During the Kansas University’s women’s basketball team’s recent trip to Chicago, the Jayhawks decided to stop off at the Windy City’s NikeTown.
There, KU’s players were confronted by a larger-than-life cutout photograph of a woman doing a one-handed pushup, displaying gorgeously sculpted muscles and washboard abs. They cast a knowing look at the photo and moved on, but they couldn’t help but overhear the group behind them, oohing and aahing over the woman’s physique and wondering aloud who she was.
“That’s our coach,” the Jayhawks said before moving on.
The picture was none other than Lynette Woodard, a KU assistant basketball coach, Kansas native and KU alumna — and quite possibly the greatest women’s basketball player ever.
“Oh my gosh,” said Kansas head coach Marian Washington, who coached Woodard at KU and now employs her as a KU assistant. “When you talk about collegiate superstars, she might be the first real collegiate superstar for women. There have been other great players, but people haven’t — and can’t, yet — put in perspective what she’s accomplished.”
She broke scoring barriers in college, the nationality barrier in the overseas professional ranks, the gender barrier with the Harlem Globetrotters and some kind of age barrier in the United States when she came out of basketball retirement to lace ’em up for the WNBA.
Pioneer doesn’t begin to describe what Woodard, now 40, did for women’s basketball, and her exploits have come to light anew recently with her nomination to several all-century, all-millennium teams.
“You just do what you do,” Woodard said. “I don’t put a label on it. People looking in see what they see and can call it any way they want to. I’m just doing my thing, doing what I loved to do. I played basketball all my life. I was just lucky enough to have a stage to play on. If not there, I’d be in my backyard, or the rec center. I was just lucky enough to have some avenues.”
She didn’t have nearly the avenues available now.
Woodard, a Wichita native, lit up the old Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) before the official era of NCAA women’s basketball statistics. She scored 3,649 points from 1978-81, a figure that ranks No. 1 all-time among women. Just three men have topped that standard before or since.
Woodard also collected 1,734 rebounds, making her the star member of the AIAW’s 2,000-point, 1,000-rebound club, and she was a four-time Kodak All-American.
What she did after college is just as remarkable.
Woodard played on the 1980 and 1984 United States Olympic teams and was captain of the 1984 gold medal team. She played professionally in Italy — at a time overseas professional basketball was closed to foreigners — and Japan and became the first female member of the Harlem Globetrotters.
She retired, spent a few years on Wall Street and eventually became a broker before coming out of retirement and playing two years in the WNBA.
She retired again this past summer and joined the coaching staff at her alma mater.
“Lynette has done so much for the game and never looked back,” Washington said. “Lynette never complained. When I think about the Globetrotters, that poster didn’t have one woman in it before Lynette. That just shows if you have a dream, no matter what people say or think, if you can dream it, you can achieve it.”
Woodard, too, points to the Globetrotter experience as among the greatest in her long list of accomplishments.
“I’m glad I was able to play the game at every possible level,” she said, “but I really loved the Globetrotters. My cousin played for them for over 20 years, and that was a team always in my heart. I was always fascinated with the razzle-dazzle. That was my dream. Professional basketball? It was nonexistent then, so there wasn’t much to think or dream about on that.
“But I saw the Globetrotters. That was tangible. I saw them every Saturday morning on the cartoons. To have dreamed that as a child playing in my backyard, to have that come to pass was very overwhelming. They were known all over the world, and I broke that barrier in their 60-year history by being the first female. And that was a time where women were fighting for the right to do what they loved to do best.”
Woodard aspires to become a head coach someday, but that day’s in the distant future.
“I’m learning a lot, but it’s a real challenge,” Woodard said. “It’s a different game on this side. I see so many things before they materialize, and I’m trying to convey that to the players. But it’s different. If they saw it, they’d do it.
“The thing that excited me the most about coaching was the mentorship of coach Washington. She’s my role model. I’ve seen her coach with no talent and with talent, and she’s still winning. Should I ever be a head coach, I’d pattern myself after her. But I’ve only been coaching two, three months. I know what I don’t know, and I don’t just want to do it, I want to do it well.
