Photo by: WVU Athletic Communications
March Memories: Kosiorek and 1992 Mountaineers Left Their Legacy on Women’s Sports At WVU
April 03, 2020 09:22 AM | Women's Basketball, Blog
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Mitch Vingle thought the best way to get to the WVU Coliseum to cover West Virginia's 1992 NCAA Tournament women's basketball game against Clemson was by going through Westover and looping around Interstate 79.
Vingle, then sports editor of the Dominion-Post, figured there might be a few more people than normal attending Morgantown's first-ever NCAA Tournament women's event, so instead of sitting in traffic for an extra five or 10 minutes on Mon Boulevard, he would just zip around to the interstate to get to the game.
What he ended up encountering was a long line of cars backed up beyond the Star City exit waiting to get into town to see the Mountaineer women play.
That bears repeating – the Mountaineer women!
West Virginia's wonderful All-America guard Rosemary Kosiorek, the first etching on WVU women's basketball's Mount Rushmore, recalled playing before mostly empty blue seats at the WVU Coliseum during the majority of her college career in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
"We might get 500, or maybe a little bit more if the men were playing after us, but for the most part, that was it for a women's game," Kosoriek, now Rosemary Meyer, recalled from her home in Bel Air, Maryland, earlier this week.
In the more than 35 years that I've been following West Virginia University sports, Rosemary Kosiorek was as competitive as any athlete I've ever watched, and that includes some of the very best ever … Rich Braham, Grant Wiley, Pacman Jones, Pat White, Steve Slaton, Dan Mozes, Tavon Austin, Mike Gansey, Da'Sean Butler, Jevon Carter … you name 'em.
Wrestling's Greg Jones is probably the most accomplished athlete WVU has produced in the last 50 years – perhaps ever – and Rosemary was right with Greg in terms of competitiveness.
She would knock down her grandmother to get to a loose basketball, and she had the bruises to prove it!
I once saw her walk into the media room to do an post-game interview and this very small woman, barely 5-feet-5 inches tall standing on her tip-toes, was covered from head to toe with bruises, each one of them earned just like a helmet sticker to a football player.
Rosemary was a terrific jump shooter