You've probably heard by now that Michael Jordan officially got inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame on Monday, joined by fellow Dream Teamers John Stockton and David Robinson, as well as Stockton's longtime Utah Jazz coach, Jerry Sloan. But you might not realize that one of their Hall classmates hails from our own Fayette County.
C. Vivian Stringer, the Rutgers' women's basketball coach who was born in Edenborn, PA, and is a graduate of Slippery Rock, will join the aforementioned legends at this year's induction this September in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Stringer has compiled a career record of 813-269 in her coaching career, which started at Cheyney State College in 1972 and continues today at Rutgers. She is currently the third-winningest coach in women's basketball history, behind only Tennessee's Pat Summitt and former Texas coach Jody Conradt. She's a five-time nominee for the Naismith Coach of the Year Award, winning it in 1993; she was inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 2001.
The accomplished coach is also the namesake of The C. Vivian Stringer Child Development Center on the Nike campus in Beaverton, Oregon. The 35,000-square-foot facility houses 26 classrooms, providing care, learning and development for approximately 300 children between the ages of six months and five years old.
Stringer, if you'll remember, was also at the center of a media firestorm in 2007 after Don Imus' now-infamous comments about the Rutgers players that ultimately cost Imus his job.
Women's basketball doesn't get much airtime on blogs, but the Hall of Fame is the Hall of Fame. And the last time I checked, there's not exactly a plethora of athletes hailing from Fayette County in any national sports shrines; so let's give it up for the woman who once said, "To us, Uniontown was the big city," the fan of Chilly Billy Cardilly and Roberto Clemente, C. Vivian Stringer...Basketball Hall of Famer.
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3 comments:
Way to go Fayettenam!!
http://www.sru.edu/pages/14885.asp
My brother met Coach Stringer years ago when she was coaching at Iowa. He drove the bus for her team after a game at Pitt to Maryland. The weather conditions were really bad and he said she was great to work with. Very patient and understanding, which is not true for some of the coaches we work with.
Wow.
Before all we had in Uniontown was George C. Marshall, Ernie Davis and the invention of the Big Mac. And now a Hall of Famer.
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