Strength via hope

Sporting News, The, Jan 2, 1995 by Steve Harrison

And there were the cheerleading tryouts as a freshman at German Township High School, fall, 1964. Vivian now -- Charlene was long since jettisoned -- stuck the landings on the flips, pointed the fingers, smiled the big smile, did all a cheerleader is supposed to do. But her name wasn't called; the squad would be all white. Always had been, and in 1964, always would be.

A neighbor talked to her father and wondered why Vivian wasn't chosen -- such things are big news in a small town -- before Charles erupted. There was a school board meeting to decide whether a ninth grader -- who now only wanted to vanish -- would cheer for the Uhlans when all she wanted in the first place was to play on a girls team that didn't exist.

The teenager did cheer and lived through the embarrassment, but will never forget not hearing her name called over the intercom. She left Edenborn for Slippery Rock in 1966, majoring in physical education and playing basketball for a team that didn't lose a game in three years. In 1970, she was hired to teach health at Cheyney State, the nation's first historically black college, 30 miles west of Philadelphia. It was also the place she met Bill Stringer, the man who would be her husband and partner.

Two years later, she volunteered to help coach women's sports. It was all a lark, really -- her teaching salary wouldn't be supplemented for coaching, and she didn't think she could even get the basketball job she secretly coveted. But no one else wanted to coach and she soon started that sliding, trapping defense she learned from Cheyney's men's coach, a ferocious man with a great mind for basketball named John Chaney.

The men and women shared the practice floor. One day Stringer would talk to the men, then Chaney would teach the women. Stringer built Cheyney State into a national contender and led it to the championship game of the first women's NCAA Tournament in 1982. But that year, Janine, born healthy 14 months earlier, became mysteriously sick. The doctors thought she was teething, or had an ear infection. Two months later, she was diagnosed with spinal meningitis.

"I told her you've got to get her to the children's hospital," Chaney recalls. "We didn't know what was wrong. She was born so healthy."

Today, Janine is brain damaged and confined to a wheelchair. She has had surgery four times to repair her spine and fix her hip sockets. Her food must be mashed. Stringer's mother, Thelma, and her sister Madeline have lived with Vivian for two years and help care for Janine. Along with Madeline's husband, Rufus, and their daughter, Vivian's two sons, David, 15, and Justin, 10, there are eight living in a two-story, six-bed-room house in Iowa City. When Stringer coached Cheyney State against Louisiana Tech, her best friend, Janice Fitzgerald, then a professor of literature at Cheyney State, stood by Janine in the hospital.

"We told her she had to go, even though Nina was in the hospital. It was such a hard decision, but everyone told her she should go coach the game," Fitzgerald says.