Brown University will name a new men’s hockey coach soon, after completing interviews with the reported seven remaining candidates.

Will president Ruth Simmons and athletics director Michael Goldberger take the predictable course and choose an assistant coach such as Brendan Whittet of Dartmouth, a Brown alum, or Mike Cavanaugh, associate head coach at Boston College, which has won two NCAA championships in recent years? Or will they make a bold decision and choose the only current head coach in the group, even if that candidate is a woman, Digit Murphy, coach of the Brown women’s team for 20 years and winner of more games than any coach in Division I women’s hockey?

Precedent indicates the former. Women do coach men in Division I athletics – Craig Lake is director of men’s and women’s cross-country and track and field at Brown, and Liz Proctor is head strength and conditioning coach at the University of Rhode Island – but not in the macho sports of football, basketball and hockey.

Only three women in NCAA history have coached in Division I men’s basketball. Rick Pitino hired the first, Bernadette Locke Mattox, in 1990 to join his University of Kentucky staff. She spent four years with the Wildcats before leaving to have a baby. A year later, she returned to the bench to coach the Kentucky women.

“It was a great experience,” said Mattox, now in her seventh season as an assistant coach with the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun. “I didn’t have any expectations. I went in understanding that my role would be the same as the other assistants.”

And who were the other assistants who helped Pitino restore respect to Kentucky basketball in the wake of recruiting violations and NCAA probation, who helped the Wildcats win Southeastern Conference championships in 1992, 1993 and 1994, reach the Final Four in 1993 and lay the groundwork for the national championship in 1996? Try Tubby Smith, Herb Sendek and Billy Donovan, now coaching at Minnesota, Arizona State and Florida, respectively.

Pitino’s personality and Locke’s talent enabled their partnership to succeed. When Ralph Willard left to coach Western Kentucky, Pitino decided he needed a woman to burnish the image of Kentucky basketball and to emphasize academics, career planning and integrity. His assistants opposed the move but changed their minds when they saw the impact Mattox had on recruits and their mothers.

“We wouldn’t have gotten Rodrick Rhodes without her,” Pitino told The New York Times in 1992.

“The respect started with Rick. He wanted it done and done the right way. If the head boss respects you, it trickles down . . . I respected Rick for that, and that’s how it was for four years,” Mattox said in a recent telephone interview while she was traveling with the Sun.

Pitino knew that hiring a woman would generate publicity. He also knew that she had to know basketball and be able to coach or the venture would fail. Locke met both requirements. She was the first women’s basketball All-America at the University of Georgia in 1980, a guard who averaged 15 points during her career, and she had five years of coaching experience on the Georgia staff. She also spent two years as a graduate assistant at Georgia and one year at Xerox.

At Kentucky, she worked on scouting, video review and coaching in addition to monitoring academic progress and advising career planning. Players embraced her. Travis Ford, the point guard on the 1993 Final Four team, told The New York Times early that season that Locke-Mattox was “just like one of the guys, except that it’s kind of nice to smell her perfume.”

“The guys who were there were super individuals. I was very fortunate to get there when Rick had super guys,” Mattox said. She mentioned that the Kentucky men were like the Georgia women in that they wanted her to teach them the game, to nurture them, to help them grow, to love them.

“They wanted that. They were very hungry for that,” she said. “Coach Pitino understood that. He understands every one of his players. You have to know what buttons to push. Herb, Billy, Tubby, they all had relationships with the guys.”

After the 1994 season, Mattox left the basketball team to become an assistant athletics director and have a baby with her husband Vince, a former University of Virginia football player and an education administrator.

“I was already working 24 hours a day and didn’t know where I could squeeze in the time to start a family,” she said with a laugh. Their son Vincent is 14.

In 1995, C.M. Newton, the athletics director, asked her to take over the Kentucky women’s program. She did and by 1999 had the Wildcat women back in the NCAA Tournament. She remained through the 2003 season and joined the Sun.

Fifteen years after coaching the Kentucky men, Mattox delights in their success in athletics, medicine, politics.

“It seems like yesterday,” she said. “I see Travis Ford coaching (Oklahoma State), and I see John Pelphrey coaching (Arkansas). I worked with those guys, and it’s great to see how successful those guys are. Jamal Mashburn is on ESPN. Walter McCarty (Louisville assistant) came in and had to battle as a freshman, and now look at him. He wears pin-striped suits. You teach them, grow them, help them become successful wherever they want to go and in whatever they want to do in life. They still call you and still send you baby pictures.”

Mattox happily shares her insight and experience with young women eager to launch careers in coaching or business. She doesn’t perceive herself as a pioneer – “So many more were in front of me” – but hopes she can “help and inspire young women.”

Two have followed in her footsteps in Division I men’s college basketball. Stephanie Ready was an assistant at Coppin State in Baltimore in 2000-2001 and Jennifer Johnston an assistant at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., in 2000-2002. Courtney Robinson is currently an assistant at Daytona State, a junior college in Florida.

Will there be others?

“It goes back to the AD,” Mattox said “I like to think so, but it’s up to the AD. Who knows? It is 2009.”

mszostak@projo.com