Marianne Stanley is a pioneer in women's basketball. In the 1970s, she played for the pioneering Immaculata College team. She coached Old Dominion to AIAW National Championships... the only national championship back then... the NCAA would not sanction a tournament. She later coached at the University of Southern California, another storied program (it's Cheryl Miller's alma mater). Many of those who currrently follow women's basketball sometimes seem to believe that the 1995 UConn team invented women's basketball -- instead, however, it was fostered and developed year after year by remarkable and couragous women like Stanley.
Stanley wasn't just a pioneer on the court. When she was the coach at USC, she filed a law suit against the USC administration demanding equal pay as the men's basketball coach. She lost her job and was out of basketball for a couple of years until Stanford hired her as a one year interim coach. She lost the case. She took a job at the University of California (Berkeley) currently, she is the head coach of the Washington Mystics of the WNBA.
Why the short history of Marianne Stanley? Today's Washington Post fronts a story that, while the head coach of the University of California, she allegedly demanded that a newly hired (and pregnant) assistant coach have an abortion or lose her job. When the assistant decided to keep her baby, her job was gone. It's in court now; Stanley claims the assistant wasn't fired nor did she demand an abortion, just that she asked for her resignation. Either way, it's quite damning towards Stanley.
How are young women going going to advance through the work world -- how are they going to have families and careers -- when friends like this treat them in this way? It's a sad, sad story.