The Legendarium: Reign in Ruston, Part 1
No Cap Space WBB's 'Legends of March' historical series continues with Old Dominion's longtime foil and one of the 70's and 80's greatest programs, the Louisiana Tech Lady Techsters.
Amidst the rolling hills of northern Louisiana, the town of Ruston was known to completely shut down on some winter nights. All throughout town, the businesses would close, parents would get their kids together and head to a revival happening on the campus of Louisiana Tech. They’d arrive hours early, standing in line and only parting when the larger than life performers would make their way through the crowd to get inside the gym. Everyone knew their names and had seen them around town more than once.
There was Kim and Janice and Pam, Julie and Angela and many more.
Inside the Memorial Gym, Rustonites were treated to something they had never seen before. A show unlike any other, presented by young ladies clad in powder blue and stripes of red. They packed to the rafters, refusing to take a seat until the opposition on the floor finally scored a basket. It was electric, from start to finish.
When the game ended, everyone went home to wait until the next time they could get back to the gym.
So they could see the Lady Techsters, the greatest show in Louisiana.
Sonja’s White Cadillac
Few people could command a room like Sonja Hogg. It didn’t matter if she was walking into a cocktail party full of Louisiana politicians or a high school gymnasium, she was able to talk to anyone and everyone. While her presence was commanding, her talent at disarming people with a smile and a little southern charm was something of a superpower.
It had been that way since her days as a young woman in Alexandria. Perhaps it’s why she and Louisiana Tech President F. Jay Taylor got along so well.
“He was a visionary,” Hogg says. “Had it not been for Dr. Taylor, the Lady Techsters would not have existed.”
It all started in his office in 1974. Sonja was in her mid-20’s, teaching in Louisiana Tech’s health and physical education department. Three students went to President Taylor’s office and asked about starting a women’s basketball program. Sonja, a former student at Tech who never got the chance to play competitive hoops at the high school or college level, was intrigued.
“I, of course, wish there had been one when I was there as a student,” she says.
So Taylor made a proposal to Hogg: continue to teach and take on the added responsibility of getting a women’s basketball program off the ground in Ruston.
There was just one problem.
Louisiana Tech’s mascot was a bulldog, and all of their athletic programs were known as such. If a woman’s team was going to be the ‘Lady Bulldogs’ it would only be a matter of time until people started to connect the dots and realize what another word for a female dog is.
“I could just see it,” Hogg says. “‘Here comes Hogg and all her little bitches.’ So the first year we were ‘the women’s basketball team’. I got with [Ruston Daily-Leader sportswriter] Buddy Davis and I said ‘we’re the women’s team, not the girls team. That’s the high school team, the girls. We’re the women’s team.’”
It would take a little while but eventually the name clicked. At Davis’ newspaper, the Ruston Daily-Leader, there was an old columnist named Major Fox. His standard practice to define former Louisiana Tech athletes or alumni would be to refer to them as a ‘techster’. So Hogg went back to Buddy Davis and said that she had found a name for her team.
Shortly thereafter, F. Jay Taylor would make sure ‘Lady Techsters’ was represented on the floor of the Old Memorial Gym alongside the ‘Bulldogs’ name for the men’s basketball team.
For the first few years of their history, the Techsters didn’t leave the state of Louisiana. Under the auspices of the AIAW, a team had to win their state tournament and then a regional tournament to get to the Final Four. From 1974-1978, LA Tech would get close to nationals but fall to other early powerhouses like Texas, LSU and Wayland Baptist.
Coach Hogg would need a little more firepower to be the contender President F. Jay Taylor wanted her to be. As it so happened, she had two recruits coming in that would change the trajectory of Louisiana Tech forever.
Their names were Pam Kelly and Angela Turner.
“Coach Hogg came down to little Shady Grove,” Angela remembers. “And she had on a white fur coat. So as soon as she walks in the door, everybody’s attention went to her.”
It was just how Coach Hogg rolled.
While some states were just giving opportunities for high school girls to be able to play basketball, Louisiana had a long and proud history of girls competitive hoops. That ecosystem allowed for top players to flourish but they needed a place to go. Schools weren’t yet recruiting nationally and unless you got lucky, it was rare that teams in the mid to late 1970’s were heading to a small parish in Louisiana to find a player. In that respect, Turner was a perfect fit for Hogg, having lived just 20 miles from campus.
Getting Pam Kelly was a little bit trickier.
