PHILADELPHIA — Maddy Siegrist remembers being nervous.
“So nervous,” the Villanova star said this past week.
Since Siegrist had gotten to ‘Nova, she’d been hearing the name Shelly from her first coach, Harry Perretta. The mythical Shelly, as in Shelly Pennefather, was the program standard, especially for a scoring forward such as Siegrist. Shelly almost could have been out there with them during Siegrist’s first couple of seasons.
A broken ankle kept Siegrist off the court her first year, but the 6-foot-1 forward found her spotlight the next season, leading Villanova with 18.8 points a game, earning Big East rookie of the year.
“Do you want to go see her?” Perretta said after that season.
That’s what made Siegrist so nervous. To Perretta, his first star is still Pennefather, the former three-time Big East player of the year, and the national player of the year in 1987. He still usually calls her Shelly. But their visit to Virginia that summer would be to see Pennefather, now Sister Rose Marie of the Queen of Angels, since becoming a cloistered nun in 1994.
The Poor Clares are a strict religious order. After Sister Rose Marie entered that convent, she has never left. Her vocation is to contemplate and fix attention upon God, waking up from a straw mattress at fixed overnight hours for prayer.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” Siegrist said. “I grew up in a very Catholic family. I was thinking The Sound of Music in my head.”
When Pennefather first became Sister Rose Marie — leaving a lucrative professional career in Japan — Perretta found out he could visit her once a year.
“I bring all different kinds of stuff,” Perretta said. “Soups, crackers, olives, flour. You name it, we bring it. Can’t bring any meat. People donate food. The week and a half leading up to that is just as happy a time for me, everybody bringing things over.”
Perretta often makes the trips with Villanova senior associate athletic director Lynn Tighe, who had played with Pennefather.
“You’re going to a grocery store that morning, running around the aisles, looking for some can of soup that doesn’t exist,” Siegrist said.
She’s gone three times now to see Sister Rose Marie. That first time … the first surprise, a house in a neighborhood in Alexandria, Va., attached to a chapel, but not a massive convent like in The Sound of Music.
On arrival, bringing a bunch of food in, Perretta went into a visitation room, where a screen separates visitors from Sister Rose Marie.
“If you want to give her pictures, you have to slide them under the screen, or there’s a little swivel you can put things in,” Perretta said.
Siegrist thinks it was Tighe who told Sister Rose Marie that Maddy, sitting there with them by then, had broken her freshman scoring record.
“Well, why don’t you get them all?” Sister Rose Marie told Siegrist of her scoring records. “I don’t need them in here.”
So, it is done. Friday night, at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., Siegrist scored 23 points, giving her 2,414 for her career, making her Villanova’s all-time leading scorer, men or women. She passed Shelly, who had scored 2,408.
The graciousness of her predecessor’s treating this with such a light touch has stayed with Siegrist all these years.
“She said to me on a number of occasions, ‘Teach me exactly the way you taught Shelly,’ ” Perretta said of Siegrist.
Perretta coached Siegrist for only a season before retiring, succeeded by his own former player and assistant, Denise Dillon. He isn’t sure if the alternative history of his coaching Siegrist the whole time would have produced more than 2,408 points.
“Denise has done a fantastic job of isolating her and getting the ball to her,” Perretta said. “We didn’t run as many isolation plays for Shelly.”
Even in retirement, with Dillon’s permission, Perretta often has gotten in the gym with Siegrist, working on little moves. Perretta admits this all is so special for him to watch.
“There’s a lot of similarities between the two,” Perretta said. “I almost feel like it’s my last hurrah, like I’m coaching Shelly. It’s a really cool feeling. I probably didn’t think I’d coach a kid like that again.”
Siegrist feels a bond beyond their points. She’ll get a letter in Villanova’s basketball office, return address, the convent. Sister Rose Marie often will include a prayer card.
“Since that first time, I wrote her a couple of letters throughout the year,” Siegrist said. “She always writes back. It’s so special and so cool to see what a regular person she is. You don’t expect it. It’s so different. It’s the closest you can be to God on this earth, what she’s doing.”
Siegrist’s own faith is important to her. Perretta doesn’t wear his on his sleeve — he’s more likely to tell you how he taught Shelly how to handicap horse races. But, he said, they also would pray the rosary together on a couple of trips to her home in Utica, N.Y. That wasn’t a regular thing for him, Perretta said, but it was natural in this case, years before Shelly became Sister Rose Marie.
“I said the rosary before I met Shelly,” Perretta said. “For some reason, when she first got to Villanova, me and her were like oil and water. Me yelling at her, she didn’t like it. I believe in fate. For some reason, we were thrown together.”
They still share laughs on their visits. One time, Perretta asked, “Do you guys vote?”
Yes, his former player told him, and you’ll never guess what they label the nuns on the absentee ballot form.
“Incarcerated,” Perretta relayed, still cracking up.
Sister Rose Marie won’t know this latest news about moving to No. 2 on Villanova’s all-time list until the summer, when Perretta makes his next visit, or maybe when Siegrist writes her next letter.
A safe prediction: Sister Rose Marie of the Queen of Angels will receive the news of this lost worldly possession — and she will smile.
