WASHINGTON — After their teams played each other on Nov. 26, American head coach Kelly Killion and Yale head coach Dalila Eshe shared a long embrace, patting each other on the back several times. Though it was their first meeting as head coaches, it brought back memories of competing against each other for almost a decade across Philadelphia’s Big 5 and the Ivy League.
Killion was on Mike McLaughlin’s staff at Penn for 11 years before coming to American in April. Eshe worked at La Salle and Princeton before getting the Yale job in 2022.
“We all kind of came up together in the [Ivy] League,” Killion told The IX Basketball afterward, also referencing her associate head coach, Robert Isme, who spent two years at Dartmouth. “So, yeah, it was nice to just kind of battle back again.”
For both Yale and American, the goal is to get back to the top of their conference, like their head coaches were at times in those Ivy League and Big 5 matchups. Yale made the four-team Ivy League Tournament in 2022 but has struggled since, going 4-23 last season and 1-7 so far this season. American won the Patriot League Tournament and made the NCAA Tournament in 2022 but went just 1-29 last season.
Under Killion, the Eagles are 1-5 — winning their season opener against Delaware State but losing every game since. So the familiar matchup against Yale was a useful barometer early in Killion’s tenure of where the Eagles are in their rebuild.
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Killion, who played for McLaughlin at Holy Family before joining his staff, came to American because she saw the program’s potential. She also thought it would be a good fit for her because she’d be recruiting similar student-athletes as she did at Penn, but with scholarships to offer. And the Washington, D.C., campus isn’t too far from Killion’s family in New Jersey, which is especially important because she gave birth to her second child, daughter Suraya Bacerra, on Sept. 30.
Killion hired Isme in part because of how being in the Ivy League forces coaches to be nimble and make in-season adjustments. The conference doesn’t allow summer workouts, and Dartmouth’s quarter system gives it one of the shortest preseasons in the country. Isme serves as American’s offensive coordinator and is the position coach for the forwards, but Killion said he does a little bit of everything.
“Rob keeps me grounded,” she said. “He’s a little more level-headed than I am. The last game, he turned to me. He’s like, ‘All right, take a deep breath,’ which I needed.”
“I think we gel very well as a staff,” Isme told The IX Basketball after the Yale game. “And it makes the flow a lot easier, so that we can just piggy[back] off each other and there’s no egos attached to anything.”
That flow among the staff has been crucial as Killion balances being mom to a newborn with being a first-time, first-year head coach. When Killion is at practice, she’s all in — including demonstrating good rebounding technique just weeks before giving birth. “If I can explode at eight months pregnant, I know you can,” she said during that drill. But when Killion has needed to be home, Isme has stepped in and run the program.
For Killion, the leadership required of a head coach comes naturally, but the decision-making in games still often feels strange. She’s learning in real time what substitutions to make and what buttons to push when her team needs a jolt. In the first quarter against Yale, she leaned to her left as sophomore guard Madisyn Moore-Nicholson attempted a layup through contact, seemingly trying to will it in. (It dropped, and Moore-Nicholson completed the 3-point play.)
As Yale pushed its lead to as many as 17, Killion tried to fire up her team in a few ways. She shouted and clapped her hands after Yale guard Ciniya Moore made a jumper, exhorting her players to defend. In the second half, she got on the officials for calling a “soft” foul, toeing the line of earning a technical foul.
Midway through the fourth quarter, Killion used a timeout to challenge a call, even though she didn’t expect to succeed. She just wanted to show her players that she was fighting for them.
“I did it on purpose to ignite our group a little bit more, and it worked a little bit,” she said. “So I don’t know — maybe that was a good decision, maybe it wasn’t. I said to [Robert], I was like, ‘I hope it’s not a close game at the end. Hopefully we’re up so we don’t have to call any advance timeouts.’”
As Killion settles into her new role, she’s leaning on what’s familiar. Eshe saw it in the scouting report on American: There was plenty that she recognized from playing Penn over the years.
“A lot of their actions look fairly familiar,” Eshe said. “A lot of the diagonal back[screen]s that they like to run, and the wide diagonal backs with a post player — [2025 Penn graduate] Stina [Almqvist] coming off the action and whatnot. So it definitely looked a lot like Penn.”
