basketball coach
Personal Information
Born in 1948 in Edenborn, PA; married Bill Stringer (a professor), c. 1970; children: David, Janine, Justin.
Education: Slippery Rock University, B.A., c. 1970.
Memberships: Women's Basketball Coaches Association, Women's Sports Foundation, U.S. Amateur Basketball Association.
Career
Cheyney State University, Philadelphia, PA, women's basketball coach, 1971-82; University of Iowa, Iowa City, women's basketball coach, 1983-95; Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, women's basketball coach, 1995--.
Life's Work
C. Vivian Stringer made sports history in 1995, when she signed a multi-year contract to coach women's basketball at Rutgers University. The deal she inked with Rutgers made her the best-paid women's coach in the country, with a base salary of $150,000 and numerous additional incentives that could raise her yearly take to close to $300,000. A three-time National Coach of the Year and the only women's coach in the country to guide two different schools to National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Final Four appearances, Stringer collects a paycheck that is the envy of many of her peers, both male and female.
Money is secondary to winning, however, and winning is secondary to enriching the lives of her student-athletes. As columnist Bill Lyon of the Philadelphia Inquirer observed: "Vivian Stringer possesses an extraordinary basketball mind. Beyond that, she embodies all that we say we want in our coaches and educators. Those who are exposed to her influence invariably grow. They are taught--and encouraged--to think."
Stringer's success is particularly admirable because she has faced professional and personal hurdles. In a quarter century of coaching she has taken 11 teams to the NCAA tournament, most of these appearances coming with the University of Iowa in the competitive Big Ten Conference. At home she faces the daunting tasks of being a single mother with three teenagers, one of whom is severely disabled. According to Michael Dobie in Newsday, Stringer's "entire life has been a study in the will to persevere and excel."
Despite the dual tragedies of her daughter's lengthy illness and her husband's sudden death in 1992, Stringer has compiled one of the best won-loss records of any women's basketball coach, currently ranking fourth-highest victory-getter in the women's coaching profession. "I'm a winner. I'm going to be a winner, and Rutgers University is going to be the jewel of the East," she predicted in 1995. "All I've ever wanted to do is coach basketball and love doing it; I just want to be a good person and do a great job."
Stringer's early years infused her with the iron will that has served her so well in adulthood. She was born in 1948 in Edenborn, Pennsylvania, a small coal-mining town in the western part of the state. Her small home town high school did not even have a women's basketball or track team, so she became the first black cheerleader instead. She hit her stride as a collegian at Slippery Rock University, where she played basketball, field hockey, softball, and tennis--all of them well enough to earn entry into the school's Athletic Hall of Fame. It was also at Slippery Rock that she met her husband, a gymnast named Bill Stringer.
In 1971 Bill Stringer accepted a teaching position at Cheyney State University, one of the nation's first black colleges. With her own college degree in hand, Vivian volunteered to coach the women's basketball team. She was 23 at the time--just barely older than the students she was working with. Her coaching career began in the tight confines of the Cheyney gym, where she shared floor time with men's coach John Chaney. A fast friendship formed between Stringer and Chaney, and it has continued while each has pursued basketball fame--Stringer at Iowa, Chaney at Temple University. Asked his opinion of his former colleague, Chaney told the Philadelphia Inquirer: "There isn't a more creative basketball brain in this country than Viv. Forget men, forget women, forget black, forget white."
Stringer spent ten years at Cheyney State, and she put the women's basketball program there on the map. Although Chaney himself won a national championship while there, he recalled in Newsday that it was Stringer's squad that was the "marquee team." Chaney said: "They played first, and the gym was filled up with people because her team always attracted the fans. When my team got on the floor, they all left." Stringer's record at Cheyney State, 251-51, includes the ground-breaking accomplishment of a finals appearance in the first-ever NCAA tournament for women. The year was 1982, and the season was marred by personal tragedy.
Even as Stringer was preparing her team for the NCAA showdown, her only daughter, Janine, contracted a severe case of meningitis. The child was 14 months old at the time. Stringer found herself flying back and forth between the NCAA tournament and Philadelphia, where her daughter lay fighting for life. "The thing with me and Final Fours, I really haven't experienced them," Stringer admitted in Newsday. "I've done it, going through the movements. But in terms of experiencing all the surroundings, the Final Four was like a vacuum." Cheyney State lost in the finals, but Stringer's achievements had caught the eye of the athletic staff at the University of Iowa. She was offered the head coaching job there in 1983, and she and her husband embarked for the Midwest with their three young children.
When Stringer took over the Iowa program, the team was struggling along in the lower ranks of the Big Ten. She soon changed that. In her first season, the team posted a 17-10 record, and over the next 11 years the Hawkeyes compiled ten straight 20-win seasons, appeared in the NCAA tournament nine times, and won six conference championships. Two of Stringer's three National Coach of the Year awards were won while at Iowa, and she was named NCAA District V Coach of the Year in 1985, 1988, and 1993.
