A Golden Anniversary for WVU Women’s Basketball – West Virginia University Athletics
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – In early August 1972, director of athletics Leland Byrd, on the job for just a week, walked into his office at the old stadium on West Virginia University’s downtown campus and noticed a note left on his desk by longtime administrator Eleanor Lamb.
It was a phone message from Kittie Blakemore requesting a meeting to talk about women’s sports at WVU. Joining them would be Dr. Wincie Ann Carruth and Martha Thorn.
Blakemore, assistant professor in the School of Physical Education, had spent years advocating for women’s sports at the University. She came to West Virginia in 1960 as a physical education instructor and oversaw the women’s intramural program on campus.
In the 1960s, women’s intramurals fell under the umbrella of the School of Physical Education and consisted of such sports as basketball, bowling, fencing, swimming, badminton, tennis and table tennis. The intramural program typically ran until the end of February and culminated with the Residence Halls Association presenting a trophy to the winning teams.
For a brief period, the Panhellenic Council prohibited sororities from competing in intramurals because of the practice of forcing pledges to play, but they were readmitted in the mid-1960s around the time Bette Hushla was competing on the men’s swimming team in 1965.
Four years prior, Marilee Hohmann was the first female to ever compete in a WVU varsity sport in 1961 when she became a member of the rifle team. Hohmann is in the WVU Sports Hall of Fame; Hushla, since forgotten, is not.
Before that, WVU women played basketball on an informal basis under an organization known as the Women’s Athletic Council, established in the early 1920s in cooperation with the University to regulate all matters pertaining to women’s athletics with the goal of increasing interest in athletic activities among students. Its function was primarily recreational in nature.
Athletic opportunities continued to remain informal and recreational for West Virginia University women through the late 1960s and into the early 1970s when other major universities around the country were beginning to sponsor and fund women’s sporting teams.
Even in the Mountain State, women’s sports teams started competing within the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (WVIAC). Marshall began playing women’s basketball during the 1969-70 season, around the same time other state colleges such as Glenville State, West Liberty, Shepherd, Concord and Salem were fielding women’s teams. Coincidentally, Blakemore and Carruth were actually asked to help write the constitution for the women’s portion of the WVIAC in 1969.
But up in Morgantown, the WVU women remained in limbo. Blakemore, Carruth and Thorn had unsuccessfully tried several times to get the University to consider starting a women’s sports program, but in each instance, they were stonewalled. WVU simply did not have the money to do it, they were told.
Director of athletics Leland Byrd oversaw the creation of women’s sports at West Virginia University in 1973 (WVU Athletics Communications photo).
Undeterred, Kittie patiently and discreetly kept collecting data on women’s sports programs at other institutions. Inside her filing cabinet were bulging binders stuffed with memos typed on crinkled, onion-skinned paper, handwritten letters from women’s student organizational leaders and their parents, correspondence from female sports colleagues at other institutions and carbon copies of proposed women’s athletics organizational policy statements. Many of these materials have been preserved and now exist in the West Virginia & Regional History Center on the sixth floor of the Wise Library on WVU’s downtown campus.
Perhaps the most important documents contained within Blakemore’s files at the time were the women’s athletic budgets that she managed to somehow obtain.
She had Kansas’ budget for the 1972-73 academic year, which allocated $11,987.42 for its seven varsity teams that season with gymnastics getting the largest portion at $3,539.76. KU’s women’s tennis that year received $575.95 for its fall and spring seasons.
Kittie also had Fairmont State’s women’s basketball budgets dating back to the late 1960s. The Falcons were spending on average about $1,000 per year, including $348 for uniforms for the 1972 season. The going rate for local game officials back then was $15.
She had samples of game contracts from Pitt and women’s sports participation charts from Illinois. There was a typed-up sheet of potential questions and responses to such things as policies, procedures, eligibility verification, rules and regulations.
Probably the most significant historical item in her filing cabinet was a one-page document titled “Discussion of Intercollegiate Program for Women at WVU.” What this came to be was essentially the Magna Carta for women’s sports at West Virginia University.