One coach that did find her way into Louisiana was Stephen F. Austin’s Sue Gunter, a Baton Rouge native who would later take over LSU’s program in 1982. The Ladyjacks and LSU itself recruited Kelly as hard as any could at the time. But Tech had two aces to play: Sonja Hogg and Louisiana Governor John J. McKeithen.
Coach Hogg had done the Governor’s family a kindness at one point, helping John’s son Fox, who had dropped out of LSU, find his footing at Louisiana Tech where he would graduate with a bachelors degree in history and social studies. He returned to Columbia where his wife, Yvonne, was coaching the girls basketball team. So it made sense that Fox return the favor in 1975.
“He was taking one of my classes,” Hogg remembers. “He said, ‘Ms. Hogg, you’re gonna have to look at this kid. She’s just a freshman over there. My wife’s coached her. She is a real player.”
Yvonne, was Pam’s high school coach in Columbia and would babysit the McKeithen kids from time to time. But as Pam’s star ascended, Hogg found out that Fox’s father, the recently former Governor of the state of Louisiana, was angling to try and get Pam to LSU, the state’s flagship school and Gov. McKeithen’s alma mater.
“So Fox came in my office that morning, and I said, ‘Fox… I know your daddy is trying to instigate Pam going to LSU,” she recalls. “[Fox] said, ‘yeah, he said a few things about LSU to her.”
“I said, ‘can you get me an appointment with your daddy’? You go back home, you call your daddy. I want to come over there and sit down. He said, ‘I can do that.’ So here I go over to Caldwell [Parish] to visit former Governor John J. McKeithen. And had a nice, nice visit. Before it was over with, I think I had convinced Governor McKeithen that Pam needed to come to Louisiana Tech.”
What Hogg was able to impress upon the McKeithen’s was how Ruston might be a better place for Pam, who was a homebody by her own admission. Ruston was a little less hectic than Baton Rouge, classes at Tech were smaller and she wouldn’t be lost in the shuffle. But it was one of Kelly’s first interactions with Hogg that made all the difference, more than any of the overtures made by the McKeithen family.
“She came down to visit me,” Pam remembers. “When she came dressed to the hilt with her white mink coat on, she drove a white Cadillac, had on a white pant suit with white hair. It was history from there.”
With Turner and Kelly on campus, the Lady Techsters had a roster that could contend with the top teams in their region, if not across the country. But Hogg still had one move to make. For this one, she’d need the blessing of LA Tech President F. Jay Taylor.
“I went to him and said ‘Dr. Taylor, it’s time for me to hire an assistant,’” she says. “I’ve gone about as far in three or four years as I [could] because I need to have someone that we can go to that next level and I can get away and recruit and do all these other things.”
She was thinking, of course, about Leon Barmore, the head boys basketball coach at Rustin High School. When the Lady Techsters program first started in 1974, Hogg went to meet him in his office where they took just about everything that wasn’t nailed down — “ropes, medicine balls, water bottles, the whole deal”, he says — to help start the program. He would occasionally help with practice but Hogg knew he needed to be more than that.
She told Dr. Taylor to take some time to think about her request and he did. A few weeks later, he walked into Memorial Gym to see Sonja, who had opened up the floor for some high schoolers practicing for a state tournament.
“He said ‘I’ve given it a lot of thought,” she remembers, “‘and you have my permission to hire anyone you want.’
I said, ‘does that include Leon?’
‘Yes.’
I hired Leon and we were off and running.”
A Ruston Revelry
If Sonja Hogg was the sizzle, Leon Barmore was the steak.
A former Louisiana Tech Bulldog player with a brilliant mind for the game, Barmore was a fixture in Ruston already. For ten years, he had been the high school boys basketball coach and had helped the school launch their girls program right as Title IX passed in 1972. When he joined forces with Hogg on the Lady Techsters staff, his impact was felt immediately.
“They complemented each other,” says Angela. “She was out there going to people’s homes and meeting families and everything and he was the one that was the tactician on the court.”
Heading into the 1978-1979 season, the Lady Techsters roster was comprised almost entirely of student-athletes that grew up 100 miles or less from Louisiana Tech’s campus. And they proved pretty quickly that they were a special team. At a neutral site matchup in Columbus, Mississippi, LA Tech beat then top-ranked Tennessee 64-56, their first over a team ranked number one in the nation.
One month later, they beat No. 2 Stephen F. Austin — coached by Baton Rouge native Sue Gunter — in front of a then-record crowd in Ruston. Everyone was starting to wake up to the idea that the Lady Techsters program was on the rise.
