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 Returning home Woodard retires, joins Kansas coaching staff
Posted: Thursday May 27, 1999 03:27 PM
LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) -- Lynette Woodard had no regrets as she easily put a career as player behind her after accomplishing just about everything possible in women's basketball. A pioneer in professional women's basketball, Woodard will never reap the financial benefits that she sees coming in the sport. But returning to the University of Kansas, her alma mater, to begin a coaching career as an assistant to longtime coach Marian Washington is all that she could want. "The benefits I've reaped, I wouldn't trade for anything," Woodard said Wednesday at a news conference as she jointly announced her retirement as a player and accepted the assistant coaching job at Kansas. "If the call would have come from another team, I would have had to say no. I'm going to turn a page. If I hadn't taken this opportunity now, the job would have been filled by someone else." Woodard scored 3,649 points during her career at Kansas and was named the Big Eight player of the decade for the 1980s. She was captain of the 1984 Olympic team that won the gold medal and became the first woman to play with the Harlem Globetrotters. Her professional career took her to Japan and Italy before she was an elite draft pick of the Cleveland Rockers in the WNBA in 1997. She decided her playing career was over after the 1998 season with the Detroit Shock. "I'm like the prodigal daughter," said Woodard, who couldn't help smiling during a news conference on campus Wednesday. "I always had too much of a player in me. I didn't think I had the maturity to come to this field of coaching. But I didn't want to miss this opportunity. "She is the dean, the doctor, the boss, the coach," Woodard said of Washington, who just completed her 26th season as coach of the Jayhawks. Woodard, a Wichita native who played at Kansas from 1977-81, said she thought she had learned enough from watching her own coaches to pass along her knowledge of the game. "I can bring my energy, my time, my effort," she said. "I was on a team in Italy where they didn't know anything about the game and no one had any real talent. But each one did one thing well. I watched that coach put it all together. "Coach Washington never asked her players to do anything she wouldn't do. But they will know that they will run, because I have run." Woodard said she considered her announcement Wednesday a celebration of a new career rather than the end of an old one. And she hopes her new path eventually will lead to a head coaching job. "God blessed me with a talent," she said. "It's been my life. Thank God the opportunities were there at the right time. You prepare, you worked hard at it, you practice. You shoot your best shot."
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