It dealt with every conceivable question that could be asked of women’s sports, including which local and national associations West Virginia University should join, the problems with starting a new women’s program and the budgetary issues it was going to present, facility requirements for practices and games, team scheduling, tryout policies and procedures and which sports to adopt first.
Handwritten notations were made in each column with suggestions on how the coaches should be compensated, which sports should be delayed or phased in over time, where most of the athletes would come from and whether or not a separate athletic council for women should be instituted with the same representation as the regular athletic council.
Kittie continued collecting these and other documents and waiting patiently until the time was ripe.
That moment came on June 23, 1972, when the Educational Amendments Act was signed into federal law. Contained within that was the Title IX provision that protected women from discrimination based on sex in educational programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance. That portion of the act was written by Indiana senator Birch Bayh, today considered the Father of Title IX.
What this meant was West Virginia University and other public educational institutions receiving federal money for research and scholarships were going to have to become compliant with the new law if they wanted to continue receiving it. Literally hundreds of thousands of dollars-worth of federal funding was on the line for WVU. Retiring athletic director Red Brown knew this, which is why he passed the baton on to Byrd to deal with it.
When Kittie, Martha and Wincie arrived in Leland’s office, he sensed immediately that they meant business. It was an ambush, if that was even possible, from someone as kind and sweet as Kittie Blakemore was.
“Kittie said, ‘Leland, we’ve got to start a women’s program. I’m here and I can take basketball, Martha can take tennis …’ I said, ‘Listen, I can sympathize with you, but we just don’t have any money,” the late Byrd recalled in 2013, nine years before his death in 2022.
They had heard this response many times before. Blakemore, who died in 2020, had an answer for every question Byrd asked. The more questions he asked them the more he became convinced of its inevitability at WVU.
“We can start it, but it will have to be on a shoestring,” Byrd sighed. “I don’t know where I’ll find it, but you’ve got $5,000 this first year.”
Kittie said, ‘Leland, we’ve got to start a women’s program. I’m here and I can take basketball, Martha can take tennis …’ I said, ‘Listen, I can sympathize with you, but we just don’t have any money.
— WVU director of athletics Leland Byrd
1972-73 West Virginia University Athletic Council. Seated left to right: Ed Shockey, assistant athletic director; Bill Conway, student representative; Kittie Blakemore, faculty representative; Eddie Hambrick, student representative; Leland Byrd, athletic director. Standing left to right: Paul Kidd, alumni representative; William Morton, alumni representative; Dr. Herbert Warden, chairman and faculty representative; Robert Jack, faculty representative; Fred Wright, faculty representative. Not pictured, Harold McNeill, faculty representative (WVU Athletics Communications photo).
“Everyone there was extremely professional. The stonewalling that occurred, it was important for Kittie to take baby steps, so that was part of the stonewalling, of course,” Sandy Elmore, Blakemore’s second assistant coach, said recently. Elmore was on the first women’s team at Glenville State, coached at Potomac State and is in the Glenville State and WVU College of Applied Human Sciences (CPASS) Halls of Fame. “Kittie, Wincie and Martha went in with this elaborate plan of exactly how they wanted it to be and every time a question was fired, Kittie was right there to give the answer.”
Dianne Nolan, Kittie’s first athletic trainer and later one of the winningest coaches in NCAA women’s history at Fairfield and Lafayette, recalled women’s coaches in the 1970s and 1980s wanting to work for athletic directors who had daughters.
“They seemed to get it, especially if their daughter happened to like sports,” she said.
Leland Byrd had five daughters, so he got it!
The next hurdle was getting President James Harlow and a conservative WVU Athletic Council to approve women’s sports. Harlow was sympathetic. He had recently lifted the long-standing curfew policy on campus that applied only to women and signed off on the decision for the WVU Law School to accept women in 1970 after students Marjorie Dean and Charlotte Rolston threatened to sue their law faculty advisors.
