Vivian Stringer can join select group of women's basketball coaches who have won 1,000 games
Rutgers coach C. Vivian Stringer is one win shy of 1,000 for her career. Credit: AP/Mel Evans
When Vivian Stringer started coaching 47 years ago, she never imagined that this day would come.
Stringer, who began her career at tiny Cheyney State in the early 1970s, was more worried about logistics than legacy. She was too busy trying to get her team gym time and decent equipment to imagine that one day she would be sitting one victory away from becoming the fifth Division I women’s basketball coach to reach 1,000 victories.
“We didn’t have a trainer and we only had three leather basketballs,” Stringer, 70, recalled in a telephone conference call Monday. “Yet, somehow we ended up challenging the powerhouses of the country.”
Stringer, who has been the coach at Rutgers since 1995, gets her first chance to join the exclusive 1,000-win club Tuesday night when the Scarlet Knights host Central Connecticut State.
When she does get the win, she will be joining the late Tennessee coach Pat Summitt, Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer, UConn’s Geno Auriemma and North Carolina’s Sylvia Hatchell. Division II Bentley's Barbara Stevens is also in the 1,000-win club. Stringer will be the first African-American coach to reach that mark.
Stringer, 70, holds the distinction of leading three different schools to the Final Four: Rutgers in 2000 and 2007, Iowa in 1993 and Cheyney State in 1982. She has been inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. And she has sent 23 players to the WNBA from Rutgers alone, including seven players who were in the league last season.
One of her most influential moments came off the court in 2007 when she took on shock jock Don Imus for using a racist, sexist epithet to describe her players, who had just lost to Summitt’s Tennessee team in the championship game. Imus was eventually fired from WFAN and apologized to Stringer and the team.
“I knew at an early stage of that it wasn’t just about basketball,” Stringer said of her job as a coach.
Even though Stringer never imagined she would be on the brink of this milestone when she started coaching nearly five decades ago, she can appreciate the moment.
“I think it’s special,” she said. “I remember once hearing about a coach who had won 1,000 games in high school. I remember thinking that is a lot of games . . . I’ve been blessed.”
Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.
