Four local CYO coaches, with legacies of service stretching back to 1957, were inducted into the Catholic Business Network – Montgomery County Youth Coaches Hall of Fame on Oct. 2.
At the breakfast meeting at Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, Dennis McCarthy from St. John the Baptist in Silver Spring, Tony Carroll from Blessed Sacrament in Chevy Chase, Kevin Giblin from St. Bartholomew in Bethesda, and Lisa Tehan from St. Jane Francis de Chantal in Bethesda joined the CBN-MC Youth Coaches Hall of Fame. The annual CBN-MC breakfast is now in its 26th year.
Inductee Tehan was serenaded with “Happy Birthday,” led by her longtime pastor at St. Jane Francis de Chantal, Father Samuel Giese, and she was presented with a frosted cupcake with a single lit candle.
“I do what I do because I love it,” Tehan told the CBN-MC breakfast audience.
She has served as a volunteer CYO coach at St. Jane Francis de Chantal Parish for 25 years and is in the Hall of Fame of Montgomery College for coaching girls’ tennis, as well as at Glassboro State College (now known as Rowan University) in her native New Jersey.
“Our talents are a gift from God,” she added. “Our gift back to God is how we share our talents.”
While Giblin is principal at St. Bartholomew School in Bethesda, he is well known for his longtime service at Mater Dei School in Potomac, where he coached basketball, football and lacrosse at the all-boys school. During his 29 years of coaching middle school football, for example, Giblin’s teams had a record of 189 wins, 18 losses and five ties, with 20 undefeated seasons. His basketball teams won 348 times and lost 30 games, while his lacrosse teams were 219-13.
To be considered for the Youth Coaches Hall of Fame honor, a coach has to have done so for at least five years.
“We had a lot of old and really good players,” Giblin said in his acceptance speech, and gave credit to his assistant coaches at Mater Dei, as well as the overall strength of the teams.
Keith Urgo, varsity basketball coach at Gonzaga College High School, served as main speaker at the 90-minute event. He said he looks to instill discipline and a sense of teamwork in his players, teaching them that what’s on the front of the jersey – the name of the school – is more important than the name on the back of the jersey, their last name.
Former Atlantic 10 Coach of the Year when he was head men’s basketball coach at Fordham University, Urgo recalled that one of his brothers was thrown off a Giblin-coached team at Mater Dei for using bad language.
Urgo grew up at Little Flower Parish in Bethesda the eighth of 10 children. He came back to work at his alma mater, Gonzaga, this past summer, and said that Giblin was the best coach his brother had ever had, even as he became an All-American lacrosse player.
“My job is to prepare my players for the next level,” Urgo said. He served as an assistant men’s basketball coach at Villanova University, including during the 2009 season, when the Wildcats reached the Final Four in the NCAA Tournament. Urgo has also served as assistant men’s basketball coach at Penn State.
Urgo paid tribute to his former coaches in attendance, including William B. Whitaker, formerly of Gonzaga – also known as “Coach Whit” - who was the founding president of Washington Jesuit Academy. Urgo said that his best friends are former teammates from the teams he has played with, and that his athletic journey started at the age of 5, when his parents put him on a plane to play Maplewood football.
Tony Carroll, one of the four inductees, began his coaching career at Our Lady of Lourdes in Bethesda in 1957, the year of his graduation from Georgetown Prep, and he coached until the mid-1990s, with decades of service at Blessed Sacrament in Chevy Chase.
Dennis McCarthy, the inductee from St. John the Baptist in Silver Spring, coached intramural basketball and girls CYO basketball for 17 years, concluding in 2015. He joked that his father launched SJB’s intramural basketball program in 1967 so that McCarthy’s brother would have a team to play on, after being cut from the varsity CYO basketball team there.
Geoff Gonella, past president of CBN-MC, served as master of ceremonies and noted that CBN-MC has given nearly $2 million in grants to local Catholic schools. He was inducted in 2024 to the CBN-MC Youth Coaches Hall of Fame.