The Hawkeyes' only Final Four appearance under Stringer brought another poignant moment to the coach's phenomenal career. On Thanksgiving Day of 1992, Stringer's husband Bill collapsed and died of a massive heart attack. For many years Bill Stringer had been his wife's biggest supporter, taking pride in her accomplishments and helping her to achieve them by providing the child care and other housekeeping duties. Suddenly he was no longer there, and Stringer began to question the importance of her career. "I very seriously thought of not working again...," she recalled in the New York Daily News. "Athletics seems like such a contradiction between life and what happened to my husband. It all seemed like such play. But my sons helped me through that. Basketball kept some semblance of sanity. I wrapped myself up in it."
Rearranging her schedule to accommodate her extra duties at home, Stringer returned to coaching in January of 1993. Within months, her Hawkeyes were prominently featured in the NCAA Final Four. With that Final Four appearance, Stringer became the first women's basketball coach to advance to the Final Four with teams from two different colleges. Although the Hawkeyes were eliminated at that point, Stringer won the National Coach of the Year title, as well as the Carol Eckman Award and a special citation from the Smithsonian Institution. Amazingly, she also somehow found time to recruit what many observers felt was the best freshman class of basketball players in the school's history.
Stringer's win-loss record just prior to her move to Rutgers was a spectacular 520-135, with 11 NCAA tournament trips. This achievement--and her demonstrated ability to perform under intense personal pressure--made her an attractive commodity to the Rutgers University athletic department. Rutgers, which is the state university of New Jersey, was about to move into the Big East Conference in women's basketball, and the school's long-time coach had accepted a job elsewhere. The university offered Stringer the job, complete with a record-breaking salary and incentives that are reported to have included home health care for her disabled daughter.
The offer was attractive, but Stringer agonized over the decision. She missed her husband's input, and--coming off an 11-17 season at Iowa--felt she was still needed there. "I prayed a lot," she told the New York Daily News. "I lost weight. I got sick. I was looking for answers that no one could give me.... Once I made the decision, there was a sense of relief." Many personal and professional goals were weighed in arriving at the final choice. Stringer's extended family lives in the area, and the campus is close to both New York City and the popular Jersey Shore. Furthermore, as Stringer told Newsday, "I felt that I needed to expose [my sons] to what I said was the real world, and the real world isn't so nice. That's not to say New Jersey is not so nice. New Jersey is not Iowa City. This might seem strange: I wasn't looking for all positive experiences. When I send them from the nest, they're going to be ready for the world."
Some cynics claimed that Stringer's hiring had more to do with public relations than with her skills as a coach. In November of 1994, Rutgers president Francis L. Lawrence sparked a huge controversy over a statement he made about African Americans lacking "the genetic hereditary background" to score well on standardized tests. Minority students protested on campus--even staging a sit-in during a basketball game--demanding Lawrence's resignation. Lawrence apologized, explained himself, and refused to step down, creating a residue of ill-will among some of the students at Rutgers. It was thought that Stringer's arrival on campus would prove the perfect damage control for the beleaguered president.
The perception of Stringer as a token hire to appease angry blacks was immediately challenged by the coach herself and many of the people who had worked with her or played under her in the past. As Bill Lyon put it, "Vivian Stringer can coach, and she can recruit. Rutgers is joining the prestigious Big East.... Women's basketball seems ready to ignite. Rutgers wants to warm itself in the flame that is to come. And in Vivian Stringer, it has a fire-starter." For her part, Stringer commented in the Philadelphia Inquirer: "I'm not trying to be the big man or big woman on anybody's campus. But, yes, athletics can be a force for good. They can have healing power."
In addition to her collegiate coaching, Stringer has served as an international coach for various American women's basketball teams. Her 1991 U.S. team won a bronze medal at the Pan American Games in Havana, Cuba, and she also led the World University Games team in 1985 and the U.S. entry in the World Championship Zone Qualification tournament in 1989. She has helped to establish the Women's Basketball Coaches Association, and she currently sits on the board of the U.S. Amateur Basketball Association. On the personal front, she continues to raise her three children, including her wheelchair-bound daughter in as many of the family activities as possible. She has hinted that, in New Jersey, she has found the place where she would like to "retire and live." She told the New York Daily News: "I can totally relax and unpack. There's no uneasiness about where I am going to be."
Her many administrative duties--and even the seasonal won-loss records--are secondary considerations for Stringer. "I enjoy having some impact on young women's lives--to see them smile and to use athletics as a vehicle for their successes in life," she stated in Rutgers University's media guide. "My focus is not just on the basketball player and their performance on the court, but the kind of young woman they are going to be off the court." As for working at Rutgers, Stringer relishes the opportunity to build a whole new program and put it to the test in a demanding conference. She concluded: "I feel good that I can sit down in a young woman's home and offer them, in effect, an Ivy League education and access to all things and the potential for greatness."
Awards
Named Naismith National College Coach of the Year, 1982, 1988, 1993; named NCAA District V Coach of the Year, 1985, 1988, 1993; named Big Ten Coach of the Year, 1991, 1993; recipient of Carol Eckman Award and special citation from Smithsonian Institution, 1993.
Further Reading
Books
- Great Women in Sports, Visible Ink Press, 1996, pp. 455-57.
- Knight Ridder wire story, July 14, 1995; July 16, 1995.
- Newsday, December 3, 1995, p. 28.
- New York Daily News, August 13, 1995, p. 38-39.
- Philadelphia Inquirer, July 23, 1995, p. C1.
— Anne Janette Johnson
