Music to her ears
Closing her eyes as she often does, C. Vivian Stringer hears music. Like a soundtrack to her life, she sways to soft jazz riffs that remind her of the dad she lost too soon or bounces to a symphony that reminds her of the game she loves.
Music, like basketball, is a constant in Stringer's life, a string that ties her ascendancy to the top of her chosen profession to her roots in tiny Edenborn, Pa. Stringer, a graduate of Slippery Rock University, is a pretty good piano player. But she had nothing on her father Buddy, who would lose himself in the keys of a piano or an organ during 12-hour weekend shifts on a piano bench that were an escape from the rigors of the Pennsylvania coal mine where he worked.
Stringer is, however, an outstanding basketball coach. On Wednesday night, her Rutgers team beat DePaul 60-46, becoming the third coach in women's basketball and the first African American to win 800 games.
Buddy died just as her career was beginning, but the strains of his passion course strongly through his oldest daughter.
"I hear music sometimes and it brings tears to my eyes because I can see his face, the contortions he would make," Stringer said, recalling the father who died at age 46 from a rare condition that hardened his arteries. "He closed his eyes and felt the music, the way he moaned and felt it, it was like he was in another world. Nothing else mattered."
His daughter can just as easily lose herself in the beauty of a basketball game. Crisp passes are like a well-orchestrated concerto, turnovers like a discordant din. A fast break is harmony; an ugly free-for-all cacophony.
"I do see the game as music, not loud and driving and hard, but fluid and pretty," Stringer said.
For her, the music never stops. For her, an early season loss at Duke is remembered as heavy metal clanging while a more recent win over top-ranked Connecticut is a sweet rhapsody.
The melodies don't subside, and Stringer's Scarlet Knights, ranked No. 4 nationally, are on their way to a potential No. 1 seed in the upcoming NCAA tournament and she recently surpassed 20 wins for the 10th time in her 13-year Rutgers tenure.
Stringer was a standout coach at Iowa between Rutgers and Cheyney State, but left Iowa City after the sudden death of her husband Bill. "I won't walk away from this group because I don't intend to coach anywhere else. I am just so excited about the future."
Stringer's compiled a heck of a list of accomplishments, including being the only women's coach to take three different programs to the Final Four.
After enduring with dignity last year's national controversy involving the ugly comments made by radio shock jock Don Imus about the Rutgers players, not even the fact that Stringer has yet to win a national title diminishes the respect of her peers.
"Vivian has done great things in this game," said Tennessee coach Pat Summit, who defeated Stringer in last year's title game to take her seventh overall championship. "It doesn't matter where she is coaching. She is a winner and has won at every place she has coached and will continue to do so. This will be a special moment for her, and I know she'll keep winning."
John Chaney doesn't doubt that. Since working side by side with Stringer as the men's coach at Cheyney State, the former Temple coach has remained among Stringer's closest friends.
"She is just so human in her involvement in the kids' activities and she is so influential to so many of us," Chaney said. "She is able to walk along with queens and kings but get down in the dirt with the regular people. She is a country girl. Her DNA is in Edenborn."
Nor is she subtle. When her players go off key, she lets them know it. She runs a practice with as much energy now as she did when her career began. "I don't know how to come on the floor and walk through things," she said. "When the time comes and I feel like I've got to go, then I've got to go."
That time is nowhere near. The running commentary out of Stringer's mouth still is matched by the symphony in her head and her players still reap the benefit. "I can't imagine not doing this," she said. "I joked with the players the other day that one day they're going to walk into my funeral, look over me and say, 'Now, she's quiet.'"
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