Event to honor 8 area women in sports
Cheryl Hatley has seen a number of outstanding female athletes come through Pine Bluff-area schools and coached a few of them herself.
These days, the woman who once coached basketball at the former Belair Junior High School is athletic director in the Pine Bluff School District. Hatley and seven other women — two of them Southeastern Conference head coaches — with local ties who have achieved success in the athletic realm will be honored Saturday with a private reception and a charity basketball game at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.
“I’ve watched these women come up,” Yolanda Scott, a youth basketball coach and one of three event chairpersons, said during a practice at the Belair gymnasium. “Cheryl Hatley was my basketball coach here. I attended Belair. Once I got into basketball, Coach Hatley was there.”
Hatley said she’s tickled to death to be honored, but downplayed it as “no big deal.”
“My work in the community speaks for itself,” she said. “This is year 39 in education for me. I love working with kids and parents. I love what I do.”
The name of the game is Making Her-story, which, organizers hope, young ladies are inspired to do. The game will feature Amateur Athletic Union teams ABC Lady Hawks, Arkansas Select and GP2 Memphis and tip off at 6 p.m. Saturday in H.O. Clemmons Arena. Tickets are $7 each for adults and $5 each for children and will be sold at the door.
Organizers say the participating teams will have an opportunity to watch the UAPB women’s basketball team practice.
Scott has connections to some of the other honorees.
Leslie Henderson won five basketball and five track and field state championships as a head coach at Watson Chapel High School. Now in her 33rd year at the school, Henderson
also served as the Watson Chapel School District athletic director for six years.
Scott played for the Lady Wildcats when Henderson was an assistant coach. Henderson said she was surprised to be honored.
“I think it’s a great event,” said Henderson, who also coached Making Her-story tri-chair and former Stephen F. Austin State University player Zedralyn Butler. “Getting little girls involved in sports and just for having role models, whether they’re female or male, it’s what kids need in getting them involved in sports. And the names just being from Pine Bluff? It’s a really nice concept.”
Another Watson Chapel alumnus and honoree, Johnnie Harris, was named Auburn University head coach in April.
Harris spent last season as associate head coach to Vic Schaefer at the University of Texas and worked on his staff the previous eight years at Mississippi State University, leading the Bulldogs to back-to-back NCAA championship games (2017 and 2018). She was a member of Gary Blair’s Texas A&M University staff that won the national title in 2011.
Harris’ counterpart at the University of Mississippi, Yolett McPhee-McCuin, is the other SEC coach to be honored. McPhee-McCuin was an assistant at UAPB during the 2006-07 season and led Jacksonville (Fla.) University to the 2017 ASUN Conference tournament title.
Scott said she’s watched the coaches who will be honored and added her own touch during the nearly 18 years she’s coached in the youth ranks.
“I’m just proud to say I even know them,” Scott said.
Other honorees include University of Arkansas basketball great Juliet Jackson, UAPB senior woman administrator Betty Hayes Anthony, former Dollarway High basketball and track coach Paulette Bell and former UAPB track all-American Pamela Smith.
Jackson, an all-American basketball and track athlete at Pine Bluff High, led Arkansas to the 1987 Women’s National Invitation Tournament championship and NCAA Elite Eight in 1990. She was named an SEC Legend in 2014.
“My daughter played basketball at Pine Bluff High,” Scott said. “My daughter wore Juliet’s number. They were the same build. She said, ‘Look, if you’re going to wear my number, you’re going to have to come down with it.’ When I say [Jackson] was all-around, she even played baseball with the boys.”
Hayes Anthony was a standout runner at Pine Bluff High and returned to her alma mater to helm the track program. She also coached basketball and track in the Dollarway School District.
Bell, who coached individual state track champions at Dollarway in the 2010s, now coaches volleyball, basketball and track at Maumelle Middle School.
Smith is the first African American woman chief of the U.S. Park Police, a unit of the U.S. National Park Service.
“To have something for the ladies is huge,” said Lucas Armstrong, the other Making Her-story organizer and head of Pine Bluff’s Youth Basketball League. “It’s not enough energy around our ladies. Everything is around our boys, when it comes to sports. This event is huge because it brings energy around young ladies, but it also lets our young women know the ladies we’re honoring, they have accomplished big things in their lives, so we just want them to see, ‘Hey, I can make it from Pine Bluff. Look at these ladies.’
“I tell kids, just because you come from a small town doesn’t mean you have to be small-minded. Them seeing these ladies who did great things in life gives them a sense of hope that they can make it.”