On the eve of her husband’s 58th birthday, Maureen Magarity chased a sliver of normalcy. She and her daughters sneaked out of the house and returned with a birthday banner, balloons and an attempt to pin a familiar moment onto days that hadn’t left much room for one.

The next morning, Charlotte and Caroline woke up with one question: Where would the celebratory dinner be?

The answer kept slipping. The honoree, Vermont men’s basketball coach John Becker, was already busy that night with a recruiting dinner. The following day, Magarity had her own recruiting dinner — as the newly named women’s basketball coach at Vermont.

And so, Becker’s birthday was temporarily set aside by a household now governed by the overlapping demands of two Division I programs. Magarity, 45, was named the Catamounts head coach on April 13, becoming counterpart to her husband, who has led the men’s program since 2011.

“I think that’s just maybe a little foreshadowing of what’s to come for us,” Magarity said.

Days into Magarity’s return to coaching, the couple, who got married just last year, is falling into a new rhythm: practices to schedule, recruits to host, two programs operating a hallway apart.

Their personal and professional lives are now unfolding in tandem, with Magarity and Becker believed to be the first Division I basketball husband and wife at the helm of programs in the same building, chasing what they believe could be “the best part of their lives.”

“It’s a little bit of passing ships in the night sort of thing,” Becker said of the demands since Magarity’s hiring, “getting to debrief each other, after we put the kids to bed, be able to pour a glass of wine and review our days.”

For years, their parallel paths never overlapped enough to require this level of coordination.

Magarity and Becker met through working in the America East, steadily building a friendship through annual league meetings while she was head coach at New Hampshire and he was entrenched at Vermont. Both had endured divorces around the same period — and their relationship evolved gradually until a dinner in 2019 with mutual friends officially kick-started their relationship: “That’s when I guess you could say we had sparks,” Magarity said.

It bolstered their friendship that former Vermont women’s coach Alisa Kresge is Magarity’s best friend and former teammate at Marist from 2003-04 and was Becker’s colleague in Burlington. Magarity’s next stop at Holy Cross, in Worcester, Mass., stretched the distance between the pair further, creating a cadence they grew accustomed to: long drives and more time apart than together.

“We both missed a lot of important moments in each other’s lives coaching,” Magarity said.

It made a moment like the morning of March 11, 2023, feel improbable. Becker was atop a ladder, net in hand, after Vermont claimed the America East title and an NCAA Tournament berth. By the next day, he was in Boston, stationed behind Magarity’s bench as she coached Holy Cross in the Patriot League championship. He yelled for timeouts she couldn’t hear and eventually celebrated right beside her.

Within hours, he was back on the road for Vermont’s Selection Sunday.

“I think I know that I’m madly in love with this person,” Becker said, “because I’ve never acted like this before.”

Those years apart became the architecture of what they have now. It necessitated a steady line of communication, a shared fluency in the job’s demands and a relationship anchored in support rather than presence. When they got engaged in 2023, the objective was clear: end the separation, and start something new together.

Magarity resigned from her post at Holy Cross in August 2024 — with a desire to “focus on her daughters and start a new chapter with John” — moving their trio to Burlington. In becoming Vermont’s director of major athletic gifts, Magarity stepped outside coaching and into a vantage point that allowed her to parse the sport from a new vantage point.

“For the first time ever … I was able to be a coach’s wife,” Magarity said, “and I loved that.”

Magarity, at times, traveled with Becker’s team, dropped into practices, made birthday cakes for players and, in the process, became woven into the university’s basketball identity.

Her daughters — Charlotte, who is in the seventh grade, and Caroline, who is in the fourth — took part in summer camps led by the women’s basketball team.