Though she’s only 35 years old, Chandler McCabe has already seen a lot of places and done a lot of things.
Originally from Orlando, the Robert Morris head coach won a state championship at Bishop Moore High School in 2008 before heading north to play college basketball at Providence. After graduation, she launched her career on the bench (and earned a master’s degree) at Henderson State in Arkansas, then followed that up with stints at Bethune-Cookman and George Mason, before stopping back in her hometown, at Central Florida, for a season.
All of that is a long-winded way to emphasize that prior to 2024, McCabe did not have any yinzer DNA in her system, whether through birth or occupation.
Nevertheless, in just her second season at the helm of RMU, McCabe has methodically transformed the Colonials from a collection of players with no true geographic tether into a unit as Pittsburgh as Andy Warhol and fries as a sandwich topping.
Make no mistake, there were bundles of intentionality behind the very specific way the coach, with no pre-existing biases or loyalties to southwest Pennsylvania, went about building the program. It began with the quality of the region’s grassroots talent.
“It’s such a perfect area, in my opinion, for mid-major basketball,” McCabe said. “Every now and then, they’ll have a big-time player like Mimi Thiero is going to Maryland, but [there are also] the Western PA Bruins and SLAAM and the old Drill For Skill, which is now part of SLAAM. Those programs have always been extremely successful and they’re full of mid-major players. For this roster to not really have a lot of Pittsburgh players, I thought that was astounding.”
So, shortly after taking the job, she made a decisive course correction, and the results – facilitated, of course, by the present era of unending player movement in college basketball – have been drastic.
In 2023-24, the final season of the 21-year dynasty of former coaches Sal and Charlie Buscaglia, the Colonials featured just one Pennsylvanian on the roster. That was guard Hattie McGraw, whose career amounted to five minutes of playing time against Penn State-Beaver. The upcoming campaign, then, presents quite a contrast, given that seven Keystone Staters will take the floor for Robert Morris. All hail from the western end of the commonwealth, and several are expected to be among the team’s best players.
Jada Lee is the sole returner of the group, and should again be one of the conference’s top facilitators after leading RMU in assists last season. Ava Leroux (the daughter of former Pittsburgh Penguins defenseman Francois Leroux) and Mallory Daly are transfer additions from Elon and Buffalo, respectively, who should provide quality depth. Well-regarded freshmen London Creach and Layke Fields are good enough to play early.
Right now, though, the star attractions are Bailey Kuhns and Aislin Malcolm, a pair of locally-sourced talents capable of placing the Colonials on the shortlist of Horizon League favorites.
As college basketball veterans, they don’t necessarily fit McCabe’s recruiting pipeline strategy. Their portal commitments in the spring were a second-order effect of it though; Robert Morris is now decidedly a Pittsburgh team that can attract Pittsburgh players who want to represent their hometown, while playing in front of their families.
Even those not from the area benefit from that carefully-cultivated atmosphere.
“Our team is full of Pennsylvania kids, especially the Pittsburgh area, so I think it’s really important to have that outlet for some of our teammates who are from places like California or France, far away, so they can come over to our house,” Malcolm explained. “We’re honestly one big family, so I think just the family unit, not even separate, but as one at Robert Morris is something super special.”
“It’s so much bigger at Robert Morris,” Kuhns added. “We play for each other. We play for something bigger than ourselves every day, and it’ll be really exciting to see where things go.”
A few years ago, Malcolm was one of those Thiero-level high-end players McCabe referenced, as the Chartiers Valley High School graduate was a four-star prospect and ranked among the top 100 players in the country by ESPN. The versatile scorer then began her career at Pitt, becoming an every-game starter in 2023-24, while shooting better than 35 percent from three-point range across most of three seasons.
Kuhns took a vastly different route to Moon Township, one that ran through Mercyhurst, a Division II program when the Mount Pleasant, PA native was a freshman. However, three years later, the Lakers moved up to Division I and became members of the NEC, where Kuhns made the all-conference first team after averaging 20.3 points and 5.5 rebounds per game.
She’s also sort of workhorse that RMU has often lacked, a statement supported by the 32.9 percent usage rate last season that made her the 35th-busiest player in the country on the offensive half of the court.
“I’ve never coached a player that plays as hard as Bailey Kuhns,” McCabe said. “It’s unbelievable to witness every single day. We can’t just get extra shots up with her. I have to sit her down because she’s just full speed all the time. No one plays harder than her. And I put her against anyone in the country on that statement.”
Kuhns, Malcolm and the newly-Pittsburghed Colonials roster enters 2024-25 with a clear goal: the Horizon League title. The task probably isn’t quite as steep as Mount Washington. It’s not even as daunting as it might have appeared two years ago, given that RMU stunned most observers last season with a fourth-place standings finish, followed by a run to the conference semifinals.
Accordingly, at this point in the program’s development, a lot of Robert Morris’ preseason preparation has been a repetitive, one-day-at-a-time grind. It’s the sort of climate devoted not to selling a vision, but to sharpening the edges of a team that now has the talent to realize it.
“Last year we were trying to get them to believe,” McCabe said. “This year they already believe. So now it’s more just about coaching them up, holding them accountable to their goals every single day, and putting them in adverse situations early so that when they see them in games, they know how to respond.”
Count Malcolm among the believers, going back to the early stages of her recruitment.
“Just listening to Coach McCabe and all the assistants talk about this coming year really got me excited,” she recalled. “It made me feel like a little kid again, just wanting to win, and doing anything to make that happen.”
