Reflecting on the triumphs, tragedies at Iowa State

Iowa State head coach Invoice Fennelly watches his staff apply in preparation for the 2009 NCAA girls’s basketball event in Bowling Inexperienced, Ky. (Related Press)

Editor’s notice: That is the primary half in a collection counting down the highest 10 moments in Iowa State Cyclones girls’s athletics historical past within the days main as much as the fiftieth anniversary of Title IX on June 23.

It’s one in all Invoice Fennelly’s most time-worn tales and it hinges on a comparatively small quantity printed on a single sheet of paper. That quantity, 310, denotes the overall attendance for his first sport as Iowa State’s girls’s basketball coach in 1995. He framed that field rating — and now his program persistently ranks among the many high 11 nationally when it comes to fan assist.

“Thus far, so good,” Fennelly stated about final season, throughout which he guided the Cyclones to a program-record 28 wins and their first Candy 16 look in 12 years.

These easy phrases aptly describe Fennelly’s 27 seasons in Ames — and are the primary motive his hiring to steer this system kicks off this Title IX-framed countdown of noteworthy moments in Iowa State girls’s sports activities historical past

The Cyclones attracted a mean of 9,567 followers to Hilton Coliseum for house video games final season, which ranked second nationally.

• However on to No. 9 — and one other monumental hiring at ISU. The date: Dec. 17, 2005. The choice: Tabbing Christy Johnson-Lynch to steer the Cyclones’ girls’s volleyball program.

ISU has received 330 matches since she turned head coach and have reached the NCAA Regional Finals twice in her tenure.

“I believe we’ve proven on our good nights, once we’ve actually performed effectively, I believe we are able to hold with anyone,” Johnson-Lynch stated final season, by which ISU reached the NCAA Match for the 14th time in 17 seasons.

Basketball and volleyball aren’t the one sports activities ISU girls’s athletes have excelled in over the 50 years since Title IX handed.

And to be clear: Not one of the moments featured on this story or subsequent choices within the coming days are ranked so as of magnitude.

• So on to No. 8: Nawal El Moutawakel’s groundbreaking Gold medal win within the 1984 Olympics. The previous Cyclone standout received the primary girls’s 400-meter hurdles crown in Los Angeles, changing into the primary Muslim girl to take action.

However landmark triumphs additionally share area with heart-wrenching tragedies in ISU girls’s athletics — as the 2 entries that observe attest:

• On Sept. 17, 2018, standout golfer Celia Barquin Arozamena was murdered on an Ames golf course. The Massive 12 champion from Spain had already been honored because the Cyclones’ feminine athlete of the 12 months — and her mindless dying led to devastating grief within the ISU group and past.

“(She) most likely embraced being a Cyclone extra than simply about anyone we’ve ever had,” a tearful ISU director of athletics Jamie Pollard stated. “How we reply as a group to what has transpired will most likely dictate how we keep in mind her legacy.”

• ISU needed to endure a special sort of tragedy 33 years earlier, when a airplane carrying members of the ladies’s cross-country staff crashed in 1985. The Cyclones had simply completed second within the NCAA championships. Head coach Ron Renko, assistant coach Pat Moynihan, staff members Sue Baxter, Sheryl Maahs, and Julie Rose, in addition to pupil coach Stephanie Streit and pilot Burton Watkins all died within the crash — and a memorial of their honor has been erected in Des Moines.

“It’s a horrible loss for our college and the households,” former assistant males’s monitor coach Ron McEachran informed the Related Press on the time.

However the group got here collectively because it mourned. ISU girls’s cross nation and monitor continued to excel, and in 2012-13 one in all a number of standouts lately raced to the highest of the rostrum.

Iowa State’s Betsy Saina (proper), with teammate Lisa Koll, on the Massive 12 indoor monitor championships, was the Cyclones’ 2013 Feminine Athlete of the Yr. (ISU Sports activities Info)

• So right here’s No. 5: Betsy Saina and her three nationwide championships. The previous Cyclone received an NCAA cross-country title and monitor championships within the 5,000 and 10,000 meters throughout a stellar ending run at ISU that sparked knowledgeable profession. Saina was an 11-time All-American.

“It’s been a fantastic 4 years at Iowa State collectively,” Saina informed The Gazette as her school profession was winding down.

And it’s been a memorable 50 years since Title IX got here into existence. Triumphs, as famous, coincide with tragedies, however all are worthy of remembrance and reflection as an historic milestone in girls’s athletics swings into full view.

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