When coach Joe McKeown traveled to Philadelphia in December for the Hawk Classic at Saint Joseph’s University, it wasn’t just another stop on Northwestern’s non-conference schedule. It was a return to his roots.
The longtime women’s basketball coach, whose career has spanned more than four decades, took his staff to Dalessandro’s, a famous cheesesteak spot in northwest Philadelphia. With a smile, McKeown declared it the best sandwich in the city.
He also noticed something new: ATMs outside the cash-only corner hoagie shop, a small but telling sign of change in a city he still calls home, even though he left in 1983 for his first coaching job away from his alma mater.
That year, McKeown’s journey took him far from his roots in Philadelphia, but his career would wind its way back through New Mexico State, George Washington and ultimately, NU, where he’s been head coach since 2008.
McKeown has now won 775 games, but to those who’ve worked with him, his legacy isn’t just about victories — it’s his ability to forge families out of strangers.
“He’s just got that Philly swag about him,” said Tajama Abraham Ngongba, who played for McKeown at GW.
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McKeown grew up in northeast Philadelphia, attending Father Judge High School before enrolling at Mercer County Community College in Trenton, New Jersey. There, he earned Junior College National Small Player of the Year honors before transferring to Kent State.
The former guard played in 53 games for the Golden Flashes, averaging 3.4 points, 1.7 rebounds and 4.2 assists per game in his two-year mid-major career. Nearly 50 years later, McKeown’s 15 assists against Bowling Green still stands as a Kent State single-game record.
Before basketball took him to the national stage, McKeown found other ways of hustling. In the late 70s, he worked as a beer vendor at Veterans Stadium — the former home of the Phillies and Eagles — where rowdy fans often threw drinks back at him.
During college, McKeown would catch the train back from Trenton on Sundays, spending 12-hour shifts alongside childhood friends at local staple Tastykake.
“That was my NIL,” McKeown joked, reflecting on his early grind.
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Shortly after he graduated, McKeown left the City of Brotherly Love and headed west to the Sooner State. It was there that a three-year stint as an assistant coach would shift not only the trajectory of his career but also his personal life.
Seated at a “Bedlam” rivalry football game between Oklahoma and Oklahoma State, McKeown met a girl named Laura.
Then a student at OSU, Laura was a friend of one of the players McKeown coached at Oklahoma.
Attending college less than 100 miles from her hometown, Laura never heard anyone talk like McKeown before. His thick Philly accent sounded incomprehensible and when he asked her if she’d like to get a cocktail, she wasn’t quite sure what he meant.
The pair ended up at Eskimo Joe’s, a popular bar in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
When they went their separate ways, McKeown could only recall limited details. He knew her name and her hometown and was pretty sure her sorority had a Delta symbol in it.
Using that information, McKeown spent hours calling every fraternity and sorority at Oklahoma State until he found the right one: Delta Delta Delta.
“He’s a good recruiter,” said Meghan McKeown, the couple’s oldest daughter, reflecting on how her parents met.
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Joe and Laura married and moved west in 1986 when McKeown took his first head coaching job at New Mexico State. During his three years in Las Cruces, New Mexico, McKeown transformed the program, leading the team to its first two NCAA Tournament appearances in 1987 and 1988 before moving to GW.
It was there, in the nation’s capital, where McKeown spent the longest portion of his career and raised his family.
In 1991, the McKeowns welcomed their daughter Meghan. Now a commentator for Big Ten Network and a former NU basketball player, Meghan McKeown (Medill ’14) grew up surrounded by the game. As a kid, she’d sit in the corner of her dad’s practices, watching Disney movies on the VCR, before eventually getting the chance to step onto the court herself.
When Joe McKeown arrived at GW, he inherited a program that had never made an NCAA Tournament appearance. He was excited by the challenge because he figured that players who had yet to experience postseason success would be more willing to listen to a coach who had already tasted it during his time at New Mexico State.
As he traveled for recruiting, Joe McKeown always brought Meghan along, involving her in every aspect of the process — from picking out rental cars to handing her a notepad to take notes during his conversations with recruits.
