OXFORD — It's a big day for Maria Fantanarosa's two daughters.

Of course, there's the fact that their mom's Miami RedHawks women's basketball team — for the first time in school history — is playing in the NCAA Tournament, meeting Louisville this afternoon, March 23, in a first-round, ESPN-televised game in Bridgeport, Conn.

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Miami University head coach Maria Fantanarosa, along with her daughters, Allison Morrow (left) and Lauren Morrow, get ready to board the bus for the trip to the NCAA women?s basketball tournament.Click to enlarge

Miami University head coach Maria Fantanarosa packed Easter candy in her luggage for her children. The women's team is going to the NCAA basketball tournament in Connecticut.Click to enlarge

But to 5-year-old Lauren and 2-year-old Allison that's just the warm-up act. After all, this is Easter Sunday and their headliner is the Easter Bunny.

The girls are hoping Mom was right, that old Mr. Cottontail also makes the rounds in Connecticut and, like always, he'll hide their Easter baskets and there'll be a hunt for those colorful plastic eggs, too.

"I had to reassure them that the Easter Bunny travels," Fantanarosa said with a smile as she sat in her bouquet-filled office at Millett Hall prior to one of the team's final practices before leaving Oxford for the tournament.

And so today, instead of at their Fairfield Twp. home, the Easter egg hunt will take place in their Connecticut hotel suite just before Fantanarosa heads down to coach her 13th-seeded RedHawks against No. 4 seed Louisville.

"It's funny, I bought the girls Easter dresses last weekend and now everybody keeps asking me if they're going to wear them," Maria said. "I tell them, 'Sure they will. They'll just be in pink instead of red at the game.'

"And everyone goes, 'You mean they'll even wear those dresses to the game?' Of course they will. It's Easter Sunday."

And more than just a game, today is a celebration of resurrection — the round-ball kind — with Fantanarosa's Miami RedHawks.

This win's for you

The first flowers — roses for the whole coaching staff from Maria's husband, Tim Morrow — arrived early last Monday and soon after that more bouquets, festive helium balloons, faxes, text messages, e-mails and phone calls came pouring in.

They were from players' families, community and campus groups, alumni and coaching friends.

"Such a breath-taking response," Fantanarosa said quietly. "It's something none of us expected."

Yet, it shouldn't have been such a shock, not after the way she was treated when Miami toppled Ohio University in the Mid-American Conference Tournament's title game last weekend to win the league's automatic NCAA bid.

The 41-year-old Fantanarosa said she was grabbed by the RedHawks star player — senior guard Amanda Jackson from Springfield South: "She picked me off the floor and walked me across the court. The whole way I was talking in her ear, congratulating her, telling her she deserves it and should enjoy it.

"She finally put me down next to Jenna Schone and we were hugging and all of a sudden I had no control of my body.

"Two of the male cheerleaders had picked me up and it was like they were doing pushups with me, just hoisting me up and down above the crowd. I couldn't sit up, couldn't even breathe because I was giggling so hard. Part of it was the excitement of winning and part was that I was shocked: 'Are they really doing this?'

"I remember trying to keep one of my (two-inch) heels on, it was falling off, and finally I just flashed the No. 1 sign in the air."

People were saluting her in part because they knew what she'd done at Miami. How she inherited a team in disarray — the previous head coach had been dismissed midway through the season — and now had taken the program to new heights.

She also was celebrated because she's one of Miami's own, probably the most fabled women's basketball player ever to put on a RedHawks uniform.

She grew up in Kulpmont, Pa., a small, blue-collar, coal mining town that has gone through depressed times, though not when she stepped onto the basketball court.

Back then, she was known as "Fantan" and she's still remembered as one of the nation's most prolific scorers in girls' hoop history.

Terrelle Pryor — the all-world athlete from Jeannette, Pa., who Ohio State just signed as a quarterback — is also trumpeted for the 2,285 points he scored as a prep basketball player.

