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Caryn Jarocki has a 370-125 career record
Caryn Jarocki has a presence about her.
It isn’t about the multiple state championships she has won at the helm of the Highlands Ranch girl's basketball team. And it isn’t from the numerous honors — including two All-Colorado Coach of the Year awards from the Rocky Mountain News — she has picked up in her 23-year career.
When Jarocki steps on the court to lead the Falcons, she doesn’t have to do anything out of the ordinary.
People just know.
Jarocki’s good.
Not an in-your-face coach, Caryn Jarocki
makes a point
The Illinois native, in her 12th year as head coach at Highlands Ranch, is one of just four female coaches who will lead teams into the 16-squad black bracket this week at the Nike Tournament of Champions in Chandler, Ariz. And, as the five-time Colorado large school champions have many times before, the Falcons will rise to the occasion under their coach’s watchful eye.
"With her teams, it’s not necessarily about Xs and Os," said Bill Bradley, head coach at ThunderRidge High in Colorado. "Their kids come to play, and she doesn’t over-coach. Caryn just coaches."
Jarocki’s Falcons, winners of five of the past eight 5A Colorado titles, had given up the title only to Centennial League opponent ThunderRidge, which won it from 2003 to 2005. The 2004 title was Bradley’s first year as head coach.
"We’re in this fraternity of coaches," Bradley said. "And she’s just a normal person in this fraternity. She’s laid back, she’s not high strung. A lot of these real successful coaches want you to know it."
But Jarocki isn’t an in-your-face success. The female coach, somewhat of a rarity in girl's basketball, has racked up a 370-125 record — an impressive 74.7 percent — as a head coach.
Jarocki got into coaching a year earlier than she intended. Her second torn anterior cruciate ligament, at the end of the summer leading up to her senior season at University of Denver, led her there. Jarocki, who had intentions of being a coach and teacher before she headed to college, was asked if she would be interested in coaching a seventh-grade girls basketball team since she couldn’t play her senior season."We had to have the no-screaming rule," Jarocki said, laughing. "Because seventh-grade girls, all they do is scream a lot and yell at each other for the ball."
After one season, Jarocki moved up to a ninth-grade boys team for a year. From there, she moved on to a junior varsity girls team and then to her first varsity job, as head coach at Colorado Academy. She led the Mustangs for 11 years before the job at Highlands Ranch opened up, and she couldn’t pass up the opportunity. With the Falcons, she is 219-52, including 5-1 this season, with the team’s only early blemish a 58-51 loss to No. 4 Sacred Heart Cathedral of San Francisco in the Northwest Nike Invitational.
The league is tough and the players are athletic. And, as has become the norm, Jarocki is surrounded by male counterparts once again.
"In the league we’re in, and even in (Colorado), there aren’t a lot of women coaches," Jarocki said. "I think that’s unfortunate. I think the girls could be great coaches that have played for me. I just don’t know why they don’t go into it."
It’s two different worlds from when Jarocki was getting into coaching, within a decade of Title IX’s beginnings when women coached girls, to the girls of today, who are told they can be anything they want to be when they grow up.
"It didn’t seem strange then, because I think my freshman year was only the second year they had sanctioned girl's basketball," Jarocki said. "(The men) didn’t want to coach the girls, they only wanted to coach the guys. "
Caryn Jarocki consults with star guard
Alyssa Fressle
So the coach-to-be had two strong female role models as a player, her high-school varsity coach and her college coach.
"It’s starting to come back around a little bit, but it’s not easy," Jarocki said. "I don’t think a lot of them are going into fields that are even closely related to coaching. And if they are, they want to coach college and go that route. "I had one (former player) tell me that when she got out of college, she would go coach a college and I could come be her assistant."
But Jarocki is happy where she is. With Highlands Ranch, she has had opportunities for vote for the WBCA High School All-Americans, compete in arguably the toughest league in Colorado and, this past summer, work with high school players for the USA Basketball program. She spent a week in June as head coach of the USA White Team in the 2007 USA Basketball Women’s Development Festival at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo., just down the road from Highlands Ranch. The girls were split into three teams, each with a head coach and assistant coach.
Ed Shepard, the girls basketball coach at Proctor R. Hug High in Reno, Nev., was Jarocki’s partner for the week.
"We just hit it off like we’d been coaching together forever," Shepard said. "She’s just really easy to get along with and work with."
Jarocki and Shepard’s squad that included USC-bound Ashley Corral, Connecticut signee Caroline Doty and Long Beach Poly junior Monique Oliver, went 5-0, winning the gold medal game the final day.
"She shot with the girls, she laughed with them, you could tell she’d played," Shepard said. "She certainly got respect. … Coach or player, you just knew it would be a good thing to listen to her."
At the USA Basketball event, Jarocki was one of four female coaches in six spots, giving every 12-girl squad at least one successful female coach to look up to.
"I think they need more role models," Jarocki said of female coaches. "But more than anything, I think they need good coaches, whether it's guys or girls."
Caryn Jarocki talks to players she led to the gold medal at the USA Basketball Youth Development Festival