“I grew up with a father who dedicated his whole entire career to uplifting women and uplifting women in women’s sports before that was a cool thing to do,” Meghan McKeown said.
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Under McKeown’s leadership, GW made 15 NCAA Tournament appearances in 19 seasons, including four Sweet Sixteen berths and one Elite Eight run. For the McKeown family, tournament games became a spring break tradition. Laura would pull Meghan, along with younger siblings Joey and Ally, out of school to attend games.
“My mom is the real MVP of this story, by the way,” Meghan McKeown said.
Ngongba, who played for McKeown at GW from 1993-97, said watching how McKeown integrated his family into the fabric of his teams had a profound impact on her as she pursued her own coaching career.
“Joe just did such a great job of showing, especially for women, that you can balance family and work and be really successful at it at the same time,” Ngongba said.
She recalled the coach’s family joining bus trips. She said Meghan was “like her little sister” and Laura was “the queen bee.”
During Ngongba’s time at GW, the team made extended postseason runs each year, including an Elite Eight appearance during her senior season in 1997.
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Myriah Cain, formerly Lonergan, played alongside Ngongba at GW. Despite a testy relationship with her coach throughout her college years, Cain credits McKeown with helping her grow not just as a player, but as a person too.
From the moment they met, Cain knew that McKeown’s world was much different from hers.
Cain spent her childhood playing basketball with a dirt-top hoop in an unincorporated town outside Shelbyville, Tennessee. With a horse in the yard and a single mother by her side, Cain didn’t come from the same background that some of GW’s players did.
When McKeown visited her during the recruiting process, she could tell her upbringing was foreign to him.
“He’s definitely a city-fied guy. But then there’s something so simple and genuine about him that he can be comfortable anywhere, and he can be comfortable around anyone,” Cain said.
Despite her uncertainty about leaving home, Cain was drawn to the idea of being part of something bigger in Washington, a place she had visited once when she won a high school essay contest. But her first season at GW was difficult.
After a tough year made her feel unmotivated and overwhelmed, Cain decided she’d pack her bags, leave school and return back home for good.
That’s when McKeown stepped in.
One day, she received a call from McKeown on her rotary phone. His message was simple: “Lonergan, I need you to meet me in Chattanooga.”
When they met for a meal, McKeown reassured Cain that she belonged at the school and that if she gave it another chance, she would eventually see it was the right fit for her.
“I feel like he stepped outside of himself as a coach in that moment and dealt with me as a father figure,” Kane said.
But their relationship wasn’t always as smooth sailing.
During Cain’s junior year, McKeown suspended her for talking back at practice. In response, Cain threw her jersey in the air and watched as it slowly parachuted down onto McKeown’s head. Her teammates couldn’t help but gasp at the spectacle.
The two joke about the incident today. The following season, McKeown named Cain the team’s sole captain, telling her to “redirect that energy, grow up and use all of that for good.”
“He gave me grace,” Cain said. “Even when I’m not sure I deserved that grace.”
Years later, McKeown showed up once again for Cain when her wedding was scheduled during the chaos of the 9/11 attacks. Many of her invited guests didn’t make it, but Joe and Laura McKeown hopped in their car to make the trip. He said he had to be there for her special day.
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McKeown’s success wasn’t confined to tallies in a win column or a place in the standings. While his teams routinely reached new heights in the competitive Atlantic 10 conference, many of his players remember experiences outside of games and practices more so than anything else.
Sarah-Jo Lawrence, who played for McKeown from 2004 to 2008, said one of her favorite team memories was a surprise trip to a Los Angeles Lakers game.
“We just turned the corner and there’s the Staples Center,” Lawrence said. “And it all clicked. I remember we just started jumping around and hugging each other and, like, laughing and crying on the bus.”
McKeown knew that the moment would be one he and his players would always remember, especially since Kobe Bryant was a hero to almost all of them.
“(Bryant) dropped like 50 that day, and I dropped a lot of money trying to get them tickets. But that’s okay. It was fun,” McKeown said.
For McKeown, those moments were part of a personal mission he knew was bigger than any potential successes on a basketball court.
