Legend

In January, Andy Yosinoff ’70, women’s basketball coach at Emmanuel College in Boston, became the seventh-winningest coach in women’s basketball history, surpassing Notre Dame Hall of Famer Muffet McGraw. Yosinoff loves to win. But his real legacy goes beyond the on-court victories.

By Bob Herzog
Photos by Seth Jacobson

Snow is piled high in the parking lot and on sidewalks and lawns as students huddle against the chill of a harsh New England winter. Some are heading to class, some to the library, and some to the basketball court, which is part of a sparkling indoor sports complex at a tiny college in downtown Boston, about a mile from Fenway Park.
 
Inside, a proud Yankees fan brings the heat in the form of boundless energy, perpetual motion, and passion—for basketball, for his players, and for his coaches. On a court that, since 2019, has featured his name, Emmanuel College’s women’s basketball coach Andy Yosinoff ’70, in his 49th season on the job, blows the whistle signaling the end of practice. Turns out, though, this day’s festivities are just beginning.

Coaches and players scurry off the court, conspiratorial whispers in the air. Yosinoff ’70, wearing a warmup suit in the royal blue of this Division III school, thinks he’s wrapped up another productive day, prepping another conference championship team for another postseason run.

Instead, he is about to start unwrapping. The Emmanuel Saints come marching back onto Andy Yosinoff Court, bearing gifts … and a cake. It is the day after Super Bowl Sunday, which also happens to be Yosinoff’s 78th birthday.

The team presents him with a large, framed color photo—a team photo from the Jan. 8 game against Wheaton College, when Yosinoff surpassed Notre Dame Hall of Famer Muffet McGraw, becoming the seventh-winningest coach in women’s college basketball history with victory number 937. Then comes the gag gift—a red-white-and-blue New York Giants ski cap (Yosinoff has been a Yankees and Giants fan all his life)—a rousing song-and-dance rendition of “Happy Birthday,” and the cutting and eating of the cake.

Yosinoff, an emotional sort to begin with—his game-day coaching style is nonstop sideline animation, with vocals—is clearly moved by the team’s gesture. Most touching, though, is the gift of a box overflowing with personal letters and cards from every single player and coach on the team. He tears up and says he’ll read them all later.

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“I’ve been single my whole life,” says Yosinoff. “My team, my players … have been my family.”

“The most important thing I’ve accomplished is to touch lives, to have relationships with my former players,” Yosinoff says, seated in his office—which is crammed with photos and artifacts from a basketball life—and wearing the Giants cap with tags still attached. “Over 400 of them have graduated. I’ve been invited to meals and weddings. I’ve been there after their babies were born. My relationships with them are much more important than what we accomplished in basketball.”

Yosinoff and his Saints have accomplished quite a lot. In nearly a half-century at the same school, he’s had 47 winning seasons, 20 conference titles in the Great Northeast Athletic Conference, including the 2025-26 season; 22 NCAA tournament appearances, including this season; and one memorable run to the Final Four in 2001. Yosinoff finished the 2025-26 season with 951 victories. His legacy, though, is more about the victories that cannot be counted.
 
“He’s much more than someone I coach with. He is family to me. He’s family to my family,” says assistant coach Meghan Kirwan, a former star player at Emmanuel College who is now in her 10th year as Yosinoff’s assistant coach.

In fact, Yosinoff is a father figure to many of his players, past and present. “We still have a great relationship. My kids actually call him Grandpa,” says former player and optometrist, Dr. Lesa Dennis-Mahamed, a 1989 Emmanuel College graduate. “A lot of players forget who their coaches are. But not us. He was an awesome coach. He supported his players. He recognized our potential, and he pushed us to be the best that we can be, on and off the court.”

In her case, that included helping her navigate a post-college path. “When I was thinking about a career, optometry came up, and he took the idea and ran full force with it, calling the school that I was applying to [New England College of Optometry] and writing a letter of recommendation. He’s been one of my biggest supporters. Because of his help, I own my own private practice in Roxbury, Massachusetts,” Dennis-Mahamed says, adding that her Emmanuel jersey—No. 35—hangs in her office, at Yosinoff’s insistence.