In April 1972, the all-male marching band opened its ranks to women and in the mid-1970s, Lea Anderson made history when she became WVU’s first female student body president.
As for the Athletic Council, Kittie had that covered, too. She was now a member.
“The thing that held it up in ’72 was the fact that they didn’t know how they were going to pay the coaches,” Blakemore recalled in 2013. “Well, when they finally realized that the coaches were already being paid through the School of Physical Education because we were teacher-coaches, then they didn’t have any question about it.”
The final detail was which department was going to oversee women’s sports, physical education or athletics? Blakemore was adamant it be athletics. For years, she barely kept the women’s intramural program afloat with its meager funding and she knew women’s sports would be a great financial burden for the PE school.
“The athletic department really didn’t want us, but they knew – and I think Leland knew – that they were going to have to start with us,” Blakemore said. “And that’s how it began.”
“Kittie was very smart,” Elmore explained. “She knew if you wanted three sports you better ask for eight. She wasn’t born yesterday, and I think she had thought things through quite a bit. I do believe that initial meeting there was information that Kittie, Wincie and Martha put out there to the effect that all the WVIAC schools had women’s sports and here is the state’s land-grant institution that had zero.
“I think the land-grant institution in every state is expected to be the leader, and in this particular instance, West Virginia University was bringing up the rear,” Elmore said.
West Virginia University’s first women’s basketball team. Front row left to right – Suzie Lefever, Lynn Buckley, Lisa Weisenstein, Sara Roberts, Cheryl Puskarich, Beth Shank, Carolyn Huffman, Cindy Booth. Back row left to right – Kittie Blakemore, Dianne Nolan, Michele Jaccar, Jo Salisbury, Pam Harper, Leslie Sergy, Celeste Knaus, Jo Nutter, Barbara Walker, Clarence Kimble (WVU Athletics Communications photo).
West Virginia University’s first three women’s varsity coaches.
Making a calculated guess, I would say probably 70-80% of the players knew quite a bit, but there were some kids with very raw talent, and you had to point them toward the locker room.
— Sandy Elmore, women’s basketball assistant coach
In the spring of 1973, at the conclusion of the Athletic Council meeting, women’s sports at West Virginia University were officially adopted with tennis, gymnastics and women’s basketball getting the go-ahead for the 1973-74 academic year. Volleyball and swimming and diving were added the next year, followed by softball, track and cross country. By 1978, WVU was sponsoring eight women’s sports.
Blakemore was appointed West Virginia’s first women’s basketball coach, and she received a $600 stipend to lead the squad. She recalled her first budget being $2,200, which included travel, meals, equipment, officials’ pay and so forth. Adjusted for inflation, that amounts to about $15,000 in today’s dollars, which wouldn’t come close to covering the expense of the women’s team’s charter flight to Provo, Utah, for this year’s BYU game.
Uniforms were also budgeted, but those didn’t arrive until the end of the season for the team picture. Instead, players were required to wear “pennies” – a vest-like smock with numbers on them worn over t-shirts. Some of the girls showed up to the team tryouts wearing cutoff jeans.
Of the 37 who tried out, Blakemore picked a squad of 15 players. One player eventually quit, leaving the first team with 14 women. It was a menagerie of players with varying degrees of talent and ability. The ones from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware had played high school basketball and were familiar with the game; the others were not.
“Making a calculated guess, I would say probably 70-80% of the players knew quite a bit, but there were some kids with very raw talent, and you had to point them toward the locker room,” Elmore laughed.
There was one player who thought when the team went into the press that she had to stand still, while another thought that made bank shots did not count.
Lynn Buckley was one of the more experienced players coming from Wilmington, Delaware, and playing basketball since she was in the seventh grade. She was asked by a friend to try out for the team. Buckley made it while her friend did not.
“There were a lot of athletic girls out for the team, but they just didn’t have any background knowledge,” Buckley recalled. “You could tell the girls that came from out of state because West Virginia was so far behind with women’s sports. I was amazed. I was like, ‘Oh, we’re working on how to shift for this defense, and that was like basic stuff we had learned in high school.’”
