Hollywood brought us Love and Basketball, the 2000 motion picture starring Omar Epps and Sanaa Lathan. But Hollywood has nothing on basketball at Fenwick with Dave and Lenae Fergerson.
Call it, “Love and Coaching.”
It’s rare to have a husband-and-wife team coaching two sports at any school, but the same sport, at the same school? Welcome to the Fergerson household, which consists of Dave and Lenae and their two daughters, Leianna (9) and Zoie (7).
“It’s constant basketball (and) sometimes we have to say, ‘Let’s separate it,’” Lenae said in a relaxed interview last week with her husband in the Fenwick library. “Sometimes we have to tell each other, ‘No basketball talk.’”
Ditto for Dave.
“After a game, you let each other vent,” he said. “She vents or I vent. … ‘OK, I’m done, let’s be normal.’”
The pair were top-level collegiate players – Lenae, a hall-of-famer at DePaul and Dave, who is a year older, at St. Louis University. Post-college, they ended up in Europe, each playing 13 seasons, Lenae after a stint in the WNBA.
One of those seasons, they were playing for their respective men’s and women’s teams in Nantes, on the northwest coast of France.
“We played in the same city, became good friends, hanging out, working on our jump shots,” Dave reminisced. “When you’re in Europe, it’s easy to kind of fall for someone … ‘Hey, you speak English.’ ‘Hey, you’re an American.’ ‘Hey, let’s hang out.’”
They did. When the time came to come back to the U.S., they decided to see where life would take them, and it led them down the same path. They will celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary this year.
They’re still competitive about their jump shots. Keep in mind that Lenae scored over 2,000 points at DePaul because she had “the greenest of green lights” from her coach, Doug Bruno. That’s what made her a hall-of-famer, inducted in February.
Shooting is a source of friendly contention for the couple.
“As of late – she’s going to be in denial – I beat her the majority of the time,” Dave said. “In the beginning, she kicked my butt.”
Lenae’s look said it all.
Riiiiiight.
“He actually gives me a run for my money now, and he’s beaten me a couple of times,” she said. “I am still considered the shooter in the family, but we both can shoot.”
Back to Dave.
“She always says, ‘You couldn’t shoot before you met me,’” he said. “I’m like, ‘That’s not true.’”
All kidding aside, these coaches care deeply for basketball, their players and Fenwick. They tend to go to each other’s games and offer advice. To a point, of course. When it’s time to be parents, they’re fully committed to that role.
“Sometimes you can’t see everything,” said Lenae, head coach since 2022-23 and head of Fenwick’s Health and Physical Education Department. “In the stands, I may see things he might not be able to catch up on. We communicate on how to make each other’s teams better.”
Coaching boys and girls is different, they said, which shouldn’t be a surprise.
“Not every girl wants to score 20 points,” said Dave, who works in admissions at Fenwick and took over as boys head coach in 2023-24. “Every dude wants to score 20 points and if you have a team of 10 guys, it’s a 200-point game. You can’t even do that in a video game. One of the greatest challenges is to get kids to accept their role.”
But there’s another difference Lenae points out: how youngsters these days view their contributions.
“I think (with) social media, the platforms these kids have access to aren’t always positive,” she said. “The kids start getting worried about rankings and not so much playing and developing.
“Sometimes it becomes me, me, me versus at the end of the day, it’s a team sport. I always preach, one person is no bigger than the program.
“It’s going to take a team.”
But that’s one thing Dave and Lenae do have down from the marriage standpoint, especially after games. Lenae said her husband, who grew up in San Francisco following the Golden State Warriors’ famed Run TMC teams, is “more of a counselor for me than I am for him.
“He constantly helps me,” she said. “There’s life after basketball. Now you have to go in there and be mommy. I follow in his footsteps.”
Added her husband: “When the horn goes off, the kids are happy you’re just dad, and they don’t know if you won or lost.”