Coach Sharp Memories

[CYMAN]

Since this is a turning of the page in the history of Tech and WBB in the B12 I thought it may be appropriate to recall some of the best stories of Coach Sharp and the class and competitiveness that she exudes.

My most recent and favorite was just a couple of weeks ago when Tech was at ISU. ISU has an "Honorary Coach" from the Lil' Clone Club which is the kids section. They sit on the bench during warmups and get to stand in line with the team during the national anthem. Coach Sharp as she was walking on the court and exchanging pleasantries with the ISU staff, she made a point to stop and talk to the young lady and shake her hand. I thought at that point that I hope that this young lady has a sense for how special it was for Coach Sharp to do this.

BTW - She was the ONLY coach so far this year to take the time to do this.

[Bball Girl]

Thanks Cyman! You're going to make me cry :(

Nancy Liberman's memories can be found at:
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncw/columns/story?columnist=lieberman_nancy&id=2343442

[YCN]

Not a memory, but you can't get a grasp on the significance of Coach sharp's career unless you read her whole bio at Tech's athletics website.

http://texastech.collegesports.com/sports/w-baskbl/mtt/sharp_marsha00.html

[ISUbballfan]

I didn't know about the honorary Little clone coach. That is so neat. My seat is at the oppsite end of the court by the visiting team end. Bill and the assistant coaches will come over and visit with the visiting team coaches during warmups. This year I noticed that when Bill came down to welcome Marsha he also gave her a big hug. At the time I thought what a wonderful conference we have that the coaches like each other.

[YCN]

ESPN has an article about Coach Sharp called What Sharp's peers are saying (http://sports.espn.go.com/ncw/news/story?id=2343675).

Presumably they will update it as comments are received by others.

[ladyhorns1fan]

I remember meeting Coach Sharp in person last year in Dallas at the Big 12 tourney. We were eating in the West End when the Tech bus pulled up and as everyone got out we spoke to Coach Sharp. She came over to our table, shook everyone's hand and was talking to us with such respect and as if we were her own fans (I certainly am). Her intensity and passion for the game were so evident in her eyes as she spoke to us. What an honor to meet her! The game won't be the same without her.

[walkaway]

Does anyone know if Coach Sharp's mother's health is okay?


I have to say, today was right up there with a long list of painful surprises for me. I expect this is how it feels when one is awakened by an earthquake.

I want to say something here and now.

Coach Sharp: Thank you.

Texas Tech will never see your like again.

I wish you well.

You will be missed.

The grace, the class, the solid foundation you brought to every game,
are a legacy above and beyond any number of games won.

[Gator]

Mz Sharp also has a great sense of humor. Did you now that she taught Lisa Leslie and Dawn Staley to line dance? Well - not exactly her personally - but - Staley and Leslie were in Lubbock for some event and Marsha took them and her team out to some "joint" with line dancing. Those were the days when you could pick up the Marsha Sharp show on cable in Oklahoma and one of the shows featured the "dancing lessons". Folks who saw it said it was hilarious!

[Scamp]

Mark of a champion -- Texas Tech's Sharp instrumental to growth of game

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/writers/tracy_schultz/02/24/sharp.reax/

[Bball Girl]

http://kcbd.images.worldnow.com/images/4550835_BG3.jpg

http://www.redraiders.com/images/022506/7896_256.jpg


http://www.redraiders.com/images/022506/7894_256.jpg

[Bball Girl]

Sharp shocks Big 12 (http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/spt/colleges/texastech/stories/022506dnsposharpreact.2204c985.html)

"I am in total shock and disbelief," Missouri coach Cindy Stein said through a team spokesman. "She is a class act. She should be applauded for all the great things that she has done for our profession and for Texas Tech University. She is one in a million."

"It's a hard job, and she's been doing it a long time and doing it really, really well," Texas coach Jody Conradt said in a statement. "She'll be missed not only at Texas Tech and by the players she's coaching, but in the basketball community. She's one of the solid people who has been really instrumental in the growth of our sport."

"People use the words 'Hall of Famer' and 'pioneer' and 'icon' and 'role model' kind of flippantly in our society, but Marsha truly is that kind of person," Fennelly said. "She treated me with tremendous respect when I first came into the league and we weren't very good."

"She has been an incredible mentor to me," Oklahoma coach Sherri Coale said in a statement. "I feel like I have been given a gift in being able to coach against her."

"I'm sad, but in a lot of respects I'm happy for her that she left at an age where she can do some other things for women's basketball," Baylor coach Kim Mulkey-Robertson said. "Anytime you lose a legend, you do miss them. I'm going to miss her from a personal standpoint as well as a professional standpoint."