The team’s best player, Leslie Sergy, from Monroeville, Pennsylvania, had actually met Blakemore during a campus visit before enrolling in the fall of 1973. Blakemore told her they were starting women’s basketball that winter.
“I remember when my mother and I went down there for some type of orientation, and I had an opportunity to meet coach Blakemore,” Sergy said. “I asked her if there was going to be a women’s basketball team and she said yes. I thought, ‘Okay, I’m here.’ I told her I played in high school and really enjoyed playing.”
Kittie had remembered guard Carolyn Huffman when she refereed Waynesburg high school games. Huffman was another experienced player.
“I was down at the Field House one day and Kittie was there, and she called me over and said, ‘We’re going to put together a team, and I want you to try out.’ I said, ‘oh okay’ and I ended up making the team,” Huffman said.
Like Buckley, precocious guard Suzie Lefever was convinced by a friend to try out for the team. Her friend also didn’t make the squad.
“I really didn’t want to try out,” Lefever, from Zelienople, Pennsylvania, remembered. “I was worried I would make the team and she wouldn’t, and that’s what happened. I’m really aggressive, and that was at a time when it wasn’t proper for women to be really aggressive. I’ll run over you. I don’t care if I’m 5-foot-3. I grew up that way playing with the boys.”
Beth Shank played on outstanding high school teams in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and took the game seriously. After spending a year at Potomac State, she came to WVU to pursue a physical education degree. When she found out West Virginia was assembling a women’s basketball team, she was eager to try out.
“I saw somewhere that said there were 30 people who showed up for tryouts, and there was a heck of a lot more than 30 people,” Shank said. “I know what 100 people look like, and I’d say there were at least that many. I was nervous. I’m like, ‘I’m not going to make it with all these people.’
“But you could just tell by watching someone play if they had experience,” Shank added. “Sam Booth was from a place in West Virginia that did not have a team, but she had brothers, and she learned to play with her brothers. She was a point guard, and she had dribbling skills.”
Sara Roberts was another West Virginia player from an athletic family. Her father was recruited by Paul Brown to play college football at Ohio State during World War II, and after the war he finished his career at Baldwin-Wallace. Roberts, who played on Wirt County High’s first girls’ basketball team, and her father are in the Wirt County High School Hall of Fame.
“I didn’t have much training,” Roberts admitted. “Our high school football coach helped me out, and I got to go to the Jerry West and Hot Rod Hundley camps in Salem and that really helped me. Hot Rod called me ‘Sara Lee’ and even years later, he never forgot me. They nicknamed me ‘Hot Rod Roberts’ because I could throw that behind-the-back pass he taught me.”
Roberts wanted to go to Ohio State and try out for the team there, but her father told her the school was too big for her.
“I also thought about going to Marshall, but my dad said he heard that West Virginia was going to have a team, so I started training right before I went up there and tried out,” Roberts said. “It was awesome. I loved every minute of it.”
Booth, from Oak Hill, also considered going to Marshall because the school already had an established women’s team. Years later, she received a legislative citation for helping establish girls’ sports at Oak Hill High.
Charleston’s Jo Salisbury played basketball with the other boys in a neighborhood two hills over from Yeager Airport, and she went to WVU to become a veterinarian. She took one of Kittie’s basketball refereeing classes and that’s how she found out West Virginia was starting women’s basketball. Salisbury admits to being self-conscious the entire time she was on the team because the other players were so much more advanced than she was.
“To be honest, I only played two years for two reasons. No. 1, most of the players were phys ed majors or were a little more serious and were definitely better players than I was,” she recalled. “And two, I was getting into some awfully heavy science courses, and I just didn’t have the time.”
Women’s basketball information in the 1973-74 women’s sports brochure. Note, no roster for women’s basketball because the team was selected after the publishing deadline.
