On Monday afternoon, Shocker volleyball coach Chris Lamb explains back-spin and top-spin to a group of 60 young women during a serving drill at camp. Across campus, work continues on locker rooms and offices at Wilkins Stadium, soon to be connected to an indoor practice facility, opened last fall, that allows the Shockers to work on softball skills year-round.
Those scenes have their roots in car rides to play days, T-shirts purchased at the campus bookstore and fights for meal money. Natasha (Matson) Fife, a teacher in WSU’s physical education department, helped start the movement for women’s college sports in the late 1960’s. She lived to see those efforts pay off with Charles Koch Arena packed for women’s sports and success and attention unimaginable in the early days.
Fife, 89, passed away July 3. In addition to her pioneering role at WSU, she was one of Kansas’ greatest golfers, winner of five Kansas Women’s Amateurs and a competing in four U.S. Women’s Amateurs. She was inducted in the Pizza Hut Shocker Sports Hall of Fame in 2018.