Shoes squeak, a whistle blows and female players yell to each other as they move fluidly in a circle around the basket with the ball going in one direction, then another, like a perfectly-timed roller coaster – Sue Gunter sees all of this and is not pleased.
Crouching near midcourt, the 63-year-old LSU women’s basketball head coach watches in silence before stopping the drill. She walks toward the basket, explains how the play should be run and allows the players to have another try at it.
Gunter is in her 22nd season at LSU and 40th overall. A Hall of Fame coach who has won more than 700 career games, Gunter has seen women’s basketball grow from a novelty in the 1950s to the media spotlight in 2004.
The 2003-2004 season has been particularly hard on Gunter, who has missed nine games this season due to bronchitis. The team is 8-1 in her absence, and her return to the court this season is still up in the air.
While the future is uncertain for Gunter, she said before the season started that unlike some of her colleagues that have left the game then come back, she will know when the time is right to retire.
“At my age, it’s not something that’s going to go on forever,” Gunter said. “That’s something that’s in the near future for me and not in the distant future and I look forward to it. It’s taken us a long time to get this program where it is and I want to be able to go up in the stands and enjoy it.
“When I quit I’ll quit, that’s it for me. I will not do it again. I’ve been the luckiest person in the world because I spent my career at two great schools.”
Gunter said many coaches simply do not have other things besides coaching to occupy their minds.
“There are a lot of people that are driven, but they don’t have another life, and that’s something I don’t think I’ll have a problem with [after retirement],” Gunter said. “You have to be comfortable with yourself, and some people can’t give it up or they’re miserable if they do.”
Throughout her life, basketball has been Gunter’s one constant, helping her through the triumphs and tragedies of everyday life. Gunter, however, is more than a coach – she is a teacher, a saleswoman trying to reel in recruits and more importantly, a mentor.
She not only instructs the players on basketball technique and how to succeed in a game, but also is their mother, their protector and their friend.
The Early Years
Growing up in Walnut Grove, Miss., in the segregated South, everything in Gunter’s community centered around the school and the church. Walnut Grove High School had no football, which left basketball as the best form of recreation, and Gunter said kids started playing it in August and played through April.
“I don’t ever remember there not being a basketball team [in Walnut Grove],” Gunter said. “Everybody went to the games; it was a big event.”
Born May 22, 1941, Gunter was the only child of Lovette and Iva Dean, who were both farmers. Lovette was illiterate, which made him stress the importance of education to his daughter.
“It was always a really big deal for him that I go through school and go to college,” Gunter said.
Gunter made the junior high varsity team in the eighth grade, and she credits her coach, W.C. Mills, with teaching her the fundamentals of the game. She said the type of play then was much different than today.
“We played three-on-three at that time,” Gunter said. “You never even talked about a zone defense. You learned to play give-and-go basketball. You passed, you cut and you screened. I was getting all that in the seventh and eighth grade.”
A devout sports lover, Gunter said if she had not gone into coaching, she likely would have pursued a career in journalism. She wrote a weekly column for her high school newspaper and kept up with as many sports as possible.
“I’ve always been a sports junky,” she said. “I kept scrap books of major league baseball or whatever was in season.”
Gunter never married, but came close once. The man, who Gunter did not want to identify, went to high school and junior college with her for a year and was a basketball player at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss.
“We won’t go there,” she said when asked the name of her high school sweetheart. “His wife might not like that.”
Gunter said her father used to tell her he was glad she never married the man, although she said he is now a millionaire. When she asked her father why, he told her ‘I liked him, but you would have ruined his life – you would have told him what to do his whole life.’
“You miss the thought of having kids, but then I look around and I think I’ve had a thousand kids,” Gunter said. “I don’t have any regrets.”
After Gunter graduated from Walnut Grove High School, her basketball options were limited. Only two or three colleges had teams under the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), which was the only sponsor of women’s basketball at the time.
So Gunter and friend Jill Upton scoured the country for teams and wound up in Nashville, Tenn., at Peabody College, which became part of Vanderbilt University. The pair played basketball for Nashville Business College and had to pay their own way.
Gunter said the amount of work she and Upton went through – waking up early for practices and keeping their grades up so they could travel with the team – made her appreciate the game more.
“It was unbelievable, hard work,” she said. “Looking back now I laugh because I don’t know how we did it.”
Gunter graduated from Peabody in 1962, earning two degrees. She played guard for four seasons with the team, won two national titles and earned All-America honors in 1960.
“I was a good player, but I wasn’t a great player,” she said. “I played with great players.”
