Kathy Stricker has pushed for equity in girls sports her whole life. 'She fights for us.'

Kathy Stricker loved sports growing up in Southern Indiana, back in the days when opportunities for girls were few and far between. Her father, Everett, was a proponent of her athletic endeavors — with one stipulation.

“My No. 1 job was make sure the cows were fed before I left,” Kathy said. “If I had basketball practice at 5:30 in the morning, my dad would say, ‘That’s OK with me. Just have the cows fed.”

That little farm girl who was driving a tractor by age 5 is still in Kathy Stricker. Her athletic career as a player, coach and advocate for women’s sports encompasses more than six decades. When she grew up, graduating from Silver Creek High School in 1974, the Indiana High School Athletic Association was still two years away from offering a state basketball championship for girls.

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That did not stop Kathy from playing. Not at all. She played basketball with her four years older brother, Larry, a member of the 1969 Silver Creek team that played in the semistate against Indianapolis Washington with George McGinnis, Steve Downing and Co., with his friends and at home in the barn hayloft.

“They didn’t care if I was a girl,” Kathy said. “They just wanted me to play, so I played with the guys a lot. We went to neighboring schools in the summer in open gyms. There weren’t many girls brave enough to do it, but I just wanted to play. My brother made me earn my way.”

Stricker, 64, fought for chances to play, convincing the Silver Creek principal at the time to put together an eight-game schedule her senior year. That was just one of many battles she fought over the years, not only for her own opportunities, but for girls athletes who followed her. She remains the only softball coach Franklin Central High School has ever known, more than 40 years after then-athletic director Larry Hanni told her there was a job for her — and, oh yeah — they were planning to start a softball team. “Would you do it?” Hanni asked.

“I was a basketball player at heart," Stricker said. "But I agreed to do it — and I loved it.”

She still loves it. Even after 42 years. And even — or, maybe, especially — after she was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer in the spring of 2019. Stricker was never a smoker. “A genetic thing,” she called her diagnosis.

“In 36 hours, my life turned upside down,” she said. “At some point, some sort of cancer will probably take my life. I don’t know when. I don’t know what. But nothing really changes for me. I’m as competitive as I was yesterday.”

To say Stricker’s fingerprints are on the Franklin Central softball program would be an understatement. The softball complex, one of the nicest you will find anywhere, was named for her a year ago and officially dedicated last month. The assistant coaches? They all played for the coach they call “Coach Strick.” And the players? They may not fully understand their coach has taken stances that set her at odds with her peers and bosses at times and cost herself opportunities in the process. But they know what she stands for.

“She fights for us,” senior third baseman Olivia Colip said. “We knows she fights for us, which makes us appreciate her even more.”

A women's sports pioneer

Stricker wanted to play basketball at the University of Kentucky. But in 1974, when she graduated from high school, there were no scholarships available at Kentucky for a women’s basketball player. But in her senior year at Silver Creek, her government teacher was Butch Zike, a Franklin College graduate who would return to his alma mater at Whiteland the following year and stay as a coach, teacher and athletic director for the next 38 years.

Zike recommended her to the coaches at Franklin College, where she could sample a little bit of everything offered in women’s sports.

“I got to play four sports,” she said. “That’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to give up anything, which is kind of how I ended up there.”

At Franklin, Stricker was coached by Ruth Ann Callon and Doreen St. Clair. In those two women, she found role models who helped pave the way for the first generation of women in college athletics. “You earned everything you got,” Stricker said. “We put up scaffolds and painted the gym at Franklin. Ruth and Doreen fought a lot of battles for us just to be in position to be competitive. I don’t think our kids today have any concept of what went on that long ago in getting things accepted. I had to have someone do that for me and I wanted that to happen for my girls that I coached. Many of them have no clue how far we’ve come.”

After her stellar athletic career at Franklin College, Stricker student taught at Franklin Central for a year before starting her teaching and coaching career in the Greenfield-Central school system as a middle school coach, along with assistant girls basketball coach.

During her year student teaching at Franklin Central, Stricker got to know assistant athletic director Alice Underwood, who was the volleyball coach at Franklin Central until 1993 and stayed in the assistant AD role until retirement in 1999. When Hanni asked Stricker to start the softball program in 1979, she was also hired on as assistant volleyball coach with Underwood and assistant girls basketball coach with Marv Knoop.

The idea, Stricker said, was for her to take over for Knoop as girls basketball coach. “That’s why they hired me,” she said. But when Knoop retired in the early 1990s after a long coaching career, Stricker did not get the job — and she did not expect to get the job. That is because, by that point, Stricker and Underwood had been fighting for equal opportunities for girls sports and women’s coaches.

Stricker's willingness to fight, at that time, ruffled feathers with administrators and likely cost her chances for advancement in her own career. 

“We wanted equality,” Stricker said. “Coaches of girls sports were teaching six or seven classes and coaches of boys sports were coaching four or five. Scheduling was the biggest thing for me. I didn’t feel like we should have to come in early every morning or late at night to practice. That just wasn’t right. We needed to be able to share facilities.”

