Tennessee Lady Vols basketball players these days get their names in lights, as the sport in recent decades has become high profile.
When Gloria Scott Deathridge played, however, she had to find out about team tryouts from a flyer on a telephone pole on campus. But that turned into its own guiding light for both her and the program.
She got to be not only a pioneering women’s basketball player at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in those pre-Pat Summitt days of the early 1970s, but she is also credited as the first Black women’s varsity basketball player at Tennessee.
But, as she remembered that time as the Shopper News concludes its two-part series on the early history of Lady Vols basketball, it all came about almost accidentally.
“We didn’t have [basketball] scholarships, and I came to UT on an academic scholarship,” she said. “And I didn’t know they had a basketball program when I got here. I thought my basketball-playing days were over.”
She had played on the 1970 state championship team of legendary coach Jim Smiddy at Bradley Central High in Cleveland, so that note on the pole naturally caught her attention.
Deathridge, in turn, would quickly catch the attention of the coaches. She went to what is now the Alumni Memorial Building when it was still a gymnasium and saw a player she knew who told then-coach Margaret Hutson she would be an asset to the team. As a result, she was noticed among the roughly 30 other players trying out and going through basketball drills.
“I tried out and they told me I had made the team,” said Deathridge, who is also a former Knox County Board of Education member. “That’s how I got started.”
A new experience for player and coach
And she had fun, too. That was in part because it was a new kind of basketball for her after playing only defense in the antiquated style of Tennessee high school girls’ basketball then, in which each player stayed on only one side of the half-court line. “I was excited to be able to play both sides,” she said with a laugh. “It was exciting.”
Somewhat surprisingly, the experience was also a little new for coach Hutson, who was kind of thrust into coaching the women’s basketball program as part of her UT physical education graduate degree work.
“Margaret Hutson was not a basketball player. She had never played a day in her life,” said Deathridge. “She made money as a graduate assistant and was asked to take on the basketball coaching. She learned from her players. And she read a lot of books about basketball.”
Coach Hutson had ...