Coaching beginnings
Coaching basketball is a stressful job. Gunter knows this as well as any other coach. After coaching two successful programs and having dealt with hundreds of players, Gunter said the best way to deal with stress is to not let losing affect you, which is something she learned the hard way.
“In the early part of my career, it ate me up,” Gunter said. “I couldn’t handle losing and I guess when I was younger, maybe during my first 10 years as a coach, I probably lost the next game because I was angry or frustrated about losing the one before.
“Instead of focusing on the next one and learning from the loss, I was doing things different when it was really the fact that we weren’t good enough or we weren’t executing.”
Gunter said she has developed a pattern after games, whether the team wins or loses, to help reduce the stress.
“If we lose, we’ll make a tape and look at it,” she said. “I want it to hurt. I want the players to feel remorse when they lose, but I want them to learn from it and get over it because once it’s over, it’s done.”
Gunter said a coach’s duties often go beyond executing a game plan on the court and worrying about wins and losses. She said a coach has to deal with the Athletic Department administration, booster groups that want access to the coach as well as having to deal with 15 individual players.
“It’s no different than what [football] Coach [Nick] Saban is going through at this level,” Gunter said. “Everybody wants you to win.”
Gunter never questioned that she would become a coach. After she left college, Gunter looked for a high school coaching job, but in the mid-1960s, schools were looking for physical education teachers more than coaches, and Gunter said the movement toward women’s basketball had not quite picked up yet.
Gunter eventually wound up at Middle Tennessee State University outside of Nashville, Tenn., where she coached two seasons. There, the 22-year-old taught a full course load and coached volleyball and basketball.
“The early years were fun because I could still get out and play with the kids,” she said. “I would do that until I was about 30 or so, then they’d start slapping my stuff in the stands.”
The transition from player to coach was easy for Gunter, largely because she said the competitive urge and fire from basketball were still in her and she fed those needs through coaching. Instead of battling with a player, the opposing coach on the opposite bench became her challenge and Gunter said she loved it.
“I never missed a beat,” she said. “I think once I stopped playing, I never lost one ounce of my competitiveness. It just carried over.”
Gunter became Stephen F. Austin University’s head coach in 1965. She continued to coach a multitude of sports along with basketball, including volleyball, tennis and track, coaching the latter two at the same time.
She said the biggest obstacle at SFA in Nacogdoches, Texas, was competing with the other big schools such as Texas, Texas A&M and Sam Houston. Gunter said the basketball budget was so low that players would have to make their own uniforms.
“Everybody was in the same boat then,” she said. “We all had to struggle to get it done. We all chipped in money to travel.”
While Gunter ranks third all-time in wins with 701, she never received credit for her two years at Middle Tennessee State or the first three years at SFA.
Until the NCAA took over women’s basketball in 1982, teams often relied on scorebooks to keep records, but Gunter said the organization would not honor the books for those years.
“I didn’t know anything about the missing games until I started getting calls on them this week,” Rick Campbell of the NCAA told the Associated Press last week when it reported on the record discrepancy. “We change records all the time. LSU would have to send us proof of those victories.”
Those lost seasons perhaps cost Gunter about 100 wins, which would put her closer to Tennessee’s Pat Summitt (842) and Texas’ Jody Conradt (837) in all-time win total.
Pioneering the women’s game
Gunter has been a large part of the women’s basketball legacy. From her early AAU days to the enactment of Title IX and now the current media exposure of the game, Gunter has seen the sport make many strides.
“It’s just been tremendous to be along for that ride and to see the different phases and how hard some women and men have fought to get the game where it is now,” she said.
Gunter said female players have had to overcome many stereotypes, but she has seen drastic changes to many of those ideas.
“For a long time, particularly when I started playing, society kind of had a stereotype about a female athlete in general, unless she was an ice skater,” Gunter said. “[People thought] they were more masculine looking, and they were a girl trying to be a guy as far as sports is concerned, but I think most of those stereotypes have gone by the wayside.”
Gunter said since she has been at LSU, people have become more accustomed to female athletes not because they were abnormal in any kind of way, but because there are more skilled athletes competing in a popular sport.
“I think we’re away from that trend where everyone looks at a female athlete as being a lesbian,” she said. “All those things were out there at some point in time, but they’re just not a focus anymore. That’s a tribute to where we are now. I think people come out to see the kids play because they’re girls, but more importantly, because they’re really good athletes.”
Along with social changes, the on-court dynamics of women’s basketball has undergone several facelifts. In 1971, the five-player, full-court game that is still used today was finally adopted, ending a long spell of various playing methods. Many of these included six players on offense, three on defense, as well as three different courts used for one game.