Whether it was taking the team to Broadway shows or taking them to eat at the best restaurants, McKeown saw these experiences as essential to his responsibility as a coach.
“Part of my job is to prepare you for life after college,” McKeown said.
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After nearly two decades in the nation’s capital, McKeown was offered the head coaching job at NU — a program that didn’t have the same winning stamina his team achieved at GW. The ‘Cats finished in the bottom of the Big Ten in their previous season.
Leaving behind a team he worked tirelessly to build into one of the nation’s best squads wasn’t an easy decision. But as a father, he knew it was the right one. His son, Joey, who is autistic, had been struggling with the lack of resources available to him at his school in the D.C. suburbs.
“Schools didn’t want to deal with the special needs world, so we really were fighting hard at that,” McKeown said.
McKeown wrestled with the decision for some time before making the final call. But it was a round of golf with then-Washington Post beat writer and ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption” commentator Michael Wilbon (Medill ’80) that helped him settle on the move.
During their day at a Maryland golf course, Wilbon encouraged McKeown to take a closer look at his alma mater and consider the goals of NU’s new athletic director, Jim Phillips, and then-president, Henry Bienen.
“He says, ‘Joe, I think these people coming in are going to be different,’” McKeown said. “‘I think you’d like a lot of what they have going on.’”
Another important factor in McKeown’s decision was the school’s reputation of successful women’s sports programs. He shared mutual friends with NU women’s lacrosse coach Kelly Amonte Hiller, and he’d followed during her playing days at Maryland. As McKeown pondered a move to the Midwest, Amonte Hiller had already amassed four consecutive national championships in Evanston.
“I remember people telling me, ‘Look, you can win in women’s sports here,’ and that was important to me,” McKeown said.
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Just as he had at GW, McKeown inherited an NU program in dire need of a spark. Before coming to NU, he never had a losing season, and while his first year in Evanston was marked by growing pains — an 8-23 record — the program soon turned in a positive direction.
In 2009-10, McKeown led the ’Cats to the Women’s NIT, the school’s best finish since 1998. That fall, Meghan McKeown joined his team, and for the first time, ever Joe McKeown was coaching his own daughter.
Meghan said she had initial reservations about playing for her father. She worried that people might question whether she rightfully belonged on the roster.
“For our family and for the situation we were in with my brother (Joey), it just felt like the right decision,” Meghan McKeown said. “And obviously, it was a great opportunity to play at Northwestern and play for him.”
Joe McKeown led NU to its first NCAA Tournament appearance of the 21st century in 2015. He did it again in 2021, but McKeown often says that the team’s best shot at national success would have come in 2020, before the NCAA tournament was canceled due to COVID-19.
“I’ve had five, maybe six, teams over my career that I thought could get to the Final Four,” Joe McKeown said. “But our team here in 2020 was at that level.”
From 2018 to 2022, McKeown had Veronica Burton on his roster — an eventual first-round WNBA pick who was recently selected in the expansion draft to play for the Golden State Valkyries.
Though Burton and McKeown never ascended the postseason heights they had hoped for, McKeown continues to speak of her playing days as one of the pinnacles of his coaching career.
McKeown and Associate Head Coach Tangela Smith attended the WNBA draft when Burton was selected in 2022.
“You’re sitting there like, ‘Wow, it’s just surreal what we’ve been through,’” McKeown said.
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In the aftermath of Burton’s graduation, McKeown’s program has struggled to recuperate in an increasingly competitive, realigned Big Ten landscape. In its last two seasons, NU has collected just six conference wins compared to its 30 losses.
Despite limited success in the win column these past few seasons, McKeown remains optimistic as hopes to rebuild his program around a fresh talent pool.
Ahead of the 2024-25 season, McKeown bolstered his roster with three high-impact transfers.
Kyla Jones, Taylor Williams and Grace Sullivan will all entered the fray last fall. Although NU has yet to secure its first Big Ten win this season, McKeown’s lifelong recruiting acumen shines through, as these new additions have consistently made their mark as key contributors.
“Some years you have a great year, in spite of your record,” he said.
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