It is now official.
Long-time Marist women’s basketball assistant coach and former player Erin Doughty is taking over as the sixth head coach in the program’s history in Division I.
Doughty was named as the coach-in-waiting in late February 2022 after the school announced that Brian Giorgis, the winningest basketball coach in school history, would be stepping down following the 2022-23 season.
Giorgis ended his 21st and final season at Marist with a 464-202 record and won 11 MAAC Tournament titles. In a stretch from 2004-2015, his teams claimed 10 MAAC Tournament crowns and won the regular-season title 11 times out of a possible 12.
Once his teams made the NCAA Tournament, they were often a difficult matchup for higher-seeded teams. Giorgis racked up five wins in the Big Dance including a memorable run to the Sweet 16 in the 2006-07 season.
Giorgis was steadfast in his support of Doughty, publicly backing her several times for the job.
Doughty came into the program as a walk-on ahead of the 2002-03 campaign, Giorgis’ first as head coach. She was a member of the team until the end of the 2004-05 season, after which she transitioned into a student assistant role for her senior year.
She’s been coaching ever since, with the program’s Sweet 16 run coinciding with her first season as a full-time assistant coach. Doughty has been on the bench for all five of Marist’s NCAA Tournament wins and the streak of nine consecutive tournament appearances that began in her senior year in Poughkeepsie.
Doughty was promoted to associate head coach ahead of the 2018-19 season, making her Giorgis’ second-in-command. During her five seasons in that position, she worked as the team’s recruiting coordinator
Giorgis credits Doughty for doing a lot of the heavy lifting during the 2020-21 season (played in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic) in which the Red Foxes posted an 18-4 record and returned to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2014.
“She obviously impressed me enough throughout the years, but no more than 2020 when COVID was really heading in and we had to move to all these different places,” Giorgis told Center Field in February. “So I mostly coached from the sideline, and she was the person out there and we won the league championship. And I was impressed enough that I took the [MAAC] coach of the year plaque and put her name on it instead of mine.”
That trophy is displayed proudly on Doughty’s desk in the basketball coaches’ suite in the McCann Center. Now, the time has come for her to move into the office formerly occupied by her former coach and mentor. She’ll hope to turn the program around and start adding some more trophies to that collection.
Edited by Andrew Hard
Photo from Marist Athletics
