La Salle coach Mountain MacGillivray sees the climb amid personal struggles as ‘a beautiful thing’

The first thing 5-year-old Emily MacGillivray did after being discharged from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia on Nov. 8 was go to one of her favorite places. After nearly a month in the hospital, where she was being treated following a leukemia relapse, there is nothing quite as freeing as splashing around under a fall sun while waves crash on the sand in Ocean City, N.J.

Emily rode a bike on the boardwalk. She shoveled sand. She ate pizza. She hugged her siblings and smiled big while her mother, Grace, took photos.

Back home in Ardmore, Emily’s father, Mountain, got home from practice at La Salle, where he has been the university’s women’s basketball coach since 2018, breathed a sigh of relief, and put his feet up. Emily isn’t out of the woods, but for 28 nights, either Mountain or Grace spent the night at CHOP with their daughter while the other tended the home and helped keep life organized for their other seven children — five of whom still live under their roof.

On that Friday night, though, they would all be together again.

The next day, Emily went to a basketball game and watched her dad’s Explorers win their home opener inside the new John Glaser Arena. Emily being home changes the whole dynamic, Mountain said.

“She’s in treatment, but she’s just getting to do treatment at home, which makes life normal again,” Mountain said.

By normal, he means all of it. The treatment, too. Emily was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a fast-growing and common childhood cancer, late in 2021, and while she was in remission by mid-January 2022, there was an almost constant wave of chemotherapy treatments, checkups, transfusions, and more in the months that followed. Emily finally rang the bell nine months ago, but concerns about bruises on her body in early October led the MacGillivrays to bump up her next check-in appointment, and blood tests showed more leukemia.

And so the MacGillivrays, as Grace wrote in the online journal she’s been keeping since this started, were “suiting up to get back in the ring.” They are a family rooted in faith, lifted by their prayers and the prayers of their community, whose credence has only grown more powerful over the last three years — though it’s been tested recently.

How’s this for a gut punch of a weekend? Emily went into the hospital on Friday, Oct. 11. The family held a hospital birthday party for 18-year-old Brigid, the third-oldest MacGillivray child, on Sunday, the same day Mary, the second-oldest, who attends Ave Maria University in Florida, called to say she was in severe pain and her roommate was taking her to the emergency room. She needed emergency surgery to treat a ruptured cyst that was bleeding. The family decided to send eldest daughter Chiara on a plane to South Florida to be with her sister.

The night was still young. Mountain was taking Chiara to the airport when his brother called. Their father was going to the hospital. Mountain dropped off Chiara and headed toward Sunday night Mass.

The phone rang again.

Mark S. MacGillivray, a former train conductor, caterer, and chef, died at 72. He had overcome gallbladder cancer earlier this year but was later diagnosed with two brain tumors. He was treated for those, and the expectation was that they weren’t going to be fatal, but he died of an upper gastrointestinal bleed.

“I was like, can there be any more?” Mountain said of the weekend.

» READ MORE: From 2019: La Salle women’s basketball coach Mountain MacGillivray charted a unique path to 20th and Olney

The Explorers lost their next two games after Emily watched them win on her second day home from the hospital. A high-energy practice, one that started at 7 a.m., was nearing its end two days after La Salle was trounced in a road game at Virginia on Nov. 17. The practice ended with a knockout tournament that morphed into a three-point contest — miss and you’re out — that freshman guard Joanie Quinn won.

A big smile flashed across Mountain’s face.

It’s a sign of the times, but these Explorers are a particularly extreme version of modern college basketball. McGillivray has just one returning player who sees regular minutes from last year’s team. It’s a roster built almost entirely via the transfer portal and five freshmen. It was going to be a difficult task for any coach to get this all to work, let alone one dealing with a sick child in the hospital and the sudden death of a father he loved dearly.

There are faces that are more than familiar, though. Quinn is among them. Her mother, also Joanie, has been friends with Mountain since they were in high school. When Mountain, who grew up in Overbrook and went to Archbishop Carroll, returned to the area to coach La Salle after leaving Quinnipiac, Quinn started attending school with Mary and Brigid MacGillivray.

This Mountain, the one who is bearing life and death on his sleeves, is the same Mountain she’s seen on the sideline for years.

“His resilience, honestly, I’m in awe,” the younger Quinn said. “I can’t even imagine what he’s going through. Just to see him come here and work hard every day, trying to make us better and wanting us to be the best we can, even though he’s going through a tough time, it’s who I aspire to be.”

Quinn may be shocked by Mountain’s steadiness, but maybe she’d need to know him for as long as assistant coach Chris Day has to notice the subtle changes.

Day and Mountain failed to make the boys’ freshman basketball team at Carroll, so they decided to become managers for the girls’ team. They’ve been friends ever since.

“He didn’t get his license till he was 21, so who do you think drove him?” said Day, who noted that his boss is “the worst driver in the world.”

The two have helped each other out professionally over the years. Day joined Mountain’s staff when he was hired in 2018.

“It’s been interesting,” Day said. “We’re good friends, but the good thing about our friendship is that we can challenge each other. If I’m acting like a fool, he’ll tell me. If he’s acting like a fool, I’ll tell him. We can get in each other’s face and just move on.”

Day admits he’s the one who is more often acting like a fool, but he’s known Mountain long enough to know when he’s a little off.

“We definitely had a talk,” Day said. “We’re human. You can talk about your faith and us being strong men, but come on. You lose your dad, and then on top of that, you got the relapse of leukemia with your 5-year-old, and when it relapses, it’s scary. It certainly has affected him to some degree, whether he says it or not.

“It’s our sanctuary, the coaching world. It’s an outlet to put that stuff, for the time being, behind you. But, again, we’re human.”