Six-on-six (basketball) meant you had two stationary guards and the only time they could shoot the ball is if they got fouled. They were the free throw shooters. Honestly, it was very sexist. It was because they didn’t think women had the stamina to go five-on-five. How ridiculous was that?
— Dianne Nolan, Fairfield and Lafayette women’s basketball coach and WVU’s first athletic trainer
Most of the women had played six-man basketball, which used an extra player as a “rover.” Dianne Nolan, who came to WVU in 1973 to teach as a graduate assistant in the School of Physical Education before also becoming the team’s athletic trainer that first season, once played six-man basketball growing up in New Jersey before going to Glassboro State, which is now Rowan University.
“Six-on-six meant you had two stationary guards and the only time they could shoot the ball is if they got fouled,” Nolan explained. “They were the free throw shooters. Honestly, it was very sexist. It was because they didn’t think women had the stamina to go five-on-five. How ridiculous was that?”
Others on that first team included Michelle Jaccar and Jozetta Nutter from Ravenswood, Pamela Harper from Charleston, Lisa Weisenstein from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, Cheryl Puskarich from Cokesburg, Pennsylvania, and Celeste Knaus from nearby Latrobe, Pennsylvania.
The tallest player was Sergy, who stood just 5-feet-10. Today, that’s considered above average height for guards. The first team won just four games out of 15 against a schedule mostly made up of smaller schools from within the state. The only out-of-state Division I team WVU played was Pitt, the Mountaineers losing by four to the Panthers in Pittsburgh.
“Coach Blakemore said we were going to get better every year and that made perfect sense to me because you could see the different levels and who played and who hadn’t played and what we were working on drill-wise in practice,” Sergy said. “So, my expectations were not sky high. I was just happy to have a practice every day where we had a set time and we had coaches there. It seemed to be much more organized than when I was in high school, so those were all positives for me.”
But the losing bothered Shank.
“I remember reading quotes in the paper from Beth about our team and how she wasn’t used to losing,” Roberts said.
“I was from an established team in Carlisle where we were like 17-1 my senior year,” Shank explained. “It was a little different for me because the guards had experience playing and one forward had experience. The other forwards did not, and it was very frustrating. Obviously, Kittie was very new, and she was just learning how to be a coach and how to run plays, but we got better.”
Buckley doesn’t recall the specific game, but she does remember the futility of once trying to make a basket.
“We must have been playing before a men’s game because people were starting to filter in, so there were a lot of students watching. I think I stole the ball like three times in a row and every time I stole the ball and dribbled down, I missed the layup,” she laughed. “I was like, ‘God, would someone please help me? I’ll steal the ball and you shoot it. I don’t even want the points!’”
Coach Kittie Blakemore talks to her team during its first game against West Liberty played at the WVU Coliseum on Jan. 15, 1974 (Submitted photo).
I think I stole the ball like three times in a row and every time I stole the ball and dribbled down, I missed the layup. I was like, ‘God, would someone please help me? I’ll steal the ball and you shoot it. I don’t even want the points!’
— WVU player Lynn Buckley
Doubleheaders with the men were rare, but there was one instance when the women scheduled a game before the men. Kittie was told beforehand that the women’s game had to end at a specific time so she sat on the bench praying it would not go into overtime and have to endure the embarrassment of someone walking out on the floor to stop the game.
“We worked around (the men),” Blakemore once recalled. “If they wanted the court, they got the court. We had some gripes, but they didn’t.”
In Kittie’s eyes, the first year was about establishing the team, letting everyone get playing time and her proving to the administration that she could manage the program and finish the season under budget. When she turned in her expense account at the end of the year, Byrd asked Kittie if she was feeding her players.
“Leland, these are girls. They don’t eat as much as the boys do,” Kittie reminded him.
But after the first year, Kittie felt pressure to put a better product out on the floor. Tryouts were held each year and some of the players on West Virginia’s first team were cut the second year. If they didn’t make the team, they had to return their tennis shoes.
