It’s rare that someone has to stop and think about which NCAA championship win was the best moment of his or her playing career.
Molly Cahill has to decide between three.
Cahill helped lead the team she now coaches to those championships during her four years of playing as a student-athlete from 2004 to 2007. Returning as an undergraduate assistant coach in 2008, she helped the team win a fourth consecutive championship.
After a break in 2009, Cahill returned to her alma mater in 2010 to coach full-time as an assistant to coach Brandon Brooks.
“She went to school here, she played here, she’s almost never left. She is a Bruin, that’s for sure,” Brooks said.
Part of her success as a player came from being “one of the most competitive and self-driven athletes” that former UCLA women’s water polo coach Adam Krikorian had ever seen. That drive, in part, led Krikorian to ask her to stay on the team as an undergraduate assistant during her fifth year at UCLA.
“One of the most important things of being a great coach starts with accountability,” Krikorian said. “You need to set the example with how you work, what you say … how you act and how you behave. It was a no-brainer (to ask her).”
Cahill said that a focus on producing good people, instead of just elite water polo players, is one of the things that drew her most to Krikorian’s program at UCLA when she was being recruited – and that is something she tries to keep as a focus in the program now.
“I’ve always believed that no person is bigger than the team and that was very clear here,” Cahill said.
Her new coach welcomed that mindset, as well as what Krikorian called a unique level of drive to succeed.
She and the rest of the team needed that drive as soon as she joined the UCLA team as a player in 2004. Five older players on the team were redshirting to train with the senior national team ahead of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, so the freshman attacker soon became what Krikorian called the “Kobe Bryant of our team” and a go-to player who could score important goals when they were needed.
The next year, with the Olympians back on the active roster, Cahill was needed in another capacity: The team was now weak defensively, so Krikorian asked the scorer to become a defender. While it may not have been an easy switch, Cahill knew it was what the team needed.
“I don’t know if she was happy in the beginning, but that was just a great example of her unselfishness and her team-first attitude,” Krikorian said.
Those qualities, as well as her excellent leadership skills while she was playing, led Krikorian to ask Cahill to stay on as an undergraduate assistant for the 2008 season.
The switch to that role was not particularly easy for Cahill, who had played with most of the players she now had to coach. That first year, Cahill said she thought of herself more as a mentor for the younger girls on the team than a tactical coach, a role Krikorian said she had already been filling during her senior year.
When she returned as a full-time assistant coach in 2010, however, she was the one in need of a mentor. She found more than one – not only in Krikorian but also in one of the women who had coached Cahill at UCLA.
During Cahill’s four years playing at UCLA, three different women filled the job of assistant coach. Catharine von Schwarz brought a tough style of coaching to the team during Cahill’s freshman year, while Nicolle Payne was a “very zen and very calm” assistant coach the next two years, Cahill said. But her senior year, Cahill worked with now-Sonoma State coach Coralie Simmons.
In Simmons, Cahill found “the perfect mix of Cat and Nicolle,” and has tried to model her own coaching style after Simmons.
Having a female role model while playing is something that several current women on the water polo team also enjoy.
“I love Molly. She played here so it’s kind of nice to be able to (relate to her),” said sophomore attacker Rachel Fattal.
Some of that may come from Cahill being a woman, according to redshirt junior goalkeeper Sami Hill.
“I really like (Molly). It’s good to have a girl coach too. We can kinda talk to her about things we can’t really talk to with Brandon,” Hill said. “I think the more emotional side is Molly. Kinda controlling snippiness among players. … More one-on-one conversations with us and more personally (than) with Brandon because he has to run practice.”
Being able to relate to the players is something that both Cahill, Krikorian and Brooks all stressed as an important quality for any coach to have.
“I think I’m a pretty unique case in that this is the only school I’ve ever really been at so I have the experience of being a student-athlete, then transitioning into a coach, so I know exactly what the girls on the team are going through because I’ve lived it myself,” Cahill said.
For Brooks, hiring Cahill as an assistant was as easy a decision as Krikorian’s decision to bring her on as an undergraduate assistant.
“She was my first call, my first candidate for an assistant coach,” Brooks said. “Molly has so much experience and so much knowledge, so much drive and passion for the game as well. It’s great to have that kind of spirit.”
While both coaches say they share coaching responsibilities fairly equally, Cahill focuses on working with attackers and defenders – positions which she played – while Brooks spends more time with goalkeepers and centers.
The relatively equal division of work between the two coaches may help Cahill, who hopes to eventually become a head coach, even if it means having to pack up and leave the school she’s attended and worked at for more than eight years.
“I always have a hard time picturing myself somewhere that isn’t UCLA. I’m so proud to be a Bruin but I do aspire to be a head coach some day, so wherever that takes me in the future, we’ll see,” Cahill said.
For now, however, Cahill is focusing on her current job.
The best moment of that current job? Another hard decision for Cahill to make, but she eventually decided on training with U.S. Navy SEALs as a team-building exercise this past winter break.
But for Cahill, it’s ultimately not the championships or the standout games that mean the most to her.
“The most important thing for me was the relationships that I made while I was a player and now while I’m a coach, that’s the most important thing at the end of the day,” Cahill said.