Article: The Pinney Generation

The Pinney Generation: Stanford Women's Basketball In The Seventies

A speech delivered at the 25-Year Celebration of Stanford Women's Basketball, Stanford, California, April 13, 1999

We were the Pinney generation. We wore them in the days before Stanford issued practice jerseys -- or, for that matter, uniforms.

This is a Pinney. This is how you put it on, sort of like an apron, with the strings in front. Then you tie it in the back, but inevitably, no matter how well you've tied it, after you run up and down court a few times, just when you're going up for a layup or jumpshot, it comes loose and flaps up into your face.

Keep this in mind when you look at our stats. Half the time, we were shooting blind.

We were the Pinney generation and we were also the angry generation. Until 1976, we weren't allowed in Maples Pavilion, but instead had to play across campus in Roble -- which is smaller, I believe, than Tara VanDerveer's office today. Until 1977, there were no scholarships. We didn't travel to Hawaii or Italy or France; our big trip each year was a bus ride to Reno, Nevada.

So we were angry. My teammates Sonia Jarvis, Stephanie Erickson and I spent all our free time staging sit-ins in the athletic director's office, insisting he implement Title IX, which had passed in 1972.

We were the Pinney generation and we were the angry generation but we were also the grateful generation, because throughout most of the seventies, our coaches were volunteers who cared enough about us and the Stanford program that they spent many long hours teaching us about basketball, and about success. These coaches of the seventies, all of whom were volunteer or underpaid, included Pam Strathairn, Shirley Schoof, Gay Coburn, Ken Morgan, Dotty McCrea, and Sue Rojcewicz. This was long before Stanford women's basketball was associated with two national championships, or two Olympic athletes, or one Olympic coach, or for that matter, I admit, even victory. All of these coaches taught us to strive for victory, though, and along the way they gave us permission to be outstanding: to be strong, to be aggressive, to be competitive, to embrace victory unapologetically.

Even today, I think it takes courage for women to be outstanding. We still get the message that we should be small, dainty, delicate, decorative, and deferential. So thanks to all the seventies coaches -- and those of the 80s and 90s and beyond -- for giving women permission to be outstanding.

In particular I'd like to thank my two coaches who are here today, Gay Coburn and Dotty McCrea.

Gay Coburn knew that I wanted to be a writer. I'm not sure how she knew that, because I barely knew it myself. And I only barely knew that I wanted to write about women in sports, or that that might be possible. Nowadays there are about a hundred fine women's sports books on the market, but in those days there were zero. I had zero role models. Then Gay Coburn arranged for me to have lunch with one of the only women in the country who was writing about her own sports experience, a poet named Barbara Lamblin. That meeting helped me begin to conceive of a career writing about women's sports, which I've been doing for the past 20 years. So thank you, Gay, for caring about me off the court, and for taking the time to help me imagine my future.

In my junior year, all of our ranting and raving at the athletic director began to pay off, and Stanford finally hired two fulltime coaches, Dotty McCrea and Sue Rojcewicz. And we finally moved into Maples Pavilion, and received real uniforms, and began to travel a little more.

Dotty came to Stanford from Immaculata College, in Pennsylvania, where, as the assistant coach, she had helped them win three national championships. I think she respected me, because I was what they call coachable -- which means I did everything she told me to do. But she wasn't sure what to make of me, because she was an easterner, and I was very much a Californian by this time. Stephanie and I found a stray dog, Druffy, and we would bring Druffy to practice, and she would run up and down the sidelines, barking at us. Some of us were also studying meditation and visualization, so we would go up there in the stands and meditate before games. For some reason, all of this drove Dotty crazy, and she found herself making up rules like: No dogs in the gym, and no meditating.

But one of many enduring lessons Dotty taught me was not to let people push me around. As a center, I had to learn to stand my ground. It was Dotty who taught me that I had a right to be there, on the court, at the low post or high post, and Dotty who showed me how to stand my ground, and not let anyone push me around. This, too, is a valuable life lesson, not only for basketball players but for all women -- and not only then, but now.

So I'm grateful to all of my coaches. I'm also grateful to my teammates: those who were as outspoken and outrageous as I was, and those others who simply loved the game with all their hearts, as I did.

Pinnies are like aprons: symbolic of a time when women had limited choices: staying in the kitchen, staying in traditional roles, staying in Roble Gym.

Nowadays, we have many more choices, and much more freedom. Nowadays, all of us from the seventies are grateful to Tara VanDerveer and to all of her teams for making us proud to tell people that we are former Stanford basketball players.

In closing I'd like to say to the younger players here -- and pretty much everyone is younger than I am -- and also to my teammates, and to all the coaches, and to the assembled community members, family members, and fans: I hope you, too, give yourselves permission to be outstanding, competitive, and victorious. I hope you never let anyone push you around. And regardless of what your goal might be, in sports or beyond, I hope you never let anything obstruct your view of that goal: not discrimination, not self-doubt, and certainly not, never again, a simple red Pinney.

Mariah Burton Nelson (formerly Maggie Nelson)'s latest book is called Embracing Victory: Life Lessons in Competition and Compassion (Avon 1999). One of her rebounding records at Stanford remains unbroken.