In honour of the late Dalhousie University Tigers women’s basketball head coach, Dr. Carolyn Savoy (1947-2015), the Tigers are naming the women’s basketball fall exhibition tournament the Dr. Carolyn Savoy Memorial Women’s Basketball Tournament.
Savoy coached the Tigers from 1977-2009, winning nine conference titles and five conference championship titles. In her U SPORTS coaching career, she became the all-time winningest coach with 858 wins. She held a 49-game winning streak from 1979-1982, to put into perspective how dominant Savoy was in the world of basketball.
Savoy’s accomplishments on the court are never-ending. However, the Dalhousie Sport Hall of Famer’s qualities go above and beyond the basketball court.
“She was the total package,” says Dr. Jillian MacDonald, former player of Savoy from 1997-2001. MacDonald was co-captain of the Tigers during her time at Dal. “She wasn't just an awesome coach who only lived and breathed basketball. She was also all in for academics, promoting and supporting women, supporting the university, and was an excellent ambassador for all.”
Tough on offence off the court
Savoy was a negotiating committee member during the 1988 Dal faculty strike. The strike considered a bitter one, lasted 23 days. When the committee was first struck, she presented team-building ideas foreign to academia and received some push back on them. Despite doubts about these ideas, she carried out her plan to build a strong team with the faculty negotiating committee members. One of the last issues which prolonged the strike was the salary equity between men and women. A decade earlier, in his two-volume history of Dalhousie, P.B. Waite devotes a section of the book to "The Status of Women Report”. The section states that in 1977-1978, in over 777 cases, the mean salary at Dalhousie was $26,598. However, when you broke it down by gender, the mean salary was $19,808 for 127 women and $27,924 for 650 men.
Before the 1988 collective bargaining agreement, there was no resolution to the salary equity between women and men. The 1988 negotiating team, led by Savoy, stuck together and got the administration to agree to close the salary gap in the next contract.
It was a negotiating team that used Savoy’s strategy of building a strong team culture and stood up to a stubborn administration. Now, gender inequality in salary is largely a thing of the past at Dalhousie University. Many female faculty members saw as much as 30 per cent increases in their salaries, while male faculty members received the allotted 4-5 per cent increase. Savoy was a “trailblazer,” says former Tiger Kathy Spurr, a two-time AUAA (now known as AUS) MVP with the Tigers.
Savoy fought for women, helping land and promote the first game played at the Metro Centre (now known as the Scotiabank Centre) for women’s basketball. The CIAU final was played between Dal and Victoria in 1980, with Dal losing 64-59. Now, it is a yearly tradition for the AUS women’s basketball playoffs to be hosted at the Scotiabank Centre.
“She broke that glass ceiling; they had never done that before,” says Anna Stammberger, a former player and assistant coach of Savoy. Savoy provided Stammberger with a standout moment in her long and impressive career in sports.
“It was one of the highlights of my athletic career to play in the national final at the Metro Centre,” says the 2014-2015 AUS Coach of the Year.
In a time dominated by men, Savoy loved to see female coaches on the bench.
“She said there's way too many male coaches coaching women's sport, and she said she knows their partners, or their wives would have been the better choice with better basketball knowledge,” says Stammberger. She coached as an assistant coach for two seasons and played five seasons under Savoy. “It was the men that were coaching high school teams and junior high teams. It was something that always irked her, and she was always seeking to give women competence and recruiting women and supporting them in stepping forward to coach in these roles.”
Stammberger, who is from Kensington, Prince Edward Island, says she lacked confidence coming from a small town. The now-retired coach lacked the confidence to believe she was as good as or, better yet, better than others.
Savoy taught her athletes to take a stand for what they believe in, never sit on the fence, discipline, respect, invest their all into everything they do, courage and resilience.
As a coach, Savoy was tough, and her competitiveness was off the charts. Former Tiger, Dr. Alex Legge, says it was Savoy’s, “constant state of being.”
“She really liked to win and hated losing, and that resonated with me,” says Legge.