Office decor aside, Yosinoff is not a control freak despite his vast experience and success. In fact, he loves interacting with a large staff (four assistants plus one graduate assistant). Kirwan appreciates the collaboration. “Coaching with him has been a joy. He has an incredible way of putting a lot of trust in me and allowing me to really grow,” she says. In fact, she thinks his trust in his staff is one of the tools that helps the team win. And winning, she acknowledges, “is important. We love to win.”

Another thing about Yosinoff, Kirwin adds, “He doesn’t act like he knows it all. He likes to hear other people’s opinions. Even after 49 years, he’s still listening.”

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Early on, Yosinoff listened to the advice of his father, Louis, a teacher in the Providence public schools who loved sports, “and got me rooting for the Yankees and Giants as a kid.” Louis Yosinoff became a guidance counselor, helping students get into college and instilling the importance of helping others into his only child. Andy was raised in a kosher household and is proud of his Jewish heritage. He coached the women’s basketball team at the 2005 Maccabiah Games, the so-called Jewish Olympics, where his team won all five games and earned a gold medal.

“It was a tremendous experience,” Yosinoff says of the competition, which is held in Israel every four years, attracting nearly 10,000 athletes from around the world. “For the first week, no basketball. They just take you around to learn about the country. For someone brought up in a kosher home, it was pretty special. I keep the gold medal at home.” 

It’s just one of his many honors, including three halls of fame and counting. This year, Yosinoff will be inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame and will receive an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Emmanuel. He had hoped to be voted into the prestigious Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in the Class of 2026, but though he was nominated for a third time, the call did not come when the finalists were announced in February. 

He is a member of the Emmanuel College Hall of Fame (Class of 2025), and before that, in 2013, his alma mater inducted him into the University of Rhode Island Hall of Fame. That accolade was for being a standout scholarship tennis player, including an undefeated Yankee Conference championship season in his senior year, 1970.

“We beat UConn at UConn. We became not only champions, but family,” Yosinoff says of the bond he formed with his Rhody teammates beginning in their freshman year, 1966. “When they named the court after me at Emmanuel, all my URI tennis teammates showed up.” The attendees were Bill Nesbitt ’74, Peter Rapelye ’70, Tad Connerton ’71, Irwin Shorr ’70, Tom Sherman ’70, Peter Barlow ’69, M.A. ’72, and Fred Brown ’70, who died on Feb. 26.

“We’ve stayed connected for 60 years. It’s unbelievable. We meet for dinner at least three times a year, usually on Federal Hill (in Providence). Guys fly in from out of town. Tennis is the main reason I went to URI, and it was the biggest part of my life on campus,” he says. “Those were great times. When we won at Connecticut, it was a phenomenal feeling. We threw our legendary coach, Ted Norris, into the lake. It was the most memorable day of my college career.”

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So how did Andy Yosinoff, tennis prodigy, go from the baseline to the sideline? A physical education major at URI, he got his first coaching “job” as a URI sophomore when his fraternity, Phi Mu Delta, recruited him. “For some reason, they asked me to be the basketball coach. So that’s where I started,” Yosinoff says. “I coached for three years. We never lost a game. We won three URI intramural championships. That’s where I developed my philosophy of running and pressing.”

His URI tennis coach had connections at Miami University of Ohio, so Yosinoff got his master’s degree in education there, while also serving as a graduate assistant for the school’s tennis team. He had hoped to coach tennis after graduation. Instead, he found himself in a variety of jobs—working at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association in New Jersey, serving as a substitute teacher in Boston, and finally working as a full-time physical education teacher in the Boston public schools, where he stayed for 34 years. 

In 1977, he answered an ad in The Boston Globe for a tennis coach at Emmanuel College, then a women’s college.  “I came over for an interview. The athletic director told me the hours of the tennis job, and it wasn’t going to work with my teaching job,” Yosinoff recalls. “Before the interview was over, I asked, ‘Do you have a basketball coach?’ She said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Now you do.’ That’s how it all started.”

Yosinoff’s first season at Emmanuel was in 1978, the year of the historic blizzard. “Luckily, half the games were snowed out. We had only five or six players, no scoreboard, and our court was only 84 feet long (10 feet shorter than regulation),” he laughs, as he recalls the 3-7 record he posted in the abbreviated season. “I don’t deal well with losing, so I started recruiting players in cities. I started in Boston, expanded to New York, and by the 1980s, I was recruiting the whole East Coast. I always had diverse teams.”