"I'm sad to see her go out," Texas A&M coach Gary Blair, a Texas Tech graduate, said. "but I'm glad to see someone go out on top."


http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/sports/13956954.htm
The resignation of Marsha Sharp is a great loss to the coaching profession,” Kansas coach Bonnie Henrickson said. “She is a great role model who has meant so much to so many people over the years, and I personally have watched her career with great admiration and respect for what she has been able to accomplish.”

This quote came from Dblt81 but I'm not sure where it came from

Sharp did even more when she served as president of the Women's Basketball Coaches Association from 2001-03. Beth Bass, executive chief officer of the WBCA, said it was Sharp who got the organization more involved in discussing issues with the NCAA and women's basketball committee.
"She took the WBCA to a whole different level," Bass said. "She single-handedly was the catalyst to bring the major coaches and stakeholders around the table. She brought a vision to the WBCA and got us more engaged in the legislative process. We are a viable voice, and she was the catalyst. She took us to a whole different level of engagement. One thing about Marsha, though, is that she has made the game bigger, but she has never thought of herself bigger than the game."

[YemenBear]

Coach Sharp made a very classy gesture towards the Baylor Lady Bear team last season. I'm not sure I'll get this 100% correct, but I think the timing was when Baylor reached the Final Four. Coach Sharp sent her best wishes along with a gift basket to the Baylor team, encouraging them to go all the way. I thought it was a thoughtful gesture from a conference competitor. It was a small move that spoke volumes of her sense of comraderie, sportsmanship, and support.

[elfdenmom]

I just feel so privilaged to have had the opportunity to have watched Marsha working with her players at practices for the past six or seven years. Her determination to have them grow, develop and improve, not simply as basketball players, but as intelligent, responsible, capable young women has been an experience I shall never forget.

She is a winner, and make no mistake that winning is extremely important to her, but not at the expense of integrity. Giving your very best in a fair and honest way with full respect for your opponent is the ultimate goal.

She is a person who has always been appreciative for any support, no matter how small. She thanks you personally, she writes thank you notes, she insists her players learn to write thank you notes. She takes time out of her way too busy schedule to personally express her gratitude for any little thing you do for the team.

She is a giver, not a taker; a builder, not a destroyer.

She is a great basketball coach, but an even greater lady.

[TTU79]

No truer words were ever spoken Elfdenmom!

[walkaway]

Amen.

and Amen.

[JohnHenry]

...a visionary PE teacher and former WWII bomber pilot took a handful of hard-working farm girls, and transformed a novelty game into a legitimate sport. In the process, Harley Redin and the Flying Queens of Wayland Baptist blazed a trail for female athletes and established something of a winning tradition for women's basketball up in those parts, and the young women he mentored went forth and spread the gospel.

One of those young women took that tradition and went out and carved it into the cultural landscape of West Texas. There is a damn good reason the high school teams in the Panhandle show up regularly in Austin for the state finals and produce more than their share of D-I talent. There's a reason some of the best coaches in the game have come from there - or near there. And it's the same reason so many little girls who've grown up there in the last 30 years have dreamed of one day putting on the red-and-black uniform of Texas Tech University.

She'd be the first to tell you fiddlesticks, of course, and school you about less well-known people like Lometa Odom and the like, who have really made their mark in this game and done so much for it...but Marsha Sharp - The Reason - has represented the tradition like no other, and taken to it's biggest stage. She showed the world that West Texas was more than just an endless sky and a bunch of windmills and weak radio signals. It was - and is - the Indiana of women's basketball (chew on that one, Mr. Knight...).

In a high country where so many kids have to make a friend of isolation and hard work, where opportunities to head elsewhere are met with suspicious glances and 'women's liberation' wasn't exactly an accepted proposition, Marsha Sharp (and those others she'll be glad to tell you about...) made it not just acceptable, not just OK, but COOL for young women to aspire to be great athletes. She made Texas Tech women's basketball the hottest thing goin' - the premier event that everybody within 250 miles wanted to be a part of.

She did it by busting her butt. She went out and pulled the fans in one by one, garden club by garden club, business by business, coach by coach. By the time she was through, she was the most beloved and revered public figure in Lubbock history. Because she had shaken every hand, talked to every young girl, impressed every parent, and presided over clinic after clinic until EVERYBODY had been introduced in some way shape or form to her style and philosophy of women's basketball - it's joys, benefits, and potentials.

She knew it was a great game that had so much more going for it than any testosterone driven, millionaire-polluted nonsense, and she convinced the denizens of an entire region of the same thing. She built her own recruiting base and reaped the harvest. Then she went out and did a little more, as a teacher promoting academic achievement, as the head of the WBCA, as a spokeswomean for God knows how many charitable causes.

