UAA women’s basketball alums recall McCarthy’s ‘mayhem mentality’

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - In one of his last — if not final — interviews as the leader of the University of Alaska Anchorage women’s basketball team, Ryan McCarthy spoke about the person who will replace him.

True to form, McCarthy’s response did not mince words.

“You’re going to have to give your life to this program, because I did,” said McCarthy, the sixth-winningest active coach (.801) in Division II women’s basketball.

McCarthy, who was hired earlier this week as Division I Fresno State University’s women’s basketball coach, also demanded a lot from his players.

“He’s demanding that everybody gives their 110% every single day at practice and so truly the best competition should be each other,” said Hannah Wandersee, who played under McCarthy from 2014-2019. “So practices should suck compared to games.”

Wandersee redshirted the 2014-15 season, which saw the Seawolves finish 29-2. The following season, with Wandersee coming off the bench, UAA finished 38-3 and made it to the NCAA Division II national championship game.

“I liked that he always used to say, you know, ‘You’re cheating your teammates if you don’t give your all in practice every single day,” Wandersee said. “Because then you’re not making them better and you’re setting them up for failure in games.”

But with the highs of victory came the lows.

Wandersee wanted out.

“You know, I’m miserable now,” Wandersee remembers telling McCarthy after three seasons with UAA. “I’m getting beat up every day in practice. I suck. This is really hard.”

McCarthy challenged her to stick it out.

“He was like, ‘You won’t regret sticking it out, but you will regret quitting someday,’” Wandersee recalled.

She stayed put, and in the second game of the following season, Wandersee recorded 19 points, 10 points, four blocks and two steals against Duke University in the famed Cameron Indoor Stadium.

Wandersee, who is now a physical therapist, did not miss a single game over her final two seasons. Now, she was doing the beating up on younger teammates.

One of those younger teammates was Kimani Fernandez, a UAA volleyball recruit from Hawaii.

Like he had with Wandersee, McCarthy saw the potential in the small forward.

“I had one [basketball] highlight reel,” Fernandez said. “The thing he liked the most was that I could jump pretty high.”

Fernandez played five seasons for McCarthy, from 2018-2023, and used her jumping abilities to snag over 400 career rebounds.

“I would say the biggest thing that separates McCarthy from my previous coaches was kind of just like — I don’t want to say killer mentality — I would say mayhem mentality, for sure,” Fernandez said. “He’s willing to tell you how it is and maybe even hurt your feelings a little bit.”

After UAA, Fernandez went into the U.S. Marine Corps and is now in officer training for drone piloting.

“I would just say that he has a mentality that I feel like not a lot of people have in terms of competitiveness,” Fernandez said. “And it’s hard to create that in someone else, and it’s just kind of like he definitely embraces when it does suck, but he’s also able to embrace the times when everything’s really good.”

McCarthy’s program was bigger than just basketball, said guard Jahnna Boese (née Hajdukovich), who played alongside Fernandez.

McCarthy “really emphasized becoming a family,” Boese said.

“A lot of my teammates have since become some of my best friends,” she added. “They were in my wedding, all those kinds of things. And I think just being elite in everything you do, whether it be outside in life or in basketball, I carry that with me.”

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