Women Coaches Find a Brand New Ball Game

This article describes Lady Pirate's basketball team in 1978. This and other articles may be found in the University Archives.

Citation for this article is: "Women Coaches Find a Brand New Ball Game" Pieces of Eight, December 22, 1978.

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Folks used to think of their kind - if folks thought of them at all - as "a spinster or a too-old tomboy, running around with a whistle around their neck."

At least that is the way Jennifer Alley, the 32-year-old head of the University of North Carolina women's basketball team, sees it.

But it's not that way any more.

Now there's a new breed of women coaches who are wed to dawn-to-midnight careers and who get their names in Sports Illustrated.

They coach a brand new ball game of bigger bucks and higher expectations. At places like UNC, North Carolina State University and East Carolina University, women's varsity basketball coaches are becoming Big People On Campus.

It wasn't always that way, of course. The big shot in the arm for women's basketball was Title IX of the 1972 Education Act, which requires schools receiving federal funds to provide equal athletic opportunity for women.

For Miss Alley, N.C. State's Kay Yow, and East Carolina's Cathy Andruzzi, the lot of a head basketball coach has changed dramatically.

Miss Yow, 36, a Gibsonville native, began her own career 10 years ago at a High Point high school teaching English and coaching basketball and softball.

Since then she has gone from coaching college players who had never touched a basketball in high school to leading a team whose members are all on athletic scholarships.

Since she came to Raleigh, the NCSU team has won two state championships and made it to the semi-finals of the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women.

The former English instructor no longer finds the time to read great literature, let alone teach it. She fulfills her literary needs by going to occasional plays. When she reads, it's usually about basketball.

Part of the pressure comes from competing with 50 colleges in recruiting top talent from high schools all over the country. So Miss Yow and co-head coach Nora Lynn Finch, formerly of Peace College, spend hours each day arranging visits to NCSU and travel thousands of miles to watch high school games.

Still, things are better than they were. At least coaches at the big basketball schools may now be reimbursed for recruiting trips.

"I used to do it out of my own pocket, with my Texaco credit card," sais Miss Alley, who has put 25,000 to 30,000 miles on her personal car taking day trips to check up on talent.

The Lenoir native says being UNC's first full-time women's basketball coach isn't any more of a grind than it was when she taught classes and coached athletics.

But it isn't any easier either. "I have to spend all my time around the basketball," she said.

Sometimes on Sunday afternoons she may watch a football game she said, if there's no basketball practice.

This year, she also managed to take a week's summer vacation. But she - and the other coaches - spent the rest of the hot weather teaching at various basketball camps.

Even social life tends to revolve around work. Miss Yow and Miss Finch said their most recent idea of a good time was attending a Sports Illustrated dinner in Winston-Salem.

For Miss Andruzzi, 25, socializing means a few hours of post-game unwinding with friends if she's not going over videotapes of the action "I believe being a coach is a hard job," she said. "If you're going to do it you do it 24 hours a day. I don't need to party."

Families ruled out
The coaches at all three schools rule out marriage and families, at least for now.

"I can't think along those lines and do what I'm doing at this time," Miss Yow said.

Miss Alley agreed: "I can't imagine it would be fair to the man. I don't see how I could maintain a household unless my husband liked to cook and do the laundry."

Looking at it the other way around. Miss Andruzzi - who went to East Carolina after serving as a basketball camp director in several states - think the wife of any male college basketball coach would have to be a patient woman.

"I like my team to be a family," she said as she led the East Carolina varsity squad to a Greenville steak house for a pre-game meal. "This way I know they're eating decent, not tacos or something" she said.

Keeping their heads
The newness of the great women's basketball boom is unmistakable.

Miss Yow and Miss Finch find themselves consciously on guard against letting all the new attention and publicity go to their heads.

"I'm trying to make myself the same in the end." Miss Yow said.

Miss Andruzzi thanks the cheerleaders after a game and is surprised when people on the street stop her to talk about this year's prospects for the Lady Pirates. "I'm not used to the interest," she said.

And then there's the basketball-shaped penny bank that the ECU team keeps on Miss Andruzzi's desk.

Despite all the advances, the Lady Pirates have to save up their spare change for the kind of luxury that a men's basketball team would find commonplace.

Normally, they ride to games in a convoy of vans. But sometime before the season is over, they hope to make at least one road trip in a genuine, air-conditioned chartered bus.