hard. You roll up your sleeves and you go to work,” Schaefer said. “You grind. You embrace the grind. You don’t complain about the grind and you embrace the grind. That is a real strength of ours and how we do it.
“The people I talked to talked about her commented on what a work ethic she has, and that is the only thing she knows. She has been around it all of her life. There is a unique quality of being a coach’s kid. Call it being fortunate. Sometimes it might be unfortunate, but I think in most situations being a coach’s kid is a real fortunate thing. It is all she has ever known growing up, and she has been around nothing but hard-working people and people that embrace the grind.”
Schaefer said Thibault will be involved in guard play and development as well as recruiting. He feels her organizational skills will complement the skills already in place on his staff.
Carly said she is excited and grateful for the opportunity to join a program that is on the rise after winning a program-record 28 games and advancing to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA tournament last season. She said she will work in a variety of roles to help the Bulldogs take the next step.
In addition to having a can-do mind-set, Thibault said she brings a “we’ll see” attitude she learned from years of hearing she wouldn’t be able to realize her dream and play basketball at the Division I level. At 5-foot-4 1/2 or 5-5, Thibault wasn’t the tallest, fastest, or quickest player. But Mike Thibault, a longtime coach in the NBA before who moved to the WNBA, said Carly took that “we’ll see” thinking from him and used her competitive fire to prove people wrong. She said Carly and Eric always wanted to dissect basketball games or sit and watch film of action. She said she peppered him with questions and would memorize scouting reports as a player at East Lyme (Conn.) High School so she would know what every player was supposed to do.
Mike Thibault said Carly learned to do all of that even after being encouraged not to become a basketball coach.
“When you have a passion for something you don’t look at it as work. You look at it as what you love to do,” said Thibault, who used to be the head coach for the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun and is now the coach and general manager of the Washington Mystics. Eric Thibault is an assistant coach on his father’s staff. “My wife joked that I get to work at my hobby every day. When you have invested in it that much you don’t look at it as work because you are willing to do what you need to do to be good.”
Thibault said his family has joked that they all will work for Carly one day in part because she doesn’t shy away from the parts of coaching that aren’t as glamorous. He said growing up around basketball helped Carly understand how hard she needs to work and how focused she needed to be to have success.
Thibault said Carly had that focus growing up. He said she was a talented gymnast and soccer player but that she gave those sports up to concentrate on basketball. It didn’t take long for Carly to routinely get up at 5:30 a.m. and ask her father to take her to school early so she could work on her shooting. Thibault laughed that if Carly wasn’t asking him to take her somewhere to shoot that she was conning janitors or physical education teachers to give her the keys to the gym so she could shoot whenever she wanted to.
“She always has been that way,” Thibault said. “That is how she got to be Division I player. She played all four years and every year got better at something. Because of that she also learned how to teach others to do that. What you can’t teach others to have is the inner heart to do it. That is the challenge for every coach, and I think she likes that challenge.”
Lewis coached Carly Thibault in her junior and senior years at East Lyme High. He remembers a “very intense” player who had a “strong desire to succeed.” In addition to being “everything a coach would want in a captain,” Lewis said Thibault was someone he “couldn’t get out of the gym,” even if she wasn’t 100 percent.
“She was a gym rat,” Lewis said. “She was the hardest-working player on a pretty hard-working team that had a lot of kids that were very motivated to do well and to achieve. It was a blessed coaching job. The kids were a coach’s dream. They came to play.”
Lewis said Carly was a wonderful player to coach because she came to work, listened, took instruction, worked hard, and never took a minute off or a practice off. In fact, he said he would almost have to restrain her because she didn’t want to sit down, come out of a game, or rest.
The Day’s Mike DiMauro wrote when Thibault committed to Monmouth that she earned statewide recognition after she played much of the postseason of her junior season wearing a mask to protect a broken nose she suffered in practice. She also played with an injury to her knee and a scratch to her eye she received against Bridgeport Kolbe Cathedral in the Class L state championship game.
Years later, Lewis isn’t surprised Thibault has joined the coaching staff of an up-and-coming program in one of the nation’s top conferences.
“She will put in the hours and do the nuts and bolts and work long hours because she is a very driven young lady,” Lewis said. “Those kind of people are always going to be successful, and she has the personality and attributes to be successful. She is very driven and also very personable, so you can talk to her.”
Carly Thibault is eager to put those traits to use as a Bulldog. She said it didn’t take her long to find out her mentality meshed with Schaefer’s and that she wanted to prove to him her age and relative inexperience weren’t going to hold her back. Now Thibault is focused on grinding and excelling on a path many never imagined she would take.
“His style of play is one I loved playing,” Thibault said of Schaefer’s brand of basketball. “I was never talented enough or tall enough or never athletic enough to rely on my natural ability. I had to work for a lot of what I got on the floor. I feel like our personalities meshed right away because we kind of are go-getters and do all of the dirty work. That was exciting for me to come work for a program that embodies that and believes in that.
“I invite that challenge because I know a lot of people thought that about me as a high school basketball player, that I wasn’t tall enough, fast enough, athletic enough, so I loved that challenge and I love proving people wrong. As a coach, it is the same thing. I walk into the gym and I am not the first person you see because I am 5-4. I look younger than most, but I invite that challenge. I am going to do my work and help the program be the best it can be, and I hope that speaks for itself.”
Follow Dispatch sports editor Adam Minichino on Twitter @ctsportseditor
Adam Minichino is the former Sports Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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