“It was gut wrenching for her to have to cut a player, and I didn’t find out some of this until later when I returned and worked for Kittie as her trainer and roomed with her,” Booth said. “She was never cutthroat, at all. She was always trying to figure out how she could make things work with what she had.”
“There was pressure, and I could feel it myself,” Elmore admitted. “It was like, ‘We’ve got to turn the corner here.’ We had a lot to prove. We couldn’t put something out on the floor that would embarrass the University because the athletic director might turn around and say, ‘Maybe this isn’t something we should be doing.’”
Eventually, Kittie began to get a little scholarship money to give to some of her players. At first, it was doled out on a need basis.
“The next year Kittie told me, ‘We are getting a few partial scholarships, and do you need it, or would you be willing to give it up?’” Huffman recalled. Her father was a well-known doctor in Waynesburg and her family was pretty well off. “I didn’t even ask my parents, and I just gave it up. I don’t think I told them until a few years later, and they said, ‘What?’”
“The one thing that was very rewarding for me was coach Blakemore got four scholarships after my sophomore year, and she had the combination of kindness and recognition to give those partial scholarships to existing players, rather than using them to go out and recruit new players,” Sergy recalled. “It was like, ‘I’m appreciated here, and this is more of a goal to work towards.’ I think we made some leaps and bounds during the four years that I was there.”
Blakemore added Pittsburgh guard Carol Mousseau in 1975, and then Wheeling’s Mary Hennen and Morgantown’s Linda Findo in 1976. Those players, combined with the nucleus of pioneering players Sergy and Roberts, won the state championship in 1977 with a 19-7 overall record.
Soon afterward, West Virginia and Marshall were booted out of the conference.
West Virginia celebrates its 1977 state championship with coach Kittie Blakemore, including founding players Leslie Sergy (30) and Sara Roberts (23) (Submitted photo).
A recent picture of co-captains Sara Roberts and Sam Booth (Submitted photo).
The first women’s team used these “pennies” as uniforms until the regular uniforms arrived at the end of the season for the team photo (Cindy “Sam” Booth photo).
Booth would have been a part of that championship team as well, but she re-injured her knee against Slippery Rock and was lost for the season. That was the first serious injury Kittie dealt with as a coach.
“When I had knee surgery, Kittie was up at the hospital with me the whole time, and I was so nauseous from the anesthesia that she was right there holding the container as I threw up,” Booth said. “Her sister said we were the kids Kittie never had, and she treated us like that.”
Buckley was another founding player who missed out on the state title because she got into physical therapy school at Kansas at end of the first semester. Blakemore was among those who wrote letters of recommendation on her behalf, even though she knew she might lose one of her most experienced guards.
“She was so supportive, just so classy and always so positive,” Buckley said. Now Lynn Dieringer, she met her husband at WVU and after he earned his law degree, they moved to Bridgeport, West Virginia, where he opened his law practice and she practiced physical therapy. Dieringer is now retired.
Lefever is also a physical therapist still practicing in Friday Harbor, Washington, where she has lived for the past 30 years. Lefever was cut from the team after her second season and immediately pivoted to athletic training.
“If you were a woman and you were 5-foot tall, nobody wanted to listen to you back then,” Lefever said. “I went and got a different degree, so I ended up becoming a physical therapist.”
Booth, fascinated by her series of knee injuries, pursued athletic training for her career.
“Once that knee injury happened, I was so timid,” she admitted. “I had torn my (anterior cruciate ligament), but they didn’t know that. It had scarred down to the bone so when Dr. (Doug) Bowers put his hand on my knee and did the testing, it gave a false negative and then my senior year it just snapped.”
Booth’s career in athletic training and hospital administration took her to such faraway places as Fargo, North Dakota, and Rochester, New York. Now, she’s retired and living in Bunker Hill, West Virginia, in the state’s Eastern Panhandle.
After graduating from WVU, Shank wanted to go into teaching and coaching but those jobs back in her hometown were hard to come by. After working briefly as an assistant aquatic director at the Carlisle YMCA, she attended Harrisburg Community College and became a registered nurse. She now resides in a retirement community in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.