And, eventually, very good ones. His 1986-87 team was ranked No. 1 nationally in Division III and earned the first NCAA tournament bid in school history. That became commonplace under the effervescent coach, who continued teaching adaptive physical education in Boston, even after he was named athletic director at Emmanuel in 1986, a role he held until 2003.

Yosinoff has fond memories of his only Final Four team in the 2000-01 season, when the Saints earned the No. 1 seed in the Northeast Region. They reached the Elite Eight, where they played at New York University, which had a Division III women’s basketball program despite having an enrollment of more than 30,000 students. Emmanuel College—a women’s college that shifted to coeducation later that year—had an enrollment of 500.

“Most people didn’t give us a chance,” Yosinoff says of playing NYU, which had a 26-1 record. “But somehow, we pulled it out in overtime (74-70), and the story was in The New York Times the next day: ‘Little Emmanuel beats NYU and is going to the Final Four.’ Unfortunately, the game was played in Danbury, Connecticut, that year, so we didn’t get to go away. We had to play Washington University (of St. Louis), a really good team, and we lost, 78-62.”

Yosinoff has never returned to the Final Four but has reached the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight. This year’s team won the GNAC with an undefeated regular season, then won the conference tournament to return to the NCAA tournament for the first time in four years. He is justifiably proud of his teams from 2000-06, which won 72 straight league games, an NCAA record at the time, and his squads that won 68 consecutive GNAC games from 2010-16.

The Saints have been road warriors, too. Yosinoff has always believed traveling was an integral part of the basketball experience. In the 1980s, he started taking his team on trips during Christmas break. “They were cultural trips, fundraising trips, and basketball trips. We’ve gone to Ireland, China, Beijing, London, St. Thomas, and many times to Florida and California,” he says. “It’s a great way for my players to get to know each other better and to play against good competition.”

Yosinoff with his coaching staff and the 2025-26 Emmanuel College Saints. The team made it to the first round of the NCAA Division III Women’s Basketball Tournament, falling to Bowdoin College, and finished the year with a 22-7 record.

Andy’s dad, Louis Yosinoff, traveled with the team to Ireland and became a regular at Emmanuel games—at home and on the road. “He’d drive up here all the time from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where I was raised. He traveled with us on the road until he got too old,” Andy says. “All my players had a relationship with my father. He died in 2017 at 99 years old. There were more than 300 people at the funeral in Providence. Three of his students from 50 years ago got up and talked. He was an inspiration, not just to me, but to a lot of people.”

A section of the blue bleachers is painted yellow where Louis used to sit. On a wall near the entrance to the court hangs a frame with photos of the Saints’ No. 1 fan surrounded by Emmanuel players. The inscription reads: “With deep gratitude to Louis Yosinoff for his support and loyalty to Emmanuel. We dedicate these bleachers in his honor. (November 19, 2022)”

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Yes, Andy Yosinoff has left an indelible mark on Emmanuel College athletics. Not just the tangible evidence of his name, painted in bold, blue script on both sides of the court. Not just the lifelong bond he has formed with generations of players. And not just all those victories.

His legacy also includes a touch of showmanship, especially during games. Dennis-Mahamed laughs when asked about Yosinoff’s antics. “Sometimes I wondered if the fans came to see us play or to see his animation on the sidelines. I don’t know which was more entertaining.”

Dennis-Mahamed played nearly 30 years ago, but Kirwan can testify that nothing’s changed today. “If you haven’t seen him work a sideline, you are missing out. There is no other coach who takes more steps up and down the court,” says Kirwan. “It’s contagious. He’s so passionate, so energetic about every play. It’s genuine with Andy because we’re not on TV. We don’t have big crowds. He cares about the kids. He cares about the game.”

Among active women’s college basketball coaches, Yosinoff is the oldest and has the longest tenure at one school. “It really is unheard of what he has done at Emmanuel. It makes the alumni community so unique, because we all played for the same coach,” Kirwan adds. “When we get together, the stories that we have are from different generations of his life. It’s amazing. What we have here is really, really special. And Andy is still going. He’s not retiring anytime soon.”

Neither the legend nor the birthday candles have burned out.