LEXINGTON, S.C. — Former Wyoming basketball star Molly Marso, who saw her college career cut heartbreakingly short by an accident in 1999, has returned to the sport she loves as a winning high school coach in South Carolina.
Molly Goodrich sat upright in her cushioned chair recently over a cup of hot caramel macchiato at newly opened Righteous Grounds Coffee Roasters just down the street from her home in the Columbia suburb of Lexington.
Talk turned toward a pivotal point in her life.
Marso was 19 years old and a rising sophomore on the University of Wyoming women’s basketball team when she was hurt.
She was recognized throughout the state as one of the greatest girls’ high school basketball players in Wyoming history.
Four consecutive state Class 4A championships at Campbell County High School in Gillette and four-time all-state accolades elevated her to legendary status.
Then it all abruptly ended before her college career could really begin.
While running routine wind sprints at UW's Arena-Auditorium in Laramie in September 1999, her kneecap became displaced from her right leg. With every move, the kneecap either snapped back in place or dislodged once again.
Marso’s basketball playing career was done.
From Player To Coach
Working through the loneliness and depression of losing her athletic scholarship and basketball career took time and ultimately led to a decision to re-direct her life.
She shifted majors from physical therapy to kinesiology/health. She no longer aimed for a future of rehabilitating others and, instead, sought a career in coaching.
She landed her first head-coaching assignment at Douglas High School right out of college at age 23.
Her teams won a pair of Class 3A state titles and finsihed runner-up in another of her five seasons at Douglas.
Then she left coaching to raise a family.
The lure of basketball kept pulling at her, and the former Wyoming star returned to coaching after upon moving to South Carolina, and just finished her 11th season at Lexington High School.
Goodrich is the school’s all-time leader in wins and has built the program into a state power, including posting a 22-5 record this past saeason, according to MaxPreps.
“I’ve coached with and against the best in the game, and I can definitely state that Molly Goodrich is one of the absolute best in the business,” said Bailey Harris, who won 637 games in 32 seasons as head boys basketball coach at Lexington High. “The best compliment I can give any coach is that I would love for my child to play for them.”
Growing Up Gillette
Marso’s upbringing in Gillette was anything but normal.
While most fifth graders were a couple of hours from wakeup calls to prepare for school in the mornings, Molly and her two older brothers, Brian and Mike, were answering a 5:30 a.m. alarm.
Five days a week year-round, the trio (and later with their younger sister, Katie) was dressed and out the door by 5:45.
Their mother, Jeanie, taxied them to the Campbell County Recreation Center for a 6 a.m. workout.
Mom walked laps in the Rec Center gymnasium. Her sons and daughter worked on their basketball game, from shooting drills to ball-handling exercises to defensive fundamentals.
Molly was not allowed — all the way through her high school days — to take a part-time job. Basketball was her job.
When the budding basketball stars were not in a gymnasium, they were playing in the family’s driveway. On rainy days, they worked on fundamentals in the garage.
‘A Pretty Tough Girl'
This was all at the behest of Garland Marso, who gave his children little wiggle room in developing a love for the game of basketball that he so much enjoyed.
While Brian and Mike developed into outstanding high school players, her father recognized that Molly possessed an even more advanced talent, passion, and intelligence for the game.
He formed the Gillette Force AAU travel team for seventh, eighth and ninth graders when Molly was younger. She practiced with and played against the older girls.
“She was kind of a tomboy, a pretty tough girl,” Dad says. “She’d jump in and do the drills. She wasn’t afraid of the older girls.”
Dad wore through four Chevrolet Suburbans during Molly’s summer AAU playing days, trading one in each time it reached 90,000 odometer miles.
Dad drove with one girl in the front seat, four in the back and four knee-to-knee in the far back.
The team traversed the Western United States for tournaments, playing as many as 70 games in a summer from Montana to Texas, and from California to Wisconsin.
By Molly’s freshman season at Campbell County High School, her father experienced some trepidation about his daughter playing on the varsity squad.