American is also shooting a lot of 3-pointers, ranking in the 82nd percentile nationally with 24.2 attempts per game. Penn took at least 20 threes per game in each of Killion’s last seven seasons there and ranked in the 78th percentile or better in that category four times.
“She’s trying to put her footprint on the program,” McLaughlin told The IX Basketball over the summer. “She’s got to do it her own way. But there’s probably a lot of things that are overlapping that we did that she wants to do.”
At Penn, Killion also took on the unofficial role of second mom to many players. She’s determined to keep that at American, even though that can sometimes be easier for assistant coaches to do because they aren’t determining playing time.
“We’re going to miss her voice,” Penn sophomore Sarah Miller told The IX Basketball over the summer. “She was really there both on and off the court. She would always let us know she’s always there for us. … And she was like another part of the family.”
“I think now more than ever, I need to have a really strong relationship with our players to ensure that they trust me,” Killion said. “… That’s something I will not change, because now more than ever, I can now challenge them but still put my arm around them and tell them that I love them, because I do. And they respect me enough to allow me to challenge them in those hard moments.”
“She’s very intentional in her approach,” Isme said. “… She comes off very loving. She may be tough on them, but she’s always lifting them back up. … I think that’s what our team needs, and I think that’s what they’re getting.”
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One of Killion’s main challenges right now is getting her players to believe in themselves and how good they can be. She decided not to take any transfers this offseason because she wanted to show the players she inherited that they’re valued and help them maximize their potential.
“I think something that’s really big is just Coach’s confidence in me,” Moore-Nicholson told reporters after a loss to Delaware on Nov. 17. “… Knowing that she’s really just there and telling me to [shoot] is the biggest thing. And Coach’s confidence has really helped my confidence.”
Building those relationships and helping her players develop are more important to Killion than results in Year 1 — though she’d love a few more wins to keep the team’s spirits high. She is trying to teach her players how to compete and win, and overall, she’s happy with how they’re battling.
After the loss to Delaware, Killion spoke for over a minute straight about the competitiveness of 5’4 sophomore Mary Bolesky, who is averaging just 2.0 points per game but plays with unmatched energy. That’s exactly what Killion believes she needs right now, and it’s why Bolesky is getting 14.0 minutes per game off the bench.
Sophomore guard Molly Driscoll and freshman forward Charlotte Tuhy have also been bright spots. Driscoll is averaging 17.2 points per game on 45.2% shooting from the field, up from 5.8 points on 35.3% shooting last season. The 6’1 Tuhy is averaging just shy of a double-double at 9.8 points and 11.3 rebounds per game and is making 35.0% of her 3-pointers.
Though the Eagles rank 345th out of 363 teams in the national NET rankings, they’ve hung around with Delaware (No. 154) and La Salle (No. 181). Against Yale (No. 337), they went on an 8-0 run after Killion’s challenge to cut a 15-point deficit to 7 and put some game pressure on the Bulldogs.
“We just lost a little bit of our fight midway through that game,” Killion said. “And then we found it again, but it was a little too late. But I got to credit our players for the fight we did have at the end.”
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At Yale, things are a little further along in Eshe’s fourth season. She has brought in her own recruits and mined the transfer portal to add some experience. Her players know her system now, so she can add layers to it. This season, Eshe has run more plays through UTEP transfer forward Luisa Vydrova — something she’s long wanted to do with her frontcourt players but hasn’t been able to.
Yet Yale hasn’t found its rhythm in terms of results. Dating back to the 2023-24 season, the Bulldogs have lost 32 of their last 37 games. So when Eshe looks at the opposite bench and sees Killion in Year 1, she knows how hard building a winning program can be.
Still, Eshe and Killion are each bullish that the other will figure it out.
“That’s not an 0-6 team,” Killion said, referencing Yale’s record before beating American. “Dalila’s doing a good job.”
“[Kelly is] such a phenomenal coach, and she’s gonna get them rolling exactly how she needs to,” Eshe said.
Killion is also betting on herself every day that she’s at American. Deciding to leave a longtime role at Penn for a head-coaching job in a new city — while pregnant — was a leap of faith and a vote of confidence that she could make it all work. The early losses haven’t deterred her; instead, they’ve been important learning moments for her players and herself as a first-time coach.
“We keep talking about that it’s eventually going to shift, and these games are going to shift … our tide,” Killion said after the Yale loss. “I just need them to believe in themselves. … I can only tell them so much how much I believe in them.”
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