Savoy’s competitiveness was extreme. On the Tigers way to the 1986 AUAA Championship, the gas pedal came off the bus just outside of Charlotte, P.E.I. Savoy quite literally drove the team to their ninth conference title.
“She actually got down on her hands and knees and physically held the gas pedal down to make sure that we got to the gym and our pregame routine would be intact,” says Spurr.
Invested in athletes on the court and in the classroom
Every single one of Savoy’s players graduated. She valued education highly. Savoy, extremely educated herself, graduated from the University of New Brunswick in 1969 (Physical Education), received her Master of Education from Boston College in 1972, had a certificate in public administration from Dal in 1986 and had a Ph.D. in sport psychology from the University of Tennessee in 1992.
“She always celebrated how hard I worked in the classroom and my academic pursuits and made me really feel proud of that,” says Legge.
Savoy invested in her athletes academically. When MacDonald knew she wanted to get into medical school and would apply next year, Savoy made an appointment to introduce MacDonald to the Dean of Medicine at Dalhousie, Dr. Noni MacDonald.
“She was so supportive of my future career beyond basketball. That meant a lot to me,” says Jillian MacDonald.
Even now, MacDonald refers to, and thinks about, what Savoy would do or say about MacDonald’s decisions and life.
“I was very lucky to have had a strong personal relationship with her that continued far beyond my time playing for her. She was a friend of my family, and she was my friend and a person that I always felt that no matter what in life, I had her in my corner. She was this unwavering source of support and encouragement who believed in me. She was a fantastic role model for my life. Even now, she is still having an impact on my life.”
Her Ph.D. in sport psychology gave Savoy an advantage as a coach. Spurr, playing from 1984-1989, before Savoy had her Ph.D., says her former coach was always ahead of her time regarding the physiological side of the game. Whether it was nutrition or anaerobic and aerobic training, Savoy was committed to ensuring her team had an advantage.
“She always seemed innovative and ahead of what is coming down the pipeline in terms of strategy and performance,” says Spurr.
Spurr began playing basketball in grade 12 and played one year at Cape Breton University. When arriving at Dal, she was originally recruited to swim for the Tigers.
An assistant coach of Savoy from 1992-1994, Spurr was selected to play in Tokyo at the World Sports Fair on a team of top athletes from universities across Canada. From beginning to play the sport in grade 12 to representing her country, Savoy helped teach Spurr the game of basketball.
“She'd be barking things at me like go post up, go set a screen there, and I'd be like, what's a post up? I was just completely overwhelmed, and I’d be crying in practice,” says Spurr. "She was tough on me, but she was just trying to teach me the game and what I should have learned in the previous 11 years in a month.”
Spurr became one of Dal's most decorated women’s basketball players.
“She knew what to say and do to challenge me to make me better and to believe in myself, and I appreciate her for that,” says Spurr.
While Savoy was all business on the court, her former players and assistant coaches remember her for what Savoy was like outside of basketball.
While she is described as one of the toughest and most demanding coaches, her players have endless stories of the joy Savoy would bring. Whether it was Savoy cooking the entire team Thanksgiving dinner in her condo, sledding down a hill on a cafeteria tray, or competing with her players on the chin-up bar, Savoy knew how to have fun.
“She was a lot of fun to be with off the court; you're always laughing with her. She had a contagious smile and laugh,” says Stammberger.
When Legge was in her third year, she tore her ACL. Her parents were living in rural Nova Scotia. Savoy drove Legge to the hospital, ensured she was cared for and organized a private MRI and an appointment to see an orthopedic surgeon.
“I'll always remember how caring and compassionate she was to me during that difficult time,” says Legge.
The tournament, a tribute to an all-time great coach, is one Savoy would have loved, says Stammberger.
“She had great bravado and no qualms about speaking and stepping up and being the centre of attention; she quite enjoyed that,” says Stammberger. “She would love to have the tournament named after her, and she would have loved it to be named after a woman. That's how she rolled; she loved to honour women and to have the legacy remembered.”
The Tigers open the tournament on October 13, facing the University of Lethbridge Pronghorns at 7pm at Dalplex.
Comments
comments powered by Disqus