1,000 wins for RU’s Stringer
Rutgers women’s basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer joined the 1,000-victory club Tuesday night, reaching the milestone when she guided the Scarlet Knights to an easy 73-44 victory over Central Connecticut at the Rutgers Athletic Center. The win cemented her place as the first African-American coach to reach that plateau.
Stringer, who is in her 48th season and has a record of 480-267 at Rutgers (1,000-420 overall), joined Pat Summit (Tennessee), Geno Auriemma (Connecticut), Tara VanDerveer (Stanford) and Sylvia Hatchell (North Carolina) as the only Division I women’s coaches to win 1,000 games.
Auriemma was on hand for Tuesday’s game, in which Rutgers trailed for all of 29 seconds, and the UConn coach was booed by the partisan crowd. Many of Stringer’s former players also attended the Scarlet Knights’ third consecutive win to start the season.
Just a day earlier, a humble Stringer told a group of reporters her focus is not on the number of games she has won, but on the people with whom she has worked.
“It doesn’t cement anything, but that it’s a lot of games,” Stringer said. “It means people have trusted me to coach their teams, the young ladies have given me and my staff a chance. They believe in me. I thank God for that.”
Stringer credited mentor John Chaney along with John Thompson and Nolan Richardson for her successful career, but couldn’t forget the impact of her late husband, Bill.
“He would brag about me and I would just be embarrassed,” she said.
Stringer, 70, is only men’s or women’s college coach to take three different programs to the Final Four — Cheyney State (1982), Iowa (1993) and Rutgers (2000, 2007). She has led the Scarlet Knights to 15 NCAA Tournaments as well as the WNIT Championship in 2014. Stringer was enshrined in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2009.