Bern Macca, the coach, always thought she'd become Bern Macca, the athletic director, someday.

After 18 years of coaching, the last four as head women's basketball coach at Mitchell College, Macca moved on to the next stage of her career as of July 1, taking over as athletic director at The Williams School.

Macca is a 1991 graduate of Stonington High School, where she is a member of the Athletic Hall of Fame, and a 1995 graduate of Connecticut College, where she finished third on the all-time scoring list for the women's basketball team and also played lacrosse.

"It's kind of cool to be able to put all that together to be an administrator," Macca said. "I'll be at all the home games; I'll watch it from a different level. It'll be nice to be a mentor to coaches, hire coaches, be a good influence that way.

"It was a hard decision to make. I love coaching, I've always been passionate about it. At the college level it's recruiting every night. It's a grind. It's different from what I'm doing, but I feel like I've been training to do this job for a long time."

Macca, who lives in Waterford, got her first coaching job as an assistant to former Conn coach Kathy Gailor when Gailor left New London to become the head coach at Bloomsburg (Pa.) University.

Macca went on to serve as a graduate assistant at Elmira (N.Y.) College, started the softball program at Wells College in Aurora, N.Y., and returned to Elmira as field hockey and lacrosse coach, earning Empire 8 Coach of the Year honors twice.

Prior to being hired at Mitchell, Macca was the head women's lacrosse coach at Utica (N.Y.) College, where the Pioneers qualified for the Empire 8 tournament for the first time in program history.

At Mitchell, Macca has coached basketball, tennis, softball and coached the club lacrosse program last season.

She replaces Scott Wagner at Williams.

v.fulkerson@theday.com