Booth would have been a part of that championship team as well, but she re-injured her knee against Slippery Rock and was lost for the season. That was the first serious injury Kittie dealt with as a coach.
“When I had knee surgery, Kittie was up at the hospital with me the whole time, and I was so nauseous from the anesthesia that she was right there holding the container as I threw up,” Booth said. “Her sister said we were the kids Kittie never had, and she treated us like that.”
Buckley was another founding player who missed out on the state title because she got into physical therapy school at Kansas at end of the first semester. Blakemore was among those who wrote letters of recommendation on her behalf, even though she knew she might lose one of her most experienced guards.
“She was so supportive, just so classy and always so positive,” Buckley said. Now Lynn Dieringer, she met her husband at WVU and after he earned his law degree, they moved to Bridgeport, West Virginia, where he opened his law practice and she practiced physical therapy. Dieringer is now retired.
Lefever is also a physical therapist still practicing in Friday Harbor, Washington, where she has lived for the past 30 years. Lefever was cut from the team after her second season and immediately pivoted to athletic training.
“If you were a woman and you were 5-foot tall, nobody wanted to listen to you back then,” Lefever said. “I went and got a different degree, so I ended up becoming a physical therapist.”
Booth, fascinated by her series of knee injuries, pursued athletic training for her career.
“Once that knee injury happened, I was so timid,” she admitted. “I had torn my (anterior cruciate ligament), but they didn’t know that. It had scarred down to the bone so when Dr. (Doug) Bowers put his hand on my knee and did the testing, it gave a false negative and then my senior year it just snapped.”
Booth’s career in athletic training and hospital administration took her to such faraway places as Fargo, North Dakota, and Rochester, New York. Now, she’s retired and living in Bunker Hill, West Virginia, in the state’s Eastern Panhandle.
After graduating from WVU, Shank wanted to go into teaching and coaching but those jobs back in her hometown were hard to come by. After working briefly as an assistant aquatic director at the Carlisle YMCA, she attended Harrisburg Community College and became a registered nurse. She now resides in a retirement community in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.
Roberts did get into teaching and coaching in the school system in Marietta, Ohio. She told Kittie about a guard playing at nearby Fort Frye High in Beverly, Ohio, named Lisa Ribble, and also about a 6-foot-7 center from Columbus who could dunk a basketball named Georgeann Wells. That duo made women’s basketball history on Dec. 21, 1984, when Ribble threw a pass to Wells and she dunked the ball in a game against the University of Charleston in Elkins, West Virginia.
Upon retirement following 31 years as a physical education teacher and coach, Roberts moved to Sebastian, Florida, with plans of becoming an LPGA teaching professional. She also worked one year at the Professional Golfers Career College in Orlando.
Salisbury gave up basketball after two seasons to pursue a degree in veterinarian science. She said her experience playing athletics helped her overcome the chauvinistic attitude toward women veterinarians at the time.
“Because I played on the basketball team, my advisor directed me toward courses that the guys were taking,” Salisbury admitted. “I had a little bit of an advantage in my academic career because of basketball. I wasn’t just a girl; I was an athlete.”
However, instead of becoming a vet, Salisbury pursued a career in research science, first at WVU in the Ag School and then at the Health Sciences Center before moving to North Carolina to work for a drug company. Today, she is living and working in Kittie’s hometown and final resting place, Manassas, Virginia, for American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), a non-profit, global biological resource center.
Huffman, now Carolyn McGrath, married longtime WVU men’s soccer coach John McGrath and returned to Waynesburg where she owned and operated one of the most successful Radio Shack franchises on the East Coast, Huffman Electronics. She has since retired.
And Sergy, now Leslie Staggers, met her husband Harley Staggers Jr. while they were attending WVU.
“My husband and I got together basically over women’s basketball because he would come to play in the gym after we finished our practices,” she said. “We were neighbors at Pierpont Hall, and one of my classmates introduced us. I’m not sure there would have even been much of an encounter had it not been for him hanging out and waiting for us to finish our practices.”
Staggers Jr. served five terms in the United States House of Representatives and still practices law in Keyser, West Virginia. Leslie spent 10 years marketing computer systems and taught business courses at Potomac State, Frostburg State and the South Branch Technical College. She has worked as a human resources manager for the West Virginia Division of Highways for the last 25 years.
Now approaching their 70s, their hair graying and their memories beginning to blur, all the players look back on what they were able to accomplish at West Virginia University with great pride.
“Being the first captain and the first MVP, those are things no one else can say,” Sergy said proudly. “I’m very happy and very proud to say that, and I’m thankful that WVU started the team when they did.”
“These young ladies knew they were making history,” Elmore pointed out. “They would sometimes come up with some of the oddest things at times, though, and Kittie was just so gracious, because some of the things they would come up with were terrible.
“Kittie would just say, ‘Well, let’s just put that one on our list, and we’ll come back to that one,” Elmore chuckled.
“I remember, Kittie always had such great pride for the University,” Nolan added. “Wherever we went around the state, it was always, ‘Now, we’re representing the University.’ That was always foremost in her mind.”
Elmore is convinced Blakemore’s gentle and motherly approach likely saved West Virginia University hundreds of thousands of dollars in Title IX lawsuits before the decision was made to add women’s sports in the spring of 1973.
“Kittie was way ahead of everyone,” Elmore said. “She knew there had to be progressive steps in building the program, but she wasn’t going to let the young ladies get cut short.
“Kittie would say, ‘Now is not the time. Let’s give them an opportunity to get this right. We just have to teach them how to get it right!’”
Roberts, the first player to score a basket in school history against West Liberty on Jan. 16, 1974, remembered something her father used to tell her.
“He said, ‘You might not have been an All-American or anything like that, but you were on the first team up there,’” Roberts said. “And I also made the very first basket! That’s awesome.”
It is awesome.
Everyone involved with that first team was awesome, including their coach. Those young women, full of vim and vinegar and all volunteers, just wanted to do what the guys were doing at the time – play basketball.