Cornell University Athletics

Email Coach LaRoche

Danielle LaRoche enters her second season as the head coach of the Cornell women’s soccer program. LaRoche led the Big Red to a 4-12 mark in her first season in 2007 despite taking over the program just three months prior to the first game of the season.

LaRoche has also made an impressive impact on the recruiting trail in just her first full year as the head coach at Cornell. Her first recruiting class, which will begin play in the fall of 2008, was ranked 94th in the nation by SoccerBuzz.com, the first time in school history that the Big Red reached that outlet’s top 100. Additionally, the incoming class was ranked ninth in the Northeast Region, another program high.

LaRoche came to Cornell after spending the 2006 season as an assistant coach with the women’s soccer program at George Mason University. She is a 13-year coaching veteran, with previous collegiate assistant coaching stops at Binghamton Univeristy and Howard University.

While at George Mason, LaRoche helped the Patriots to an 8-9-2 overall record and a 5-5-1 mark in the Colonial Athletic Association. She also served as recruiting coordinator and was responsible for bringing in a highly-decorated six-member class for the 2007 season.

Prior to her stint with the Patriots, she was an assistant coach at Binghamton for two seasons, helping the Bearcats to a 24-12-5 record over that span. The Bearcats went to the NCAA tournament as the America East Conference champion in 2004 and finished the season ranked fourth in the Northeast Region by the NSCAA and by Soccer Buzz. LaRoche also served for three years as an assistant coach at Howard, where she helped in the development and creation of a new program. At each of her stops, she also was a coach within the U.S. Soccer Olympic Development Program. She is currently a member of the senior staff of the Olympic Development Program Region I U-13 team.

In addition to her collegiate coaching experience, LaRoche spent four years as the director at One Touch Soccer Academy, organizing the coaching efforts for 28 adult and youth programs while also running 35 camps per year.

LaRoche received a Bachelor of Arts in Afro-American Studies from the University of Maryland, where she was a member of the women’s soccer team under April Heinrichs, who would later go on to serve as head coach of the U.S. Women’s National Team. She also holds numerous national coaching licenses and certificates, including a USSF National ‘A’ license, a USSF National Youth license and a NSCAA Premier license. LaRoche was also selected to attend and graduated from the NCAA Women Coaches Academy in December of 2007.

LaRoche is married to Dan King, the Director of Sports Medicine at Binghamton University, and the pair resides in Ithaca.