And if UD got both, they’d be the only incoming freshman added to a senior laden team for the 2011-12 season.
As everyone now knows, the Flyers plan worked to perfection.
Hoover and Malott not only ended up lifelong friends – from college roommates all four years to now 29-year-old married women living just 20 minutes from each other – but they became towering pillars of the program like no other combo in UD women’s basketball history.
The 5-foot-9 Hoover and the 6-foot-4 Malott helped set the lofty standard for UD women that guides the program today, especially the current 23-4 team that is the Atlantic 10 regular season champion and the No. 1 seed in the A-10 Tournament.
The pair combined for 3,352 points and 1,453 rebounds in their UD careers. They won All A-10 honors in each of their four seasons – Hoover was the A-10 Player of the Year as a junior – and their teams made the NCAA Tournament all four years.
The highlight came senior season when the Flyers advanced to the Elite Eight and had UConn – the powerhouse that had won 34 straight games and had kayoed its first three tournament opponents by an average of 47.7 points – on the ropes for more than half the game before falling.
The Flyers won 102 of 127 games with Hoover and Malott in uniform and, after their college careers, the pair became the first two UD women’s players drafted by the WNBA. Malott was the eighth overall pick by the Washington Mystics and Hoover was the 31st pick by the Los Angeles Sparks.
Saturday, Hoover and Malott will be inducted into UD’s Athletics Hall of Fame along with Mike Harmeyer, a two-time Division III All-America football player from the mid-1980s, and former soccer coach, Mike Tucker, who is the winningest coach in program history and has the fourth best winning percentage (73.6) of any coach in any sport in the history of the school.
Tucker was named the Atlantic 10 Coach of the Year five times in his 22-year career and his teams won 20 regular season and league tournament titles.
Hoover said she was surprised when she learned of her and Malott’s enshrinement:
“I feel like we are pretty young to even be considered. I’m just humbled to have my name next to all the other Hall of Famers and be part of the history of the University of Dayton.”
She credited Malott for her induction: “I wouldn’t have had anywhere near the career I did at UD without her.”
‘No going down from here’
With Jim Jabir as the Flyers head coach, UD made its first ever trip to the NCAA Tournament in 2010, two seasons before Malott and Hoover joined the program.
The Flyers edged TCU that year and then fell to Tennessee. They made the tournament again the next year and that set the stage for the arrival of the promising teens.
“When we came in, the seniors instilled in us: ‘There’s no going down from here. We’re only going up!’” Hoover remembered. “That’s what out mindset was for four years. And while NCAA Tournament was our standard every single year, we were determined to do more.
“We wanted to get past the tournament’s first weekend and to do that, we couldn’t look at the Power 5 teams as being better than us just because of the name on their chests.”
And that’s just what the Flyers did in the 2015 NCAA Tournament, pushing their way past Iowa State and then Kentucky to make the Sweet Sixteen for the first time ever. Then they knocked off Louisville to advance to the Elite Eight and the matchup with mighty UConn.
The Huskies were 33-point favorites, but the Flyers went toe to toe with them, making seven of 10 three pointers in the first half and outrebounding them to lead 44-43 at the break.
“We were little, tiny Dayton, this No. 7 seed that wasn’t supposed to do a whole lot against these Power 5 teams, but we’d kept winning,” Hoover said.
“And I tell people all the time, if we had run into any other team besides UConn, we’d have made it to the Final Four. I’m not the type person to say stuff like that, but our team was on such a high roll, we would have beaten anyone. It’s just that that UConn team was absolutely stacked.”
After the game UConn coach Geno Auriemma saluted the Flyers: “This is one of the best teams we’ve played in the last five years!”
And he had special praise for Hoover and Malott.
WNBA scouts saw something in them, as well. Malott overcame injuries and played two seasons with the Mystics and had off-season stints in Turkey and Australia twice and Latvia.
Hoover joined the Sparks, then coached by Brian Agler, the former Wittenberg star who’s now the school’s athletics director.
She played 12 games with L.A. and was cut after the All Star Game. She turned down offers to play overseas, came back home, and married her boyfriend, Jake Holder.
Malott was playing in Turkey at the time and was dismayed she couldn’t get away to be in the wedding.
Two years later – in December of 2017 – Hoover had her first daughter, Raegen. She also has 16-month-old, Blakelyn and in August she’s due to have the couple’s third daughter.
“We’ll almost have enough for a basketball team,” she laughed.
Hoover works at Wright Patterson Air Force Base as a cost/price analyst and she and Jake are building a new home on a farm outside their hometown of Bellbrook.
Malott married Andy McCarthy in September. He’s an assistant basketball coach at Bishop Fenwick High. The couple lives in Franklin Township and she’s the operations director of the Atrium Family YMCA in Middletown.
Malott said she misses basketball and one day might like to do some coaching.
Hoover has thought of coaching, too. But with three young daughters, she knows her time will be limited:
“Hopefully my girls will get into basketball and, if the opportunity would present itself – even if it was coaching the first grade Bellbrook peewee team – I’d do it.
“Of course, I might have to (scale it back) a bit from what I’m used to.”
Full circle
While the current Flyers are living up to the standard she and Hoover once set on the court, Malott admitted the most indelible memories from her UD days aren’t from the games. They come from the relationships she had with coaches and teammates and especially with Hoover.
“I was just in Ally’s wedding this past September,” Hoover said. “And my daughter, Raegan, was her flower girl.
“It’s crazy how this has all come full circle.”
And yet Hoover is the first to admit her oldest daughter is cut from a little different cloth than she was.
“I grew up a huge tomboy,” she laughed. “I had two older brothers and I wanted to be exactly like them.”
She once told me she’d broken her nose three times playing basketball and rough housing.
“My oldest daughter is really putting me through the wringer,” she laughed. “She’s all about princesses and makeup. She’s the complete opposite of me.”
Malott chuckled about that: “I don’t know if Andrea will say it, but I think she’s struggling with that a little bit.”
“Yeah, I told my mom she’s finally got the true daughter she once was hoping for – just 25 years later,” Hoover said. Maybe so, but on Saturday, her mom should be mighty proud of her as she stands alongside Malott at midcourt during halftime of the Flyers’ men’s game with Davidson at UD Arena and some 13,400 people cheer the pair who became so much more than UD coaches once dreamed for them.
They are best friends.
And now Hall of Famers, too.
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