To say that Old Dominion Women's Basketball coach Allison Greene '90 has always loved basketball would be a true understatement. A player throughout high school, Allison made the natural transition to collegiate ball and played at Dartmouth. Elected captain her senior year, Allison led the team to four consecutive Ivy League conference championships. Back then, however, the Dartmouth team did not participate at the national level so the team did not get a chance to test their skills against other conference champions from around the country. Therefore, when Allison graduated in 1990, she was itching for more competition and was not content to just hang up her sneakers.
She decided to take her talents abroad and play for the Portugal National team (at the time, no women's professional basketball leagues existed in the US). Her team went on to win three national championships. It was in Portugal that Allison also started to focus on her other great love -- diplomatic relations. She received a scholarship to pursue her interest in International Studies and went on to earn a Masters and Ph.D. in this area, with a focus on Conflict Resolution.
In addition to her passion for basketball and diplomatic relations, Allison has always had a fascination with languages. She grew up in a multilingual family (her father fluently speaks seven languages) and went on to study French, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese and is currently teaching herself Chinese. When asked, Allison modestly claims fluency in three of these languages. She jokes that she often gets funny looks from motorists because she practices Chinese intonations while she drives. Her motivation to learn Chinese is that the United States' relations with China are critical at the moment and Allison finds it quite shocking that there are only two high ranking U.S. officials that speak Chinese!
According to Allison, multilingual people are not a novelty in Europe; they are the norm. She recalls a powerful experience she had while riding on a EuRail train in France: A man boarded the train on his way home from work and struck up a conversation with her. Throughout the conversation, Allison gathered that he was a farmer who was fluent in five languages. This surprised Allison because in the United States, it is rare to find a person with this farmer's type of linguistic ability. Stereotypically, American citizens who are fluent in many languages have more than a high school education.
She remarked that this perception is (thankfully) changing in the US since the world is becoming a more global society with greater access to information. She believes that John Rassias has been a major impetus in this change (Rassias' involved method of learning languages is currently used at Dartmouth). Through a fast-paced "drill" session, students must think on their feet and respond quickly in the language they are learning. Rassias doesn't only teach you the semantics of the language, he makes you live it - and Alison believes that this makes a world of difference.
Allison gets to apply all of her great passions to her coaching practice. She incorporates all that she has learned about different cultures into the coaching arena. Her players are diverse, coming from various parts of the world and practicing many different religions and customs. She instills in her players an acceptance and appreciation of diversity. Her role as a coach is quite varied: she recruits international athletes; plans play strategies and trains the players. She also has the, often-unrecognized, role of educator, teacher, mentor, advisor, life and career counselor, mother and sister to her players. Her only dislike about the job is wishing she could be on the court during game time.
When asked what advice she would give to students trying to decide on a career path, she said, " Follow your heart! Many of my classmates went on to Law school and the corporate world, while I went overseas to play basketball. Money is great, but if you don't wake up happy to go to work every morning, then what kind of quality of life is that?"
