The name Melissa Hearlihy is synonymous with excellence in high school sports. With 39 full seasons, 839 career victories and two girls’ basketball CIF State Championships with the Wolverines under her belt, Hearlihy announced her retirement from coaching earlier this summer. Hearlihy’s departure marks the end of an era for girls’ basketball at the school, having been with the team for 24 seasons.
Hearlihy said she is grateful to have worked alongside dedicated coaches at the school.
“All of the coaches are working really hard at our school,” Hearlihy said. “It’s demanded of us, but it’s also something they’re very passionate about. I love my colleagues, and I have been so fortunate.”
Hearlihy’s story is not just defined by her success in her final season with the program that culminated in the Division II CIF State championship she and the team earned in Sacramento. Her career would feel incomplete without the years of care and dedication that built the foundation for her final championship, Hearlihy said.
Hearlihy’s early days in basketball are rooted on the home court at Alvin High School in Texas. Hearlihy was recruited to play the sport during high school, and she played an older version of basketball until her senior year.
“At my high school in Texas, they didn’t have basketball, so I got recruited into the ninth-grade class for the very first class of basketball,” Hearlihy said. “We played six-man, which meant that you could not cross half-court. Three girls [were] on one side and three girls on the other side. One side was offensive, and the other side was defensive. Then by my senior year, they finally went to full-court basketball. That was my first experience playing basketball as you know it.”
Hearlihy played basketball and softball throughout college while attending the University of San Francisco. She got her first coaching job in 1984 as the JV head coach and varsity assistant at Bishop Alemany High School in Mission Hills while she worked on her Master’s Degree at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). Hearlihy quickly rose through the ranks of the Alemany girls’ basketball program, becoming head coach and a full-time faculty member in 1985. Hearlihy said she learned from her past teachers to create her dynamic coaching style.
“I went from being a player and then jumping the fence to a coach,” Hearlihy said. “I had a couple of really rough days. I was working on my Master’s at CSUN, and one of the professors that I had said, ‘What’s the matter with you today?’ And I said I’m struggling. And he said, ‘Well, are you taking notes?’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Well, when things go well, that’s easy, but when things don’t, are you taking notes? Are you learning?’ I could reflect back to all the [teachers] I had, take parts that I loved and parts that I didn’t and make those work and shape me as a coach.”
Hearlihy said her commitment to leadership, collaboration and resilience led her to high school girls’ basketball, where she found a deeper fulfillment of these principles.
“When you get into the real world, no matter what your line of work is going to be, you’ve got to learn how to work with others,” Hearlihy said. ” If you want to be at the highest level, you have to learn how to be a good boss, to be a good leader and to sit in an office with predominantly all men. That’s always been my journey and my purpose. If it was all about winning basketball, I would have gone to the collegiate [coaching] level had I been there. Instead, I got into high school [coaching] at Alemany High School, fell in love with it and stayed at that level for the rest of my career.
Hearlihy had a fruitful 10-year career at Alemany as she led the Warriors to three CIF Southern Section Championships, six CIF regional finals and a CIF state final appearance in 1998. Former Harvard-Westlake Head of Aquatics Rich Corso recruited Hearlihy to the school, where she became the girls’ basketball program head. Reflecting on her decision to transition from Alemany to Harvard-Westlake, Hearlihy said it was a pivotal moment in both her personal life and professional career.
“Harvard-Westlake was going to be something totally different than Alemany,” Hearlihy said. “I loved Alemany. I started there at 22 years old, and it was a Catholic school. I grew up there, and I had a lot of good people around me that formed me, but I felt like it was time for me to branch out into something different. When it was time to make that transition, there were some things that I wanted differently. I had young kids. I was pregnant with my second one, and my oldest one was five. I had to look down the road at what I wanted for them from a personal standpoint.”
Hearlihy said her connection to the school deepened when her own children became students, offering her a new perspective on the rigorous academic environment she already greatly appreciated.
