The suite of women's basketball offices in the Dedmon Center were named in honor of Charlene Curtis last month.
 
Curtis was the first Division I women's basketball coach at Radford and so much more. Where to begin? The Roanoke native was Radford's first African-American athlete in 1972 and first 1,000-point scorer in basketball. She maintained a 3.8 grade point average as a student, was a member of four academic honorary organizations and played a mean trumpet in the school's nationally recognized band. She graduated with honors in 1976 and became the school's first African-American coach at a pivotal time.
 
"I understood I had been given one of very few opportunities as a Division I head coach at a non-historic black school," she recalled. "It was important to keep the door open for the next person by doing well but it wasn't a weight on my shoulders. My parents and teachers had always taught me to give my best effort. You don't do it for rewards but because it's the right thing to do. But I knew people were watching me."
 
Sometimes just who was watching surprised even Curtis. Radford upset ACC power North Carolina in her third game and word got out quickly, even pre-internet. When the prestigious 5-Star Girls' Basketball Camp convened at Radford that summer, Pat Summitt was on campus to speak, and Curtis went up to introduce herself to the legendary coach.
 
"I know who you are," said Summitt. "You beat North Carolina this year."
 
***
 
More importantly, Curtis' teammates and later, her players knew who she was and were continually inspired by the example she set. About 20 former players came to the dedication and celebration of the office naming. Dedication and celebration: That might be a fitting way to describe Curtis' entire Radford career. She had a 121-53 record at her alma mater, a .695 winning percentage and a dominant 46-2 record (.958) in Big South competition, including the first four regular seasons championships, three tournament crowns and Radford's first postseason national appearance, winning two of three games at the 1989 Women's National Invitational Tournament.
 
So what makes her most proud?
 
"The student-athletes I coached, the successes they've had since they left Radford, their successes in their communities, with their families," she said. "For a lot of people that played for me, it was the lessons off the court that were more impactful than the lessons on the court or the games won or lost. And we won a lot of games at Radford."
 
I've been around long enough to listen to the still-youthful Curtis and hear her coach at Radford, Pat Barrett, talking. Curtis picked up a lot from Barrett and would be the first to tell you so. The Dedmon Center women's basketball locker room is named for Barrett, Radford's first varsity coach in the modern athletics era beginning in 1971.
 
Pat loved her players, too, but it was a different era. The team rode in monstrously-long, green station wagons with bag lunches to away games and players arranged chairs in a then-bleacherless main floor in Peters Hall for home games. Barrett was self-taught as a coach and she was a quick study, never suffering a losing season in her 13 years at the helm going from unaffiliated college program to nationally-ranked Division II power in 1983-84.
 
"There was a vision for Radford then, from Dr. (Donald) Dedmon on down," said Curtis. "From the beginning, it was just quality. I think about success and doing it with almost nothing, but nobody had anything back then or very few schools did. It was right at the beginning of Title X when I played."
 
My first full-time sports job was at Radford, traveling with Barrett's last team, that great 16-ranked Division II squad. One thing I distinctly remember is a lot of McDonald's breakfasts on the road. I would have complained but Coach explained it to me.
 
Barrett would horde the meal money and on longer trips, save up from the cheap meals to take all the players out for a nice dinner at an elegant restaurant.
 
Often, players from rural areas had never really experienced anything like that. We had a lot of first-generation college students in those days. They dressed up and had to learn which fork to use and got to try foods they never thought about before. 
 
Curtis did the same thing with her players and so enjoyed watching them grow, while also, I must say, spoiling McDonald's breakfast for me. I remember her taking a napkin and wringing the grease out of her hash browns. Thirty years later and I've never eaten another hash brown from the Golden Arches.
 
Besides the personal shift in morning diet, I also saw what the extensive travel and more elegant dining experiences did for the world-view and for the confidence of those players. Curtis and Barrett knew their role was more than basketball. They were making girls into young ladies. 
 
Somewhere Radford College's original matriarch, M'Ledge Moffett, was smiling.
 
***
 
Between Curtis and Barrett, the then-Lady Highlanders didn't have a losing season for their first 19 years, never even came close to such a thing on those coaches' watch with the program stepping up in competition each year.
 