From 1972 to 1982, the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) essentially controlled the women’s game. In 1982, the NCAA took over after a bitter anti-trust suit with the AIAW and it adopted a national tournament similar to the men’s game.
The advent of Title IX in June 1972 gave all women’s sports a push, particularly in basketball, and Gunter said the legislation was a big stepping stone to getting on equal terms with the men.
“[With Title IX], you get the exposure and the crowd and now the pressure builds. Now you become much like the men,” she said. “It’s big time now with the advent of TV and the media blitz through the ’90s.”
Despite the tremendous growth of the game and the fact more men are coaching women’s teams, Gunter said she doubts a female coaching a men’s team will ever become a trend. She said there is not much difference from the styles of play, but other factors likely are holding women back.
“I wouldn’t be intimidated, not in the least,” Gunter said of coaching a men’s team. “I think the only difficult thing would be for the guys to get over the embarrassment of being coached by a woman.”
Assistant coach Bob Starkey said an important part of his success at LSU has been understanding where the game came from and who was a part of getting it to the point it is now.
“She’s the history of the game,” Starkey said. “I think it’s important that if you want to be a great coach, you understand the history. You’ve got to understand what was done and the sacrifices that were made.”
Olympic glory and sadness
Outside of Gunter’s office is a framed red jersey with the No. 80 on it. It is a bittersweet reminder of the Olympic triumph she had, but also the opportunity she missed.
The 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal marked the first time women’s basketball was a participating sport. Billie Moore, the team’s head coach and Gunter’s good friend, asked her to be an assistant coach.
Gunter said the team had to go through a qualifying tournament in Toronto and faced 21 teams, all vying for two of the six spots.
The team won the tournament and headed to Montreal, which Gunter recalled as one of the most thrilling experiences of her career. She said it was so difficult to qualify for the games because the coaches had no way of scouting the other team prior to the tournament.
“I don’t think anyone expected us to even qualify because the European teams were much better than we had been,” Gunter said. “It was such a unique experience though. You went in, you rode the game and played it by the seat of your pants.”
Tragedy stuck in July when her father died of cancer, forcing Gunter to fly back from Montreal and miss the team’s first two games, including a loss to Japan. She said having to leave the team was one of the more difficult things in her life.
Despite a 17-point loss to the Soviet Union, the team bounced back to earn the silver medal with a win over Czechoslovakia in the semifinals. Gunter said few people will realize how monumental the win was for the United States.
“You just don’t realize what it means to be an American until you get in a situation like that,” she said. “That big USA is plastered across your chest and you feel pressure like you don’t believe when you walk out on the court.”
Four years later, Gunter was named head coach of the women’s team that was set to compete in Moscow, but the United States boycott of the games forced the team to stay home and robbed her of a chance at Olympic gold.
“In many ways, it was more traumatic for the kids than for me because I had the ’76 Olympics,” she said. “[But] the one thing you held on to was the fact that you were an American first and athlete second.”
Good times and bad at LSU
After the Olympics, Gunter took a break. She had been coaching year-round since 1975, so she took a job as athletic director at Stephen F. Austin University and pondered her future.
“At that time, I thought I’d coach again; it just had to be the right place,” Gunter said. “I was [almost] 40 then, and you realize you don’t have a lot of moves left.”
The right place turned out to be LSU, which offered the job to former Louisiana Tech coach Leon Barmore, but he refused. Gunter said former LSU Athletic Director Bob Broadhead then called her, at Barmore’s suggestion, and offered her the job.
When Gunter took over the Lady Tigers in 1982, her goal was to get to recruit more quality players above everything.
“Recruiting took precedence over everything else,” she said. “I would miss practices to go recruit. We had to have players.”
Gunter’s first team went 20-7 with the help of two-time All-American Joyce Walker, who averaged 24.8 points per game that year and finished as the second leading scorer in Southeastern Conference history.
Gunter would have 20-win seasons for the next four years, including 1986 when the team reached the Elite 8 of the NCAA Tournament. After that season, Gunter landed Dana Chatman, a point guard from Ama, La.
Chatman, who earned the nickname “Pokey” because of her lack of speed, played four years for Gunter and currently is an associate coach. Chatman said playing under Gunter was special because she was such a great motivator and Gunter instilled confidence in her as a player and then as a coach.
“You always felt as if you earned coach Gunter’s respect as a player,” Chatman said. “I always felt like I was her extended coach on the floor.”