Day, who misses Mark, Mountain’s father, and loved playing fantasy sports with him in recent years, made sure to let Mountain know it was OK to take time off when he needed it in October. The staff has been supportive and caring, Mountain said. Like when the staffers arranged a flight home from the season-opening game in Maine rather than making him sit through a nine-hour bus ride with sciatic nerve pain. Pain that was so brutal it caused him to lie on an emergency room floor the night before his father’s funeral.

“This is nothing,” Day said of coaching. “This is the easy part. Dealing with what he is dealing with is the hard part.”

Mountain was in eighth grade when he was baptized and confirmed on the same day, but his beliefs really took form when he attended college at Temple.

“What I loved about Temple is that you got challenged everywhere by everything, from riding the subway in to people of a million different faiths taking world religion classes,” Mountain said. “I got to really investigate my faith and understand what I believed and why I believed it and really build a relationship with Jesus, and that has been there ever since.”

The family is leaning on it right now. “Faith sustains us,” Mountain said. “That’s the bottom line.” There are obvious questions here: Are these not the times that make you wonder what’s real and what’s not? That make you question everything you think you know?

“He has not caused her cancer,” Mountain said. “And yes, he could do something about it, but, yes, he could also use this to bring people closer to him. That, in the end, if you hearing this story somehow makes you have a little more faith, mission accomplished. Because from my worldview and perspective, the end goal is heaven, and I want everybody there. If this helps, it’s a beautiful thing.”

Mountain said he spoke to God in his prayers.

“I got mad,” he said, “and just told him: ‘You can intervene here and make Emily OK, because if she’s not OK I’m not going to doubt you. I’m not going to lose faith, so I don’t need to be tested. You can just go ahead and take care of her.’”

Crisis of Christian confidence averted, what about a fork in the future? No one could have blamed him for taking some time away and stepping aside for a bit, basketball season weeks away or not.

“When life comes at you,” Mountain said, “there’s a chance that you might have to do that, but the only time you consider doing that is when you have to do that. It never got to that point.”

Yes, Mountain may be confident in his convictions, but this isn’t some bible-toting, basketball-coaching robot without emotion.

Mountain recently was trying to avoid carbs and needed to make scalloped potatoes. But how can you make scalloped potatoes without sampling them? I’ll have my dad make them, he thought, and the tears started flowing. He was at the O’Hara father-daughter dance with his daughter, Brigid, when he read a text from Grace, who was texting from home with a question about food. Mark attended The Restaurant School, and so Mountain’s first reaction was to start typing text my dad. He stopped himself before sending the message and began to cry. Brigid, a senior, saw him from across the floor and rushed over thinking something might be wrong with Emily. They cried together.

“Three minutes later, we’re back out there having a great time,” Mountain said. “That’s what it’s been. It’s not been depression or this big hole that I can’t fill, but you miss the guy who’s been in your life the whole time who’s been there for everything.”

The MacGillivrays spent Thanksgiving together at home, and, if all continues to go well, Emily will remain home through the Christmas holiday. In January, she is on track to start a CAR T cell therapy treatment that, according to Penn Medicine, “uses immune cells called T cells that are genetically altered in a lab to enable them in locating in destroying cancer cells more effectively.”

In Dr. Mountain’s words: “They’re training the cells to attack the protein in leukemia, and they need to get the amount of T cells and the amount of leukemia in the blood to be the same. The second it’s the same, we need to get in there and inject the T cells in. It’s a very specific science, and there’s not a moment to lose once it’s the right time, and they don’t know when the right time is. They’re growing the cells.”

Mountain doesn’t think Emily’s ordeal has changed much about how he coaches. Being a father of eight has given him a lot of perspective over the years, he said.

“When we lose, my kids still hug me, and they’re still happy to see their dad, and when we win, they’re a little more excited, but they still hug me and they’re still happy to see their dad,” he said.

“What [Emily] has taught me is to just be in the moment. Enjoy what you’re doing right now. Athletically, it’s a great message for the team. Players, teams, coaches get tight because of what’s coming [and] what’s next. We might lose; we might win. That’s how you end up losing.”

It is a typical way of thinking for a coach, but Mountain says most coaches aren’t actually practicing what they preach. This coach is 5-5 and has won four of the last six games since that upbeat practice session after the Virginia loss. The Explorers are three wins away from matching their 2023-24 total.

This version of himself probably would have sounded rich to Mountain during his teenage years. If he lost a baseball game in high school, his stepmother would tell him to go stay at his grandmother’s house because she didn’t want to deal with him. He would be mad until the following Sunday when the Eagles lost on a Sunday, assuming they won. Even when he was a young basketball coach, he’d arrive at the gym still stewing over a loss.

“I don’t come in the gym angry. I come into the gym with a plan now,” he said. “Sometimes now I’ll put on an edge because it’s what they need.

“How nonsensical is it to be angry about something you can’t undo?”

That same thought process applies to Emily, who, like more than any of Mountain and Grace’s children, is a climber. She loves to climb. When La Salle partnered with the B+ Foundation to raise money and awareness for pediatric cancer and dedicated a game to Emily, there were T-shirts made that read “Fight On” on the front and “Climb With Emily” on the back.

Day 1 after this most recent hospital stay was spent enjoying the beach. Day 2? The playground at Chestnutwold Elementary in Ardmore, where Emily, low hemoglobin count and all, wanted to get to the top of the red geodome climber. She reached with one hand, then stepped with one foot. One hand, one foot.

“She got up there and sat there like, ‘Look at me,’” Mountain said. “That’s been her natural disposition, to keep fighting and moving forward.”