Playing for Another Day

At practice, she brought a stool.

Two to two-and-a-half hours on your feet is part of the job for most coaches, but during the 2023–24 season at Denison University, Maureen "Mo" Hirt had to adjust. She kept her whistle, kept her voice, kept running practice, but when the fatigue hit, she sat. Sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes longer, then back up again when she could.

A few weeks earlier, everything had looked normal. It was the summer of 2023, and Hirt was out recruiting, building what she hoped would be another competitive Division III roster. She had a lingering cough and felt unusually tired, but, like most coaches in the middle of a recruiting cycle, she pushed through.

On Halloween, she finally went to the hospital.

A chest X-ray prompted a call from her doctor asking whether she was sitting down. There was a mass in her chest. By the next day, she was admitted to the hospital, where she would spend 18 days. The diagnosis was Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Her players didn't know the details right away, but they knew something serious had happened. By the time the season began, they understood more. They weren't worried about basketball. They were worried about her.

Hirt, though, made a different decision about how the season would unfold. As chemotherapy treatments began — every few weeks, each one taking a physical toll — she worked to keep the experience as close to normal as possible for her players. Practice stayed on schedule. Games were played. The structure of a season remained intact. She coached.

Some days, that meant standing through drills. Other days, it meant sitting on that stool, conserving energy, instructing from the sideline, letting assistants carry more of the physical load. But she stayed present, and over time, the team began to take on that same steadiness.

The 2023–24 season didn't end with a championship. And the story didn't resolve neatly either. In April of 2024, Hirt learned the initial chemotherapy had only been partially successful. More treatment followed, including an autologous stem cell transplant; a process she later described as a kind of "factory reset" for the body.

It was nearly two full years from diagnosis to recovery. By the time the 2024–25 season arrived, she was on the other side of it.

Denison wasn't expected to contend for a national title. In Division III, with roughly 450 programs competing, they hadn't received a single Top-25 vote at the start of the year. There were no preseason expectations, no national attention, no indication that anything unusual was about to happen. They just kept playing.

Seventeen straight wins followed. The team moved through its schedule, then through the NCAA tournament, advancing round by round. At some point, the usual conversation, about rankings, matchups and expectations, never really took hold inside the group. Hirt didn't emphasize where they might end up. She kept it where it had been all along.

Fight for another day together.

It's a simple phrase, but over the course of a season, it has a way of shaping how a team approaches everything. The next possession matters. The next practice matters, not because of what either one leads to, but because it's the one in front of you.

By the time Denison reached the national championship game, they were no longer an unknown team. But they still played like one — connected, disciplined, focused on the moment rather than the stage.

They won. The first national championship in the program's history.

After the championship, a journalist who covers Division III basketball mentioned something about Coach Mo that had nothing to do with the final score. He'd been leaving the building after an interview and she stopped him. She had an extra sandwich. She wasn't going to eat it. Did he want it?

The journalist, Gordon Mann, who writes for d3sports.com and has covered the league for years, said it without any setup: she didn't know him. She could have given it to anyone. But that's who she is. And a team that watches its coach closely enough will eventually start to look just like her.

A coach who showed up to practice on a stool, kept her whistle and refused to let the season belong to her illness, her players were watching all of it. Not the championship or the winning streak. The stool. The whistle. The decision, made over and over, to be there.

That's what they carried into March.