“I don’t think I really knew how good we really were,” Kelly, who averaged nearly 19 and 10 a game off the bench, explains. “Every day we went to practice, we worked hard and then the coaches would give us the message that you’re only as good as you practice and that great teams were made in practice.”
That year, the Lady Techsters not only advanced past the AIAW Regional Tournament for the first time but also made their first run to the Final Four, beating Tennessee in the semifinal before falling to a Nancy Lieberman led Old Dominion team in the national championship.
But the groundwork had already been laid and, with Hogg and Barmore finding their groove as a tandem coaching staff, the Techsters rise to becoming a nationally prominent program had begun. And, best of all, it was a uniquely home grown group who were capturing the imagination of the rest of the state. LSU — the flagship school of Louisiana with a sports program that was a passion project of local politicians — was a dominant power in the immediate wake of Title IX but the coach that started the program, Jinks Coleman, left in 1979. She’d later cite a frustration with LSU officials over a lack of institutional support for the program as a reason for her departure.
Sonja Hogg had no such issue in Ruston.
“[President Taylor] said ‘we’re going to be a Title IX university not just because it’s the law but this is something we could do [successfully],” says Julie Wilkerson, who joined the program in 1980. “He really threw himself into and supported it.”
As the program grew into a success story on the court, so too did their prominence grow outside of the state of Louisiana. While the 1979 team was comprised almost entirely of homegrown players, the recruiting footprint started to expand heading into 1981. It began with neighboring states like Mississippi and Texas. But they were competing with established programs like Jody Conradt’s Longhorns and Van Chancellor’s upstart Ole Miss Rebels.
“Louisiana Tech just felt right to me,” Janice Lawrence, a Lucedale, Mississippi high school star, recalls.
Alongside the 6’3 Lawrence, Coach Hogg and Coach Barmore managed to convince a 5’4 point guard from Tickfaw, Louisiana to make a four and a half hour drive to come see Ruston.
“[To get to Ruston] we had to go through Mississippi to cross over back into Louisiana and I was in rolling hills,” says Kim Mulkey. “I never had seen anything like that and I kept asking ‘are we still in the same state?’ In South Louisiana, it was swamps and flatland.”
At Hammond High School, Mulkey led her team to four straight state titles and was recruited heavily by a number of schools. Growing up within an hour of New Orleans, she and Lawrence played on an AAU team, the New Orleans Dominoes, together as teenagers.
“I’ve known Kim since we were like 15 years old,” Janice says.
But when Mulkey arrived on campus, Barmore wasn’t completely sold. Here comes this freshman with a white corvette with the number 20 — her number — on the license plate arriving to the track for the first day of practices. It was tradition for Coach Hogg and Barmore to run the players to see what they had in terms of physical fitness. The first two laps were run without issue but on the back end of the third, Kim sat down on the track.
“I turned and told Ms. Hogg, ‘what we got here? She just quit, coach!’”,” Barmore remembers.
“I tell you what,” Hogg adds, “She was so humiliated and embarrassed that she couldn’t finish that mile. And Leon just looked at me and I shook my head because I really knew what was going on with her.”
What Barmore didn’t know at the time was that Mulkey had spent the summer in and out of the hospital getting four wisdom teeth removed.
“So I showed up as a freshman, certainly out of shape and overweight and had no idea how to prepare,” she recalls. “And being that you think you can still do it, I realized after one lap ‘I’m not doing this. I didn’t come here to run track.’”
“I just walked off the track and realized I was going to embarrass myself,” she continues, “and so I think it might have been two weeks later, we ran it again.”
“She finished second in the mile run,” Barmore says. “And the girl that beat her, the record might still stand. But I do know this. I found out we got a competitor.”
With Lawrence, Turner and Kelly forming the spine of Louisiana Tech’s starting five, Mulkey came off the bench with Debra Rodman and the run was on in Ruston.
President F. Jay Taylor’s vision of success for his Lady Techsters was already exceeding expectations and he made sure to treat them accordingly. Suddenly, money for trips to Madison Square Garden or Los Angeles for marquee matchups was pouring into Coach Hogg’s program.
“Dr. Taylor, honest to goodness, would go to the AIAW national conventions and he would visit and go in where we were voting and listen,” she remembers. “He was the only President that I ever knew of that ever did that. He was a very academic president but he saw what athletics could do for a university.”