In 1991, Chatman’s senior year, LSU was the No. 2 seed in the Mideast Region of the NCAA Tournament after winning the school’s first SEC Tournament. But the school could not host the first two rounds of the tournament – which the top four seeds were supposed to do – because of what Gunter still calls “The Sesame Street fiasco.”
Sesame Street Live had signed a contract to perform in the PMAC on the same dates as the tournament games, which forced LSU to travel to face Lamar University. The Lady Tigers lost 93-73, and Gunter still holds ill feelings toward the situation.
“I’ve never forgotten that,” she said. “The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was walk down and tell Pokey [Chatman]’s team, the team that had just won the SEC Tournament, that because our arena was obligated, we had to travel.”
Gunter said the University could have backed out of the deal by possibly buying Sesame Street out or having the event moved to the Riverside Centroplex downtown, but nobody did anything.
“They underestimated that team,” Gunter said. “They knew the tournament dates and knew we’d have a chance to host, but they went ahead and didn’t think we’d be that good that year.”
While Gunter’s first 10 seasons at LSU were filled with consistency and winning, the next three, starting in 1993, would turn out to be the darkest in the team’s history.
“It seemed like everything we did went sour,” Gunter said of those seasons, which LSU went a combined 27-54, including a 7-20 stint in 1994-1995. “We had one great player, Cornelia Gayden. She was one of the highest profile recruits we’d brought in.”
Unfortunately for LSU, Gayden broke her leg in an automobile accident the August before school started and missed the entire 1992 season.
“It was a really tough time,” Gayden said in a phone interview. “But playing for someone like Sue, she just kept motivating us to not give up. We always battled adversity.”
Gunter said she also had recruits who turned out to be bad apples and had to release them.
“They got in all kinds of trouble and they weren’t focused on what needed to be done,” Gunter said. “That really depleted us player-wise, but we couldn’t have won with them anyway.”
Things were not well in Gunter’s personal life either. Her mother Iva had been battling Alzheimer’s disease for the past 10 years, and she was at her worst during that period.
“It made me very sensitive, very acute and very aware of that disease,” she said. “We do everything we can now to help people with that.”
Coming off the 7-20 season, Gunter and her staff faced rumors that they would be fired. Following that year’s SEC Tournament, Gunter met with then-Athletic Director Joe Dean and the two made plans for the future of the program. Contrary to rumor, Gunter said Dean never gave her an ultimatum to turn the program around in a year or be fired.
After that meeting, Chatman and Gunter went on a recruiting trip and eventually signed future players Pietra Gay, Tony Gross and Elaine Powell, who now plays point guard for the WNBA’s Detroit Shock, winner of the league championship in 2003.
Gunter’s success continued through the mid-1990s through 2002, when she compiled a 150-67 record, went to the NCAA Tournament five times and landed the top recruit in the country, Seimone Augustus, who now is a sophomore for the Lady Tigers.
In her freshman season, Augustus helped guide LSU to a 30-4 record and a trip to the Elite 8 in the NCAA Tournament, where the Lady Tigers fell to Texas and Gunter was denied another shot at the Final Four.
Rutgers coach Vivian Stringer, who ranks fourth behind Gunter in the all-time win list, said she hopes Gunter can win a title with this year’s team.
“I’d like for her to win a national championship, especially with Seimone [Augustus], but she has to bring the other elements there and it seems like she’s got them if her team can avoid the injuries,” Stringer said. “There are some people that are so good that they keep coming up and you just say ‘you’ll get your shot.’
“I think her time is going to come. She seems poised to do it this year, and that would be a crowning point for her.”
Bonding with players
A plethora of mementos surround the walls of Gunter’s office on the fourth floor of the Athletic Administration building. There’s a signed basketball of her 500th career win against Jackson State. Behind her desk is a photo collage of graduation pictures and her former players’ children. These are all constant reminders of her illustrious career and the countless number of players she coached.
Gunter said the most rewarding perk of coaching is to see her former players come back and reminisce, and everyone who has ever played for her has a story.
“I’m kind of like No. 2 mom,” she said. “I can’t tell you how much it means when I see older players come back. When they come in and show me pictures of their kids, it’s like they’re my grandkids when I see their kids’ pictures.”
Gunter said part of the coaching job is not only teaching players the basketball skills they need on the court, but following up on their lives and molding them into mature adults. She said even if she never wins a national title or makes it to a Final Four, she will still feel like a winner because of her players.
“Coaches sit in a position where kids get close to them,” she said. “You go through too many tumultuous times, so they’ll come to you and talk to you about things they can’t talk to their parents about. You become much more than just a coach.”
Living Legend
February 17, 2004