The Syracuse women’s basketball team greeted a small woman in a light-brown knitted hat and a blue SU basketball shirt standing behind the bench after a game in the Carrier Dome on Dec. 6. Each player shook her hand as she supported herself with a black cane in her left hand. They all uttered just two words: “Thank you.”

The woman was Muriel Smith, Syracuse’s first women’s basketball and field hockey head coach, who died on March 1. She was 87. Smith led the women’s basketball team to a 57-33 record from 1971-1978 and the field hockey team to a 22-16-7 record from 1972-1977. She was a gold medalist in the National Senior Games — a fierce competitor, yet still kind and gracious. She was a coach, teacher and trailblazer for women’s sports.

“She did all of those things so quietly but determinedly and that’s just who she was,” three of her daughters, Anne Ploettner, Eileen Daly and Clare Woods, said. “She didn’t want accolades. She didn’t necessarily want recognition. She just did it because she enjoyed it.”

Smith loved playing sports from a young age at a time when women’s participation was discouraged. She’d hide her hair under a baseball hat, call herself Moe or Tommy and play with the boys. Her cover was nearly blown a few times when she got into fights.

Smith was the first in her family to go to college, graduating from Hunter College in 1950, and eventually came to Syracuse as a graduate assistant in January of 1968 while earning a master’s degree in physical education.

Her husband had died about one month earlier, leaving her to raise six children by herself. But Smith still found time to coach the women’s club basketball team, a group of eight or nine students who met just once a week.

“The field hockey kids wanted to play field hockey. The basketball kids wanted to play basketball. And Muriel found ways, opportunities for them to be able to do that,” said Barbara Henderson, one of Smith’s students in the early 1970s and former senior associate director of athletics and senior women’s administrator at SU.

 

Courtesy of SU Athletic Communications

 

Smith had to fight for gym time, eventually earning the club team three to four days a week to practice. In 1971, Syracuse joined the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, which was created by a group of physical education teachers as a women’s version of the NCAA. The AIAW organized games and turned the club women’s basketball squad into an official team.

Smith would drive her players in a 12-person van to play other local schools around the state. She had no assistants to help her.

The university asked her to sweep the court at halftime of games she was coaching, but she refused. Her basketball team had to share uniforms with the volleyball team and equipment wasn’t easy to come by. Title IX was passed in 1972 and though Henderson thinks 99 percent of campus didn’t know about the women’s basketball team, Smith kept pushing it forward.

“Muriel would go to the powers to be and say ‘You know, we need some more gym time for this basketball team,’” Henderson said. “And she fought for it and she would get it and then went from there. Everything was a battle.

“She was their spokesperson. And a successful spokesperson for the students.”

Within four years, Smith guided the women’s basketball team to a 10-win undefeated season — the only undefeated season in program history. She took the field hockey team from winning one out of five games in its inaugural season to winning eight of 12 games in 1976.

When she retired from coaching and left SU, Smith won a gold medal in women’s doubles table tennis in the 2009 Summer World Senior Games. She traveled around the world competing in competitions in table tennis and badminton.

Her regular schedule until this winter consisted of table tennis every Tuesday and Thursday, badminton every Monday and Wednesday, bowling on Fridays and golf on Saturdays. She’d watch nearly every Syracuse men’s basketball game on television — coaching from her seat in front of the TV while Jim Boeheim took care of things on the court.

Almost half a century after Smith’s work began, she was honored during the game in December. Her face lit up when it appeared on the jumbotron — a rare acceptance of recognition from a humble woman.

“Muriel was the type of person to say, ‘Well, let’s not make a big fuss about this,’” Henderson said. “And I said ‘No, Muriel. You deserve to have a big fuss made.’ I said, ‘You started all of this. This is the result of your hard work, interests and determination.’

“We’ve lost a bit of history.”

Published on March 11, 2016 at 7:30 pm

Contact Jon: [email protected] | @jmettus