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posted 04-02-2023 09:52 AM
How Tech's '82 title team revolutionized women's basketball
Forward Pam Kelly helped the Lady Techsters win the 1982 NCAA national championship. Kelly averaged 20 points that year to secure the Wade Trophy, which is awarded to the top player in the country.
RUSTON — There was a time, almost four decades ago, when Louisiana Tech ruled the world of women’s college basketball.
The program, led by future Hall of Famers and those considered pioneers of the game, helped revolutionize women’s basketball into the product it would later become and still is in the present day.
The Lady Techsters were that good, and it was evident to everyone.
“I remember Pat (Summitt) saying Louisiana Tech should be ranked one and two (in the national polls) and then the rest of it start from there,” said Sonja Hogg, the Hall of Fame coach who helped found the program in 1974 with former Tech president F. J. Taylor. “We had the best two teams in America.”
By the 1980s, business was booming for the Techsters. During that decade, Tech compiled a 320-29 record, an average of 32 wins a season. There were three national championships, eight trips to the Final Four and two runner-up finishes.
One year stands out.
In 1982, Tech, one year removed from winning the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) national championship, became the first program to win an NCAA women's basketball national championship, a feat that will be recognized Saturday when members of 1982 squad are presented with championship rings.
The 35-1 season is, perhaps, regarded as one of the most successful runs in program history.
“We were setting records and doing things way long before others were. We were visionaries,” Hogg said.
As legendary coach Leon Barmore, who was an associate head coach in 1982, put it, the Techsters were similar to the modern day machine that currently rules women’s college basketball.
“We were Connecticut before Connecticut,” Barmore said.
Making right a wrong
Kim Mulkey never forgets the story.
The year was 1984 at the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, and Summitt, who doubled as Tennessee’s coach and women’s national team coach, told Mulkey she planned on staying in coaching until she could beat the Techsters.
“We pretty much dominant,” said Mulkey, who was a point guard on the 1982 team.
Tech was ranked No. 1 every single week of the season.
The Techsters ran through their schedule, even against elite competition. They won 35 games by an average of 33 points. Fifteen of the wins came against Top 25 teams with seven over Top 10 teams, and they broke the 100-point barrier in 11 of the 35 wins.
Tech won 54-consecutive games until Old Dominion snapped the streak with a 61-58 victory. If not for the loss, Tech would have recorded 70 straight wins over a two-year period. That record stood for more than 20 years until UConn broke it in 2003.
To this day, Barmore is convinced the Techsters could play with anybody, including UConn’s current dynasty that has won 11 national championships under Geno Auriemma.
Reserve Jennifer White was part of a talented bench that made practices competitive during the Lady Techsters 1982 national title run.
“If we played today, I’m sure we’d split. If we played the best of three, I’m not so sure Connecticut could beat this bunch,” Barmore said. “That’s how good they were. I believe we’d beat them three out of five.”
Mulkey, who now coaches at Baylor, took her praise of that team and that era a step further.
The talent, the depth, the coaching situation was so unique that it can't be matched, at least for Tech's own program.
"I don’t say this in a negative way, but there will never be another era like that at Louisiana Tech in women’s basketball," said Mulkey, who is the only person to win a national title as a player, assistant coach and head coach. "They could build the program back up, they could win another national championship, but that era was just so special and you just can’t duplicate that."
Hogg was the visionary, serving in a CEO-type of role as the face of the program and lead recruiter. Thanks to the financial support of Taylor, Hogg traveled the country selling the Techsters program.
Barmore, meanwhile, ran practices and games.
“It was a complete package,” said Angela Turner, a Kodak All-America during the 1982 season. “One without the other would be very difficult for us to be as successful as we were.”
Reliving the origins of Lady Techster basketball
Turner and Mulkey were two mainstays in the lineup along with Pam Kelly, Lori Scott and Janice Lawrence.
Kelly, who averaged 20.3 points and 9.1 rebounds per game, became the first Wade Trophy winner, an award that goes to the top player in the country, in Tech history while also earning her third straight Kodak All-America honors.
The starting five, aided by a strong bench, went on to beat Cheyney State in the championship game, 72-62. The march toward the title witnessed wins over Tennessee in the Final Four and at home against Kentucky in the third round of the NCAA Tournament, which saw 4,850 fans show up for the final game in Memorial Gym.
Women’s basketball was brand new as an NCAA-sanctioned sport, and Tech never received championship rings. Instead, they were given watches.
On Saturday, Hogg, Barmore, Turner, Sue Donohoe, Ann Pendergrass, Lori Scott, Jennifer White, Debbie Primeaux, Debra Rodman, Pam Kelly and Rita Rust all plan to be in attendance to finally receive their rings provided by the NCAA as part of the 35th anniversary of the title.
“I think it was brought to their attention, and I think they wanted to make right a wrong that 35 years ago they probably should have done that for us,” Hogg said.
Posts: 14155 | From: berea, ky, usa | Registered: Sep 1999
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