“My growth through the school was going through it with the athletes,” Hearlihy said.“ Then my own children got there and I had an even different perspective because I was seeing the homework come home. I’m hearing about their day, both being athletes and what the expectations are. And on the outside, people look at our school as an affluent school, and that’s why these kids go to all of these amazing universities. That’s not why. The reason is because our teachers and our kids are very hard workers. I love that the kids are so driven.”
Hearlihy said her playing experience, particularly her early love for defense, became the foundation of her coaching philosophy.
“When I talked about the six-man game I played in high school, I was on the offensive side, so I got to score loads of points,” Hearlihy said. “Then when we went full court, I got to experience more about who I am. I was six feet tall, fast and a good athlete. I got excited about playing defense. When I was on teams that were very successful, it was because our defense was very successful. Defensively, that’s something you could show up and do every night and do it well. That spun me to the foundation of who I was going to be as a coach.”
Hearlihy entered her 2023-2024 season with the Wolverines with this philosophy more fully developed than ever before. It was much needed as the girls worked through injuries and adversity. In preseason, they lost forward Bella Spencer ’25 to an ACL injury. Forward and center Valentina Guerrero ’ 26 broke her nose mid-season and guard Angelina Habis ’27 suffered a concussion. Guard Jamie Yue ’24 suffered a knee injury during practice that would sideline her until January. Hearlihy said she gained renown for her focus on defense and further emphasized the coaching style in order to make up for the loss of the team’s key upperclassmen and starters.
“If you play Harvard-Westlake with Melissa Hearlihy at the helm, you’re going to play man-to-man defense,” Hearlihy said. “Late when we got in some trouble in the state-run [in 2024], we started playing some zone. I was steadfast in being a man-to-man coach, but I felt that zone was also really important to prepare my kids for the next level. If you can play man-to-man, you can play anything else. I always want my kids to not only be successful at my level but to be prepared for the next level. That was always really important to me.”
Hearlihy coached 18 athletes to college basketball and many more to achieve their full potential in all aspects of their lives. She said her success as a coach came from a mutual exchange of trust.
“One of the things that I’ve done really well in my career is take girls that are not talented but are driven,” Hearlihy said. “ I look at players like [Jayla Ruffus-Milner ’18 and Jayda Ruffus-Milner ’18] that I had and even some of the kids that were top athletes. It’s because I could find a way to get them to push beyond the box and to believe in themselves for us to beat teams that we really didn’t have any business beating. They believed in the system, they believed in themselves and they believed in me. I’m just going to keep bouncing back to looking at all the young women that have played for me and being a part of their journey.”
Along with other prestigious high school girls’ basketball awards, Hearlihy also laid claim as the second all-time leader in wins in California state history and was named the 2023 Women’s Basketball Coaches Association (WBCA) National High School Coach of the Year. Awards like these do not define a career; rather, Hearlihy said her success as a coach is rooted in upholding the core values of the game.
“What is changing about sports is that it’s concerning themselves more about what coaches are going to get out of it,” Hearlihy said. “As a coach, it may be very tough to keep the team unified because we’re so concerned about ourselves that we can’t be concerned about others. Sports used to be very community-based, and now it tends to be all over the place, and kids are trying to find the best fit for them. I would like to see us go back a little bit to caring about others because the more I care about you, if you’re on my team, the better we’re going to be. I just hope that we can hold on to personal integrity, to integrity of the sports we’re playing and to integrity of our school. If you ask people in the community and the basketball world, that’s always something that’s been very important to me.”
The school community, along with the 24 Wolverine teams coached by Hearlihy, would attest to her unwavering integrity. In retirement, Hearlihy hopes to coach golf to young players and begin to host local tournaments in her new home of local Huntington Beach harbor.
The Wolverines are forever grateful to Hearlihy, and as the team embarks on a new season, the doors to Taper Gymnasium will forever remain open to the emblematic head of the girls’ basketball program.
This story originally appeared in the fall edition of Big Red. Find the issue here.