She might be better suited being a member of the junior varsity, he figured, instead of sitting on the varsity bench.
At the first varsity tryout, Molly caught an elbow from a 6-foot-2 center and her nose bled profusely. She refused to leave the court.
That was convincing evidence for Ross Hall, Campbell County’s head coach at time.
“I’m going to have her on the varsity,” Hall told Molly’s dad. She became the second player in Campbell County girls’ history to start on the varsity as a freshman.
Over her four high school seasons, Campbell County won 90 of 97 games and once earned a national top 25 ranking from USA Today.
The Camels lost only once to a team from Wyoming. During Molly’s sophomore season, Campbell County played without two suspended starters and fell to Green River.
It marked perhaps the only time Molly cried following a game.
Green River’s chant directed at Molly and her teammates during the boys’ game that followed has stuck with Marso since: “Don’t be sad, don’t be blue, we beat your girls’ team, too."
Senior Sensation
She handed out 159 assists during her senior season of 1998, which at the time was the second-most in Wyoming girls basketball history.
She left the Gillette school as the all-time Wyoming career leader (now second) in assists with 558 and in career steals (now 13th) with 396.
Marso was a 5-foot-6 dynamo of a point guard. She was street-tough, played without fear and tormented opposing players with an attacking defensive style that can only be described politely as tenacious.
“When we are practicing against her,” Molly’s sister, Katie, told the Gillette News Record in 1997, “I yell, ‘I don’t got Molly.’”
Marso was named to several national All-America teams. She was both the Gatorade Circle of Champions state player of the year and Miss Wyoming basketball in 1998. Wyoming-basketball.com recently named her one of the top 15 best girls’ players in state history.
Despite a bedroom adorned with trophies and certificates, perhaps her most noteworthy high school accomplishment was a speedy recovery from a torn ACL.
She suffered the injury during the summer before her senior season. Doctors told Molly six months was an optimistic timetable for returning to play. She was playing in five months and did not miss a game during her final season.
Marso began to hear from college coaches in the eighth grade. By her junior year, some 50 schools had contacted her.
Many dropped out of the sweepstakes following her injury, which did not make any difference to Marso. She was bent on attending the University of Wyoming, and it was the only school where she made an official recruiting visit.
She signed to play for coach Chad Lavin, who left Wyoming before Marso arrived on campus.
She started every game her freshman season, averaged seven points and led the team with four assists per game.
Marso suffered more losses in a 7-19 season than she did in all of her years of playing travel ball and high school ball combined.
Kneecapped
Then came the kneecap injury.
Two surgeries in Colorado, both performed by renowned sports knee specialist Dr. J. Richard Steadman, left Molly with the prospect of a permanent disability.
From “eating and sleeping” basketball, as her younger sister once described Molly’s obsession with basketball, to never again being able to play was devastating.
She soothed her depression with long walks around the Wyoming campus with her yellow Labrador retriever, Bailey, who essentially served as her therapy dog.
“I was pretty low. I was really kind of alone,” Molly said. “I really leaned on God to get me through it. ... Going from an athlete to being just a student was very hard. I started playing when I was 5. To learn living without something you’ve had your whole life ... ”
Her voice trails off before she pivots to how the sudden conclusion of her playing career forever altered her outlook on basketball, particularly when she entered coaching.
"I really try to make it not their life,” she says of her players. “As much as we work, as much as we play, this is not your life. You need to find things outside of this so it doesn’t become your whole life.”
Behind The Whistle
Marso first coached at Laramie Junior High while a student at UW.
Upon graduation in 2002, she applied for the head coaching job at Douglas High School with no experience at that level.
No doubt, her legacy as a basketball player in northeast Wyoming helped her land the job.
“Everybody knew Molly,” her father says.
Her parents were living in Douglas at the time, her mother was a first-year teacher at Douglas Intermediate School.
Josh Goodrich also was a first-year teacher and assistant football coach at DHS.