Roberts did get into teaching and coaching at Marietta College in Marietta, Ohio. She told Kittie about a guard playing at nearby Fort Frye High in Beverly, Ohio, named Lisa Ribble, and also about a 6-foot-7 center from Columbus who could dunk a basketball named Georgeann Wells. That duo made women’s basketball history on Dec. 21, 1984, when Ribble threw a pass to Wells and she dunked the ball in a game against the University of Charleston in Elkins, West Virginia.
After retiring from Marietta College, Roberts moved to Sebastian, Florida, with plans of becoming an LPGA teaching professional. She also worked one year at the Professional Golfers Career College in Orlando.
Salisbury gave up basketball after two seasons to pursue a degree in veterinarian science. She said her experience playing athletics helped her overcome the chauvinistic attitude toward women veterinarians at the time.
“Because I played on the basketball team, my advisor directed me toward courses that the guys were taking,” Salisbury admitted. “I had a little bit of an advantage in my academic career because of basketball. I wasn’t just a girl; I was an athlete.”
However, instead of becoming a vet, Salisbury pursued a career in research science, first at WVU in the Ag School and then at the Health Sciences Center before moving to North Carolina to work for a drug company. Today, she is living and working in Kittie’s hometown and final resting place, Manassas, Virginia, for American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), a non-profit, global biological resource center.
Huffman, now Carolyn McGrath, married longtime WVU men’s soccer coach John McGrath and returned to Waynesburg where she owned and operated one of the most successful Radio Shack franchises on the East Coast, Huffman Electronics. She has since retired.
And Sergy, now Leslie Staggers, met her husband Harley Staggers Jr. while they were attending WVU.
“My husband and I got together basically over women’s basketball because he would come to play in the gym after we finished our practices,” she said. “We were neighbors at Pierpont Hall, and one of my classmates introduced us. I’m not sure there would have even been much of an encounter had it not been for him hanging out and waiting for us to finish our practices.”
Staggers Jr. served five terms in the United States House of Representatives and still practices law in Keyser, West Virginia. Leslie spent 10 years marketing computer systems and taught business courses at Potomac State, Frostburg State and the South Branch Technical College. She has worked as a human resources manager for the West Virginia Division of Highways for the last 25 years.
Now approaching their 70s, their hair graying and their memories starting to blur, all the players look back on what they were able to accomplish at West Virginia University with great pride.
“Being the first captain and the first MVP, those are things no one else can say,” Sergy said proudly. “I’m very happy and very proud to say that, and I’m thankful that WVU started the team when they did.”
“These young ladies knew they were making history,” Elmore pointed out. “They would sometimes come up with some of the oddest things at times, though, and Kittie was just so gracious, because some of the things they would come up with were terrible.
“Kittie would just say, ‘Well, let’s just put that one on our list, and we’ll come back to that one,” Elmore chuckled.
“I remember, Kittie always had such great pride for the University,” Nolan added. “Wherever we went around the state, it was always, ‘Now, we’re representing the University.’ That was always foremost in her mind.”
Elmore is convinced Blakemore’s gentle and grandmotherly approach likely saved West Virginia University hundreds of thousands of dollars in Title IX lawsuits before the decision was made to add women’s sports in the spring of 1973.
“Kittie was way ahead of everyone,” Elmore said. “She knew there had to be progressive steps in building the program, but she wasn’t going to let the young ladies get cut short.
“Kittie would say, ‘Now is not the time. Let’s give them an opportunity to get this right. We just have to teach them how to get it right!’”
Roberts, the first player to score a basket in school history against West Liberty on Jan. 16, 1974, remembered something her father used to tell her.
“He said, ‘You might not have been an All-American or anything like that, but you were on the first team up there,’” Roberts said. “And I also made the very first basket! That’s awesome.”
It is awesome.
Everyone involved with that first team was awesome, including their coach. Those young women, full of vim and vinegar and all volunteers, just wanted to do what the guys were doing at the time – play basketball.