🏀0️⃣4️⃣2️⃣ Agnus Berenato
Agnus Berenato
Meet Agnus Berenato, a former player, storied NCAA Division 1 coach, educator and an early U.S. pioneer who played professional basketball in France.
Berenato (née McGlade) grew up one of ten children in Gloucester City, New Jersey in the 1960s and 1970s playing basketball in her family’s driveway. She and sisters continued to play in school, winning state accolades, but upon high school graduation in 1975, there wasn’t a way for Berenato to pursue her sport, her passion. Although Title IX was passed three years earlier, there still were not the same scholarship opportunities for women to play basketball (or other sports) as there would be a few years later. But France was a different story, as the McGlade family learned from fellow hometown hoops star Carmine Calzonetti, known in the hexagone as “Merlin the Wizard” for his U.S.-style basketball magic. Swayed, Berenato’s mother bought her a one-way airline ticket to France, where Agnus played the 1975-76 season with Entente Sens.
Agnus’ Story
With nary a lick of French in her toolbox, Berenato arrived in the north-central French city, where she lived in an old classroom on the third floor of a schoolhouse. She had a cot and two long benches on which to put her belongings. “I was young,” she recalled of the disorientation of her lodgings, particularly at night when the building’s noises added another layer of foreignness to the situation. But for Berenato, her passion, her sport, saved the day.
“Honestly, the basketball was wonderful. It was warmth to my heart because I didn't have to understand what they were saying. I didn't know what they were saying. I didn't have any clue what they were saying. But basketball's basketball.”
Her season in France coincided with the game’s domestic growth thanks to the media spotlight generated by the era’s most dominant team, Clermont Université Club (CUC). It was a roster filled with many national team players, including one of the country’s first basketball stars, Jacky Chazalon, as well as legendary hoops heroine Élisabeth Riffiod, the first Frenchwoman to land a one-handed jumpshot. It was a good time to play women’s ball in France.
The Sports Diplomacy Connection
Berenato and her Entente Sens teammates during the 1975-76 season. Photo: Agnus Berenato.
As a basketball player in Sens, Berenato engaged in informal sports diplomacy every day, communicating, representing, and negotiating with teammates, the school’s children, and the town’s residents about her homeland.
Her teammates were intrigued by the myth of ‘America.’ As Berenato recalled, “they always felt like ‘American’ was utopia, the chosen land, and they all wanted to come to America. But they could never afford the plane ticket.” With one exception: one of her teammates later visited Berenato in New Jersey.
It was also an opportunity for Berenato to learn about France and its culture through the basketball prism. Unlike in the United States, which had teams centered around schools, Entente Sens was a club team, which meant that it was in and of the community, not attached to the education system at all. That meant that players had regular jobs–basketball, while a passion, was not their primary profession. Berenato too earned a paycheck and the club provided her lodging, although her non-basketball gig was to help serve food to the elementary school children.
“I’m a camper at heart, so I love being with little kids.”
“I had to sit down and eat with the little kids,” which helped her fledgling French.
Few of her new teammates spoke English, and the other foreigner was a girl from Czechoslovakia (n.b. at the time French teams were allotted a maximum of two non-French citizens on their rosters). It was a plunge into the deep end of learning a new culture, from how players smoked before practice and would drink a glass of champagne before a game as part of the offered hospitality to a more relaxed attitude to being on time–one centered more on sharing an espresso and the journey than starting practice on-the-hour. “They were wonderful people,” Berenato recalled. “It was just a different culture.” The experience taught her the importance of being able to pause and relax.
By January 1976 she began to understand French and the next month, started to speak and dream en français.
“To me, the universal language of basketball is about love, sharing and caring and teamwork. It doesn't matter if you speak the language. Everybody's on the same page.”
“My whole goal in France was, if I could just get through the day I could, if I could, make another day,” Berenato said. “What I truly learned was that I could do anything I wanted to do in life, anything.”
Mapping the Connection
From Gloucester City, New Jersey to Sens, France
Further Reading/Resources
[E] Interview with Agnus Berenato, February 13, 2024.
[E] Alexander Nolan, “Berenato Retires After 33-Year Head Coaching Career,” Kennesaw State University, March 29, 2021.
{[E] Agnus Berenato, http://www.agnusberenato.com/about-agnus/.
How to Cite This Entry
Krasnoff, Lindsay Sarah. “Voices: Agnus Berenato,” FranceAndUS, https://www.franceussports.com/voices/042-agnus-berenato. (date of consultation).