Not long after the 2002-03 school year began, Marso and Goodrich began dating and were married in July 2004.
By then Molly Goodrich, she left coaching following the 2007 season to be a full-time mother.
Then the Goodriches made the cross-country move in 2014 to South Carolina where two of Josh’s brothers lived.
It was a bold move. Molly left her entire family behind in Wyoming. The couple did not have jobs.
After seven years out of coaching, Molly took an assistant girls’ basketball coaching position at Lexington High School while working part-time at nearby White Knoll Elementary School.
A year later, she was Lexington High’s head coach.
Molly’s dad had concerns about the job.
“I thought, ‘Are you sure you aren’t going to a graveyard there?'” he said. “Doesn’t sound like a place you’re going to be successful.”
The Lexington High girls’ program had fallen on hard times since winning state championships in 1976 And 1979.
Not long before Goodrich arrived, posters were hung in the school’s hallways pleading with girls to try out for the basketball team.
Her one season as the JV coach, she pulled girls from middle school to form a team. With a shortened roster, the team’s motto was “Eight is Enough.”
“I was a little surprised,” Goodrich says of the lack of interest in girls basketball. “It was more like something you do for fun. More like a club team.”
From Basement To Champions
From there, Goodrich worked her coaching magic.
In a little over a decade, her teams have won four championships in one of the state’s most competitive regions. Her 2019 squad ran up a 24-5 record and runner-up finish in the state’s highest classification (AAAA) tournament.
With a 22-5 record this season, Goodrich has a program-best 187 wins at Lexington. Add her 108 wins at Douglas, and Goodrich is five shy of 300 for her career.
Those who watched her play at Campbell County or coach at Douglas High would not recognize Goodrich on the sideline today.
Gone are the days of challenging officials’ calls or raising her voice to elicit better performances from her players. Instead, she only occasionally emits a piercing whistle through her fingers to her mouth.
She was much more direct during her Wyoming coaching days.
Bri (Goodrich) Andreen, a cousin of Josh Goodrich, played for Molly at Douglas. The two remain close friends.
“We had our first meeting ... and I thought ‘Who is this?’” Andreen said. “I was kind of thrown back. She was super intense that first meeting.”
One summer, the Campbell County team was returning from a tournament in Las Vegas with Molly at the wheel of a van.
A tire blew on the vehicle in Beaver, Utah. Worse yet, the van no longer had air conditioning in the searing June heat.
Tired of hearing players complain about the adverse conditions, Molly turned to her team and bellowed: “This is how we work on our mental toughness!”
Then there was halftime of the 2004 Class 3A state championship game against Thermopolis when Goodrich was none too happy about her team’s first-half performance.
At the conclusion of a spirited talk with her team, she kicked a chair in the locker room. She then hobbled on the sideline during the second half with a broken foot.
Her foot felt better after Douglas won, 42-39.
‘Be Like A Fish'
These days Goodrich fashions a Johnny Cash-look for every game, dressed in all-black jogger suit.
She is direct and demanding with her players. She takes pages from legendary men’s college coaches Dean Smith and Mike Krzyzewski with constant positive reinforcement to her players both during games and in practice.
“I don’t care if you miss four (shots) in a row,” she will tell a player. “You will make the next one.”
Or, “be like a fish. Think like a fish. They don’t remember anything. Move to the next play.”
She balances being a wife and mother to her daughters.
Josh is Lexington High’s official scorekeeper and sits at the end of the scorer’s table next to the team bench. Halle is a sophomore at Clemson University in South Carolina. Braidi is a junior starting point guard and the sparkplug for the Lexington High team.
Following a recent practice, Goodrich gathered her belongings and headed home to prepare a late dinner of pancakes, eggs and bacon (no grits).
At least an hour of her nightly routine during the basketball season includes heading to the couple’s bedroom for videotape study. The sessions extend to four or five hours on weekends.
Her love for the game of basketball has never waned.
Ron Morris is a Cheyenne-raised journalist, now retired in Lexington, South Carolina.
