Nearly 20 years after they first met, Karen Keyes and Muffet McGraw shared a telephone conversation that neither could have imagined when they arrived at Notre Dame together, just trying to adapt to their unfamiliar surroundings.
Keyes was a freshman guard on McGraw’s first Fighting Irish women’s basketball team in 1987. Keyes scored more than 1,500 points in her career and served as a graduate assistant under McGraw for two years while earning a graduate degree in business. When Keyes married her husband, Kevin, in 1995, McGraw attended the ceremony. They remained close, even when Keyes moved to the East Coast and McGraw built the Irish into a top national program that lost to Connecticut in the national championship game last week and has made the Final Four in each of the past five seasons.