Eventually, those inequities were rectified. Coaches of equivalent sports were paid the same. Schedules were adjusted. Facilities were upgraded.

“There were good things that came out of it,” Stricker said. “But there were girls’ coaches who weren’t very supportive at the beginning. They thought we were taking things away from the boys’ programs. That wasn’t what it was about. We didn’t want to take anything away from them. We just wanted things to be equal.”

Years later, Stricker had taken a part-time position working at the Indiana Grand Racing & Casino in Shelbyville. E.B. Carver, the longtime superintendent of Franklin Township schools, had since retired and ran into Stricker.

“He put his arm around me and said, ‘I only know one person as stubborn as you are and that was me,’” Carver told her. “He said, ‘I hope you learned a lot through this process because I sure as hell did.’ It was about the long-term effects of the kids and I wanted to be part of that change long-term. We’re still having equity things like we saw in the NCAA tournament. I was totally dumbfounded. How does that happen? But we’ve made progress. Some of the male coaches know better now than they did back then and have a whole different respect for the situation than they did back then.”

Stricker's role as a pioneer for women’s sports is not a topic that comes up often with her players or coaches. She does not bring it up. But those who played for her understand everything she has meant to the program over a 42-year span.

 “I’m forever grateful to her,” said assistant coach Erica Miller-Glasener, a 2007 Franklin Central graduate. “She leads by example day in and day out, which is a big part of the reason I’m back here. One of my dreams was to come back and help coach with her. She’s done all the fighting for the girls and she’s constantly going to bat for them.”

After years of fighting battles for others, Kathy is fighting one of her own — an opponent she may not be able to wear down.

Fight turns to lung cancer

Kathy retired from teaching in December. But coaching? Not yet. She has one of the top teams in the state, ranked in the top-10 in Class 4A with a 20-5 record going into the weekend. The Flashes have never won a state championship, but have come close — really close — as state runner-up in 2008 and ’13. The program owns seven regional championships and 11 sectional titles, all under Stricker.

All of those numbers are great. But she is not chasing a trophy.

“I think coaching is, to me, my passion,” she said. “I don’t do it for money. I do it for the kids. I just liked it. I like the kids. I loved coaching and enjoyed just being around the kids and seeing them get better. Coaching is different now than it was in 1979.”

How so?

“Parents are entitled,” she said. “Not good or bad. It’s just, ‘This is going to happen. It’s my daughter. This is going to happen.’ That’s not the way it was when we were growing up. Sometimes I have to show the girls how to use the broom to sweep the dugout and I just roll my eyes. But I still love coaching. And our girls are great. They are ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ girls. It’s just a different time than it was before.”

She would coach forever if she could. But Kathy was thrown for a loop in the spring of 2019 when she went in for a physical before the softball season. An annoying cough had bothered her for a few weeks, but she did not think much of it until the doctor brought her in to look at an x-ray.

“They showed me a scan on the wall,” she said. “My father died from lung cancer. He was a heavy smoker. But I knew what a mass looked like.”

The cancerous mass in her lung had already spread to her tailbone. Within a week, she had started treatment. Early in the 2019 season, she told her team she had been diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer.

“We were all caught off guard when she sat us down and told us,” senior shortstop Macee Roberts said. “I forget sometimes. It’s like it’s not even there because she never talks about it. She’ll get radiation done and she’ll be ‘radioactive’ at practice is about the only time it comes up. But it teaches us to not complain or take anything for granted because you never know what is going to happen. It brought us all closer. It’s awesome to have such a selfless coach who is always there for her girls no matter what is going on in her life personally.”

Kathy describes her current health status as “stable.” The cancer is not going to go away, but her most-recent scans showed the largest tumor had shrunk to half its size after radiation. However, the cancer has spread to her liver. “That’s the scary part to me,” she said. “But all is pretty stable right now and I’m doing pretty good.”

Not much has changed for Stricker in softball. Two years ago, she moved to the bench instead of coaching third base. This year (last season was canceled due to the pandemic), she has mostly moved back to the third-base box. But she still coaches like she always has — with high standards and expectations.

“She set the culture here,” senior pitcher Josie Newman said. “That culture is that we’re going to have fun and we’re going to do what we know how to do. She knows how to have fun. I know Strick takes it very personally when she loses and I love to win, too. But we’re going to enjoy the game, too. It’s not the end of the world if you lose.”

Kathy is not done fighting, though — for herself or her program. That nice Franklin Central softball complex that has her name on it could be even nicer with a turf field.

“I’ll coach until I can’t or I decide it’s time,” Kathy said. “My health has to come first. I know that. As long as I can coach and be part of the program, I will. As soon as I can’t, I’ll step aside.”

When that time comes, Kathy can rest assured her legacy and impact on the girls she coached at Franklin Central will live on much longer.

Call Star reporter Kyle Neddenriep at (317) 444-6649.