By MADDY VITALE
Stephanie Gaitley described her season coaching the Ocean City High School Red Raiders girls basketball team as a “fairy tale.”
Gaitley, a local legend who had a storied career playing high school and college ball, came back to help a team that had a difficult couple of seasons because of controversy over the former coaching staff.
The Raiders girls basketball team, with Gaitley at the helm and some excellent assistant coaches, ended a successful season with a 23-7 record and captured the South Jersey Group III Championship by defeating archrival Mainland.
“I feel like we left it better than when we got it. Anytime you win a championship, you feel you left a mark,” Gaitley, of Ocean City, said in an interview Tuesday. “You will always be tied to history together. I felt the players were great and the parents were great. I made friends for life. It was my home away from home.”
Before taking the position at OCHS, she spent 11 years as the head coach at Fordham University.
And soon, Gaitley will be back to college ball.
She accepted the position of head coach for the women’s program at Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU), which is located in Madison, N.J. On Tuesday, the college held a news conference to announce her hiring.
Some of Gaitley’s top players at OCHS attended the news conference, including Madelyn Adamson, Tori Vliet, Avery Jackson, Sophia Bishop and Ayanna Morton.
Gaitley’s husband, Frank Gaitley, said of some of her players attending the news conference, “They are great kids. Steph was emotional when she saw them. This team will be tight forever. It was an amazing year on and off the court.”
He added that other players would have been in attendance, but many of them had other practices.
Before she began her coaching career, Stephanie Gaitley played her first year of college basketball at the University of Delaware. The following three years of her college career, she played for Villanova University. The team won three Big Five championships and went on to the NCAA Final Four in 1982.
At OCHS, she was a standout from 1974-78 in rebounding and scoring. She was known then as Stephanie Vanderslice, her maiden name.
When parents spoke to Gaitley about returning to her old high school to take over as head coach for a season, she thought about it — but not for long.
“I went down to the beach and wrote down the pros and cons and everything was pros,” she explained. “The kids were going through a difficult situation. We wanted them to finish their high school with a good experience.”
Gaitley credited her assistant coaches, including her sister, Coco Lefkowitz, who not only attended FDU but played basketball there, her nephew, Ocean City Police Officer Jack Davis and Emily Gillian, with working together to help lift up the players and create a cohesive team.
Her legacy at OCHS as the girls basketball coach is not completely her own, she said. Her legacy includes the help of her assistant coaches, she stressed.
“My legacy was kind of a group effort from our coaches – every one of us. We all grew as people both on and off the court and we all got better because of the experience,” Gaitley said, adding that it was a victorious celebration when the team took the South Jersey Group III Championship.
Now, she will have two basketball families.
“I will have my FDU family. And I will always have my Ocean City family,” she said.
