Slippery Rock University Athletics

C. Vivian Stringer (1970) was a standout basketball and field hockey athlete during her time at The Rock.
 
Stringer spent 50 years as a collegiate head women's basketball coach, where she amassed 1,055 wins, four NCAA Final Four appearances and 28 berths in the NCAA Tournament. She was inducted to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2009 and the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 2001.
 
Stringer served as head coach at Rutgers University from 1995 to 2022, the longest tenured Rutgers coach at the time of her retirement. During that span, she won 535 games with the Scarlet Knights while qualifying for 17 NCAA Tournaments, including 10 consecutively from 2003 to 2012. Stringer led Rutgers to a pair of Final Four appearances in 2000 and 2007, with the latter culminating in RU's first NCAA Championship Game. In 2000, she became the first men's or women's basketball coach to guide three different intercollegiate programs to the Final Four after playing in the first NCAA Championship Game with former PSAC member Cheyney State in 1992 and leading Iowa to the national semifinals in 1993.
 
Stringer's historic impact was evident at every stop of her career. She turned limited resources and pre-Title IX challenges at a small, historically Black school at Cheyney State into a run at the national title. She turned a seven-win Iowa program that ranked 299th out of 302 teams in attendance figures into a perennial contender that posted its first-ever advance sellout of Carver-Hawkeye Arena. Within three seasons at Rutgers, the Scarlet Knights won 20 games and won a Big East division title. Within five years, RU rose to national prominence as the women's game exploded in popularity across the United States.
 
Stringer surpassed the monumental 1,000-career victory milestone in November 2018. She became the fifth NCAA Division I women's basketball coach to reach 1,000 career wins and was the first African American coach to reach the milestone. She retired ranked fifth all-time in NCAA women's basketball history with 1,055 career victories. In 2019-20, Stringer passed the late, great Pat Summitt and became the NCAA record holder with 37 seasons of 20 or more victories. Following that season, she received the John R. Wooden Award "Legends of Coaching" honor based on character, success on the court, graduation rate of student-athletes in their basketball program, coaching philosophy, and identification with the goals of the John R. Wooden Award.
 
In March 2021, Stringer was honored in the Sports Business Journal as a Leader in Diversity and Inclusive Hiring. Stringer also recruited, developed, and coached 21 student-athletes who would be selected in the WNBA Draft, along with others who played professionally overseas.
 
She was an assistant coach for the gold-medal 2004 U.S. Olympic Team. Stringer was one of the key players in the development of the Women's Basketball Coaches Association. She served on the Board of Directors of the Kay Yow/WBCA Cancer Fund. The Foundation, in partnership with the V Foundation for Cancer Research, is an initiative to fight breast cancer.
 
The basketball court at Rutgers was renamed in her honor when she retired in 2022.