Diane Richardson lends her voice to "Can't Retire From This" event

If there was anyone sitting at the Howard Gittis Student Center who might have been unfamiliar with Temple women’s basketball coach Diane Richardson’s impact in the DMV prior to arriving on North Broad Street, they started to get it soon after the lights went down at the “Can’t Retire from This” documentary screening.

Richardson was a main character in the documentary, part of a women’s basketball event sponsored by Coaches vs. Cancer that also included a live podcast recording with former Temple women’s basketball star Marilyn Stephens and a conversation with Melanie Page, the founder and director of the Can’t Retire Project. 

Richardson’s Temple players in attendance gave their head coach a literal shout-out and smiled once they saw her on the screen.

But the event wasn’t just about Richardson. It was also about highlighting the women who had paved the way for women’s basketball to get where it is today. Richardson, longtime Philly girls basketball coach Yolanda Laney, former Army women’s hoops coach Lynn Arturi-Chiavaro and Stephens, a Temple Hall of Famer, spoke about their experiences playing basketball.

Both the good—and the bad.

“It definitely has evolved,” Richardson said of the growth of the women’s game. “To be back in the day when you could actually get a scholarship to go to play basketball – and that was a really big deal back then and it made a difference in my life, because I would not have been able to go to college – it showed me so many different things when I went away to college, and so many different people and so many different ways I could live my life because I could play basketball.”

After a basketball and track career at Frostburg State University, Richardson began her career in the business world as a vice president for Bank of America before getting back into coaching. At  Riverdale Baptist School in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, Richardson began to build a nationally-recognized program. 

Richardson even coached against Page while at the boys and girls club. And while the two never were on the same team, they both knew of each other.

Page began the Can’t Retire From This project in the middle of COVID-19, while her boredom was at an all-time high, she said. She had played basketball growing up, but she was unable to get away from the sport and used it to get eyes on players that made DMV basketball so great, like 2021 WNBA MVP Jonquel Jones, Monica McNutt and her idol, Nikki McCray, who played for the Washington Mystics.

Page also wants to do the same for nearly every city with a WNBA team, giving girls the dream she had of playing women’s basketball.

“​​With that representation and why ‘Can’t Retire From This’ is the series that is becoming, it’s because I want to create more young girls that have that vantage point that I was privileged to have as a kid,” Page said. “We had season tickets for the Washington Mystics. We didn’t go to the Wizards games. We went to Washington Mystics. We had courtside seats, basically. It was accessible. It was everything.

“Being able to play against my peers and seeing people like Coach Rich and my mom be the leaders in business and as basketball players and coaches, that is all I knew. When I left the DMV area to go to college, that’s only when I realized this was not the reality.”

Stephens, Temple’s second-leading all-time scorer and the program’s career rebounding leader, spoke directly to Richardson’s current players about her playing career and how to not take anything for granted. She also reminisced about her time as a ball girl for the Philadelphia Fox, a Women’s Basketball League that folded in 1979, the same year it started.

Laney, Page and Richardson then chopped it up about the WNBA expansion team coming to the city in 2030 and how the sport is growing.

“One of the things, obviously, with Melanie doing the documentary and highlighting those before us and highlighting the people in Philly and then the Unrivaled team coming here,” Richardson said, “those kinds of things, when you put together that marketing strategy, it will be really nice five years from now when the team gets here. Nobody wants to have an empty stadium, not at all.”