The Lady Techsters were slowly becoming a marketing vehicle for the school as much as they were a nationally competitive basketball program. The Memorial Gym, which seated around 5,000 people, was at or near capacity almost every night and especially for the big time games.
It allowed Taylor to bring the AIAW National Tournament to Ruston for the rounds of 16 and 8 (now known as regionals in the NCAA) where the Memorial Gym was packed to the brim. Both games were a capacity crowd of 5,200 as the Lady Techsters defeated Jackson State and then UCLA to advance to the AIAW Final Four for the third year in a row.
They got to Eugene, Oregon and beat an upstart USC Trojans team led, at that point, by the legendary McGee twins: Pam and Paula. Once again, they had to face off against Tennessee in a game with major stakes. As much as the programs were rivals on the floor, Hogg and Barmore both had great relationships with Lady Vols head coach Pat Summitt.
In fact, when Tennessee would come to Ruston to play, Summitt would stay at Hogg’s house, even bringing the laundry of her players to wash it there in the early years of the AIAW.
But on the floor, their teams were as competitive as they could possible be. Behind the dominance of Lawrence and Kelly, the Lady Techsters cruised to a 79-59 win over the Lady Vols and brought home their first national title. President Taylor reacted as one would expect.
“When we won the national championship, he closed down the school,” says Janice. “We had a police escort from Shreveport, Louisiana all the way to Ruston. We had a pep rally. You’d have thought we were big time. President Taylor was our number one fan.”
Everyone in Ruston wanted a part of the Lady Techsters, so much so that they became a show unto themselves. Throughout the early period of women’s basketball, games were typically run as doubleheaders, with the women playing first so they would get a piece of the men’s audience that showed up early for the marquee game. In Ruston, the situation eventually reversed.
“We quit playing doubleheaders with the men because the men got really upset,” Mulkey remembers. “People would get out, get up and leave after our games.”
The show continued into the 1981-1982 season as the sport veered into the world of the NCAA. Earlier that summer, universities across the nation voted to join the organization, effectively ending the AIAW era of women’s basketball. While some schools like Texas and Rutgers decided to give it one last shot with their original governing body, teams like Louisiana Tech decided to make the jump and compete in the inaugural NCAA women’s basketball tournament.
“[President Taylor] had a lot to do with that,” Hogg explains. “Our philosophy was ‘we’re going to schedule the best teams in America, play the best teams in America and we were independent. As long as I was at Louisiana Tech, we were the Notre Dame, so to speak, of women’s basketball back then.”
That year, Kim Mulkey stepped into the starting point guard role and played floor general for a team that was loaded from top to bottom. They lost just one game that year, a three point defeat to Old Dominion in Norfolk. But they ended the year as one of the top teams in the nation, heading to the first ever NCAA Tournament in March of 1982.
They breezed through most of their bracket, dismantling Arizona State, Kentucky and once again defeating Tennessee to set up a historic national title game. Opposite the Lady Techsters was Cheyney State, a Philadelphia area HBCU coached by the soon-to-be legendary C. Vivian Stringer.
“I remember seeing Coach Stringer,” Janice remembers, “And for whatever reason, I don’t know, I was like ‘Oh, a black coach!’. They had great players but they were just another opponent at the time. I don’t think we knew the significance [of the game] of it being the first [NCAA title game] because they don’t ever say it.”
With Mulkey distributing, the Lady Techsters shot 56 percent from the field and cruised to their second straight national title. In the process, they made history as the first ever NCAA women’s basketball champion. Over the course of two years, Louisiana Tech was 69-1 in 70 games, sending off Angela Turner and Pam Kelly in style.
“We played [in Norfolk] and there were over 10,000 people at the game,” says Angela. “That may have been the most attended women’s basketball game at the time. I don’t know if that was something that was because of the NCAA or just women’s basketball gaining more eyeballs?”
In some ways, it was both. But there was at least one certainty: as the sport grew, Louisiana Tech was destined to grow along with it.
And for Leon Barmore, the longtime original goal of becoming the head coach of Bulldog men’s basketball was starting to fade away. President Taylor, in part, made sure of that.
“I applied for the Louisiana Tech job — the men’s — but we had just won two national championships,” he says, “and the President wouldn’t have anything to do with that.”
Taking Over the TAC
Heading into the 1982-1983 season, Louisiana Tech remained the team of the moment. On their campus, the Thomas Assembly Center — known commonly as ‘The TAC’ — opened and replaced the Memorial Gym. The Lady Techsters home opener against then #1 USC draw a record 8,700 fans. They would lose that matchup, 64-58, but it would be the last time they’d lose until April of that year. Entering the Tournament that March, the Lady Techsters blew out Auburn, then Texas and Old Dominion to return to the final.