The brilliant Barrett didn't want to recruit at the Division I level and Curtis took over that nationally ranked team in 1984. When Radford's first Division I game tipped off that winter, not much was expected. The Lady Highlanders had lost four starters, a ton of experience and most of the scoring punch off a 23-win team. Curtis was a young coach in her first head job, and no one knew how this Division I thing was going to go.
 
"You would have never known that was (Curtis') first year," said Pebbles Maynard Smith, the only returning starter and the point guard of that first D-I team. "She was putting things in place she would use her whole career and she was such a leader. We all wanted to follow her and be successful."
 
The Lady Highs gutted out an 82-72 road win at Richmond and I was sitting at the scorer's table right by the Radford bench as the buzzer sounded. Curtis, a wide smile on her face, first embraced her top assistant (cousin and fellow Roanoker Vernon Claytor), and said just audibly enough for me to catch, "This works!"
 
That was my first inkling that Curtis had any doubts at all. She basically rebuilt a team from unused parts the year before and turned things over to Pebbles, her senior point guard, who would flourish with more responsibility. The 5-5 Franklin County product was particularly adept executing the secondary fast break which fueled Curtis' state of the art offense. On defense, Maynard was the vocal leader of a sticky match-up zone that confused opponents and allowed Radford to win 17 games that first season.
 
Twenty wins followed the next year when freshman Stephanie Howard arrived from Harrisonburg, and the following year when the program took off with the new Big South affiliation. Howard's jersey hangs in the rafters now and she entered the pantheon with Curtis and Nan Millner, a list of great players – great Highlanders – that began growing exponentially. 
 
Curtis' team dominated the new conference, so much so that she found herself trying to send Big South schools the players that wanted to come to Radford, but for which she didn't have any more scholarships. True story.
 
Those that knew Radford's roots as a women's teachers' college, took great pride in Radford setting a high standard for other conference schools, driving them to keep up and put more money and resources into women's athletics.
 
***
 
Curtis would go on to coach at Temple and Wake Forest, where she was also the first African-American women's basketball coach at that ACC school. She was on staff at Connecticut for a Final Four and an Elite Eight run 1995-97, coached in the WNBA, was a fixture with USA Basketball and served for 11 years as the Atlantic Coast Conference's Supervisor of Officials until retiring in 2019.
 
She's active in all things Radford these days, and it fuels a passion she has for the place that means so much to so many. "Radford gave me, as a student and then as a coach, an opportunity to learn, grow and serve," she said. "So, for me it's been easy to want to give back and continue to support not just women's basketball, but the whole university."
 
So now she's got an office suite named for her in Radford's – pains me to say, aging – Dedmon Center. Somehow it doesn't seem enough for someone so important to the history of the school's athletic department, someone who so embodies the best of our campus community. The heights Curtis reached professionally, the way she has always represented Radford, she's a pillar of what we are and what we all aspire to as alumni or as advocates for our university.
 
Curtis was such a Highlander I remember how she used to break out the old, famous band kilts on her teams' picture day and have the freshmen class – to their horror -- wear them. She told them the pictures were going to run in the program or the team's media guide. They never did, but she wanted them to see the school's real colors and understand the history in the highlands of Southwest Virginia.
 
Curtis still wears the school colors on her sleeve and in her heart. She is satisfied with her place as a pioneer in her profession and she's still pushing the best for her school and eying future generations of students to share the same wonderful experiences she had as an undergrad at Radford. Her story sounds familiar for so many Highlanders.
 
 "There was so much support from people I didn't even know were in my corner," she said. "People like (long-time Dean of Students) Bonnie Hurlburt, and faculty and administrators here, they opened doors for me, even as a student and there's such a nurturing environment, so many opportunities inside the classroom and out. I used it as a recruiting tool – you can go to a huge campus and be a number or you can come here, and your professors know who you are, and you can make a name for yourself."
 
And that's exactly what Charlene Curtis did.
 
Mike Ashley '83 was a national award-winning writer and columnist ('Sidelines') for the Radford University student newspaper The Tartan as an undergrad. Then Radford and the University just couldn't get rid of him. He worked in sports information for the Highlanders 1983-85, and again 1987-97, after two years at Virginia Tech. He has been a freelance sportswriter in Fairfax, Va., the past 25 years, still covering Radford and the Big South, along with other less important college teams for several national publications and online services.
 
Ashley will write an occasional column for the Radford website to share his recollections and hopefully, some entertaining info for Highlander fans.