And yet, he'd need another 1,500 points even to get close to the 3,823 Fantanarosa scored at Mount Carmel Area High School. Over a 122-game career, she averaged 31.3 points. She's the second all-time scorer — boys and girls— in state history and recently was inducted into the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame.

Bypassing several major colleges, she came to Miami — where she knew an assistant coach — because as a top student she was impressed by the academics, she liked the college town feel of Oxford and "at that point I didn't want to be the headlines anymore."

A two-time All-MAC player, she scored 1,086 points and was taking graduate classes when she was coaxed into joining the Xavier staff. Four years later she was a South Carolina assistant, where her main job was scouting the opposition, people like Tennessee's Pat Summit and Vanderbilt's Jim Foster.

"It was a great experience to prepare me as a head coach," she said. And she needed all that training when she finally took over at Western Carolina, a rebuilding program where she found herself tested right off the bat.

"My first week there I remember driving on campus and seeing two players I recognized," she said. "I got out of my car, walked up and asked if they were so and so. One said, 'Yeah, are you our new coach?' I said yes and as we introduced ourselves, but the other player — one of the captains — didn't say a word and just walked away from me. But I didn't take it as an insult. I took it as a challenge."

Let the rebuilding begin

A year later, she was handed an even bigger challenge when she was offered the Miami job in June 1998.

The previous coach, Lisa Bradley, had been relieved of her job with 10 games left in the season after she immersed herself to the extreme in a Columbus-area church and began to spend less and less time around the program.

When Fantanarosa finally took over, it was too late to recruit even though there were just eight players left. That's when she began to scour the campus and finally found five walk-on players.

She endured more challenges by hold-over players who initially tried to ignore her rules. She slowly changed the attitudes, molded the talent and went 11-15:

"I was disappointed, but the administration treated me like I'd won the national championship. They said they never expected us to win more than three games."

In the years that have followed she's recruited some memorable talent— from 2002 MAC Player of the Year Heather Cusick to Jackson, now Miami's all-time leading scorer — and the program began to change.

Three years ago there was an 8-20 season after Jackson went down 10 minutes into the opener with a year-ending ACL injury. As she fell, she landed on center Laura Markwood, who suffered an MCL injury and was lost much the year. Earlier in the same game, another starter was lost with a broken thumb.

Before this season began, Schone gave Fantanarosa the team's new motto: "No distractions." That mantra was instantly put to the test when the RedHawks lost four players — two of them starters — to season-ending injuries before the first game.

And yet, the remaining band of believers have gone 23-10.

Teammates for life

Using basketball to turn around attitudes — and get stunning results — even worked when Fantanarosa first met Morrow, a former West Carrollton High basketball player.

"I was the only person in the gym one day when he and his (Miami) roommate and another guy walked in," she said with a laugh. "They wanted to play 2-on-2, but he didn't want to play on my team. His roommate said, 'I'll take the girl.'

"Well, we killed them. Just wiped the floor with them. Afterward Tim and I talked and it wasn't long before he asked me out."

Her husband — a local paint salesman — is still her teammate, she said. It's the only way she can pull off motherhood and coaching.

They share household chores and tending to their daughters — while also getting help from the Miami staff and a local day-care — and yet Fantanarosa is conflicted at times:

"You spend so much time coaching, scouting, doing public relations stuff that you're not at home and you feel guilty — like you're not the world's best mother.

"So you try to make it quality time and you try to mesh both worlds when you can."

That's what she was doing the other evening when she put a Barney tape on for her girls downstairs and then started to watch Louisville game film on her own:

"Within five minutes both girls were sitting next to me, saying, 'No, Mom, we'd rather watch basketball.'

"It was just so they could be with me. Pretty soon they were coloring on my scouting reports ... and I usually leave all those markings on them to remind me to stay grounded, to remember both worlds in my life."

But maybe it was something Allison said — something that made her mom chuckle again when she recounted it — that let her know home and hoops were teaming up just fine in that 2-year-old mind:

"She told me when she sees the Easter Bunny (today), right off she's gonna give him a high five."

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2156 or tarchdeacon@DaytonDailyNews.com.