What lied in the national championship game was one of the greatest collections of talent in the history of the NCAA women’s basketball tournament and perhaps the history of women’s college basketball in general. Louisiana Tech was led by Mulkey, Lawrence and the added firepower of Jennifer White, Lori Scott and Debbie Rodman. USC was still led by the McGee twins but now had three fabulous freshman to round out their starting five. Cheryl Miller was already a household name, Rhonda Windham was a distributor on the same level of Mulkey and Cynthia Cooper was a scoring machine.
It was a game of runs, with the Lady Techsters jumping out to a 37-26 halftime lead and the Women of Troy exploding to a 43 point second half to take a late 69-67 lead. With just 15 seconds left, Mulkey picked Kathy Doyle’s pocket, corralled the loose ball and sprinted down the floor. She went up to tie the game but the ball tapped the right side of the rim and fell short before rolling out of bounds. There was no foul, no touch by USC. The chance for a threepeat would fall just short and the Women of Troy would claim their first of two straight national titles.
After the 1984, most of the original core of Lady Techsters would go on to graduate. Mulkey, Kelly, Lawrence, Rodman, Wilkerson, and others all finished out their careers with national titles and plenty of individual accolades. But Hogg sensed a new direction on the horizon for herself as well.
“I was going through a divorce and I just wanted a change of scenery,” she explains. “I’d been there so many years and gone to school there and [my ex-husband] lived there and I just wanted a change.”
After the 1984-1985 season, in which Louisiana Tech was eliminated before the Final Four for the first time in five years, Hogg handed the keys to Leon Barmore.
“‘It’s your ship’,” she jokes. “‘Whether you want it or not’.”
“Ten years of trying to maintain the thing was what was so hard,” Barmore says of Hogg, “And that’s what I was proud of. Sonja had just worked herself to death.”
Now that he was a head coach, Barmore had to build a staff. His first move was to keep their key assistant, a young man named Gary Blair, who had achieved incredible success as a high school coach at South Oak Cliff High School in Texas where he coached future Lady Techster Debra Rodman. Blair had been on staff since 1980 and was a part of both national title runs.
But he needed one more and, as it so happened, there was a great candidate still on campus.
“I was working on my MBA and just finished the 1984 Olympics,” Mulkey recalls. “So I’m sitting in class and towards the end, campus security came to the door and told me that the President wanted to see me and so I’m thinking that something bad has happened to my family. I get up there and he tells me, ‘Sonja Hogg is retiring and Leon Barmore is going to take over. But before I give him the job, I want you to be on his staff.”
Mulkey was flummoxed.
“I said, ‘No, it doesn’t work like that. Dr. Taylor, I know you mean well but I’m done,” she continues. “I’ve done everything I want to do in basketball. I’m going to go and be a CEO of a Fortune 500 company and fly all over the world. And he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
She thought to herself that she’d coach for a year while she finished her Master’s in Ruston and then continue with her career.
40 years later, Kim Mulkey has still yet to finish obtaining that graduate degree.
Legacy of the Lady Techsters
With Barmore, Blair and Mulkey comprising the next staff, the Lady Techsters reloaded their roster. They began with an energetic, defensive-minded guard named Teresa Weatherspoon and committed to recruiting elite frontcourt players in the mold of Pam Kelly and Janice Lawrence. They started with Tori Harrison and then Venus Lacy.
Their dominance continued through the 1980’s where they stood toe-to-toe with the up and coming major universities of the time. All around them, the SEC was starting to invest heavily into their programs. Auburn had Joe Ciampi, Georgia had Andy Landers, Ole Miss had Van Chancellor and Tennessee had Pat Summitt. But Louisiana Tech had more than Leon Barmore. President F. Jay Taylor continued to be the Lady Techsters’ number one fan, booster and advocate.
They had made history as the first NCAA women’s basketball national champion but they, like Old Dominion, were determined to not fall into the same historical background that Immaculata or Delta State had. They were here to stay and throughout the 80’s and 90’s, the Lady Techsters persisted at the top of the game.
It’s why the legacy of Louisiana Tech remains such a hallowed cornerstone of women’s basketball and why the next generation of stars in Ruston knew their mandate when they walked into the TAC: Above all, it was to continue the reign of a dynasty in the rolling hills of Northern Louisiana.