And she's not done. Not by a long shot. :)

:TTU:

[ChipperF1]

Bravo, JohnHenry! :)

Can't say much more than that. But I do have a memory of Marsha Sharp.

It was 1997. Nebraska hosted a ranked Texas Tech squad in a game both teams needed. Rene Hanebutt was hitting clutch shots all day, but so was Tina McClain and Nicole Kubik. Nebraska won a nip-and-tuck game and kept their NCAA hopes alive...at least for the week.

But, it was after the game where many of us got a first-time close-up view of the grace and greatness of Marsha Sharp.

She said:

"It was a fine game and you never want to lose. But, to see the Nebraska crowd getting behind their girls and to see a team that is building something come to play hard and not giving in does good for this entire conference. In the long run, more games like this will be better for all of us as a whole. Building more crowds like the one that was excited to see their team play against us can only improve this sport."

I'll never forget that show of class. It was genuine. As genuine as the woman who said those words.

On the opening day of the Big 12 tournament, I'd like to see a massive standing ovation when Marsha Sharp enters the playing floor. For what we will being seeing on that sideline is something very rare in sport, or in life.

Marsha Sharp gained so much of the world, yet she never lost her graceful soul.

Thanks, Coach Sharp. :)

[Bball Girl]

Bravo JohnHenry and Chipper!

Your heartfelt eloquence made me cry!

[Gator]

And she's not done. Not by a long shot. :)
Thank you JH for that recap of a life. Moving, to say the least.

I think that she has done one more thing which is remarkable: she did NOT let herself be defined by the thing she was most famous for. She could have stayed Coach Sharp of Texas Tech for many years but SHE chose to say the end to that chapter of her life because it was the right decision for HER. I believe that takes a truly special person. We might not see as clearly the things she will be able to do now because she will be operating out of the glare of the spotlight but I do not doubt that her contributions to Tech and women's basketball are far from over.

[DBLTFarmer]

How about ..................






"MARSHA SHARP FOR CHANCELLOR OF TEXAS TECH"


:D

[Bball Girl]

or at the very least, the next Athletic Director!

[elfdenmom]

Thank you John Henry and Chipper.

[Bball Girl]

Of all the victories, 1 stands out for me.


Tech was ranked in the Top 10 in 2001-2002. Plenette Pierson, a Junior foward from Kingwood Texas was on all the pre-season award lists and Tech was poised to make a run at the Final Four. But things were not going well in non-conference. Tech lost to New Mexico and on the bus ride home, everyone else was quiet, but Pierson was laughing and talking loudly on the cell phone. Coach Sharp asked her to be quiet and Pierson recalled "I was frustrated with myself, and so I just started mouthing off at Coach Sharp right in front of the whole team. I was really angry and spewed off all kinds of things to her in a really bad tone of voice. And I regret everything I said to this day". Pierson was suspended for the rest of the season and the criticisms and condemnations poured in. Through it all, Coach stuck to her guns. Coach Sharp told her that she would have to earn her way back on to the team. Everyone including Pierson thought she would transfer but she stayed at Tech. Although she was dismissed from the team, she was not dismissed from their lives. She had individual practices with Coach White, she went through anger management and slowly she began to erase the distance between her and the team. She started coming to games mostly by herself and sat near us where she could see the bench and the team. The kid known for being ultra cool, quietly and sometimes shakily participated in all the songs and chants and cheered on her team.

She came back her senior season with renewed energy and passion and control. She was named 1st team All Big 12, 3rd team all American, and played in the WBCA All Star game. Tech played Duke for a trip to the Final 4. During the game, she suffered a servere groin pull. She said "I wouldn't let them give me cortisone. I just told them to wrap me up so I could get back in there and try to win". She played 37 minutes, scored 17 pts and 17 rebounds but we lost by 6. Pierson said "Coach Sharp wanted so much to take us to the Final Four but I wanted so much to take her back to the Final Four. She deserved to do that more than anyone. I wish I had it to do over again for her"

Later she said "I learned through this that I was willing to do anything in order to play and stay on the team. I also learned how to channel my anger into something positive, like playing better defense or offense. I realized after leaving Tech, the tremendous amount of leadership Coach Sharp proved in that situation. I just couldn't really understand it while I was there."

On Senior Night, when Coach Sharp pulled Pierson she held out her hands to Pierson and looked up into Pierson's face and nodded at what she saw. Then they hugged.

That's victory.

[Bball Girl]

'Giant of the game' will retire at end of season (http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/sports/bk/bkc/women/3684907.html)

"(Sharp) has been at the forefront of whatever we've accomplished in women's basketball," Comets coach Van Chancellor said. "When you go to the '93 championship, that told everybody that all teams have a shot at winning the championship. It was no longer a championship for the elite or the few. I just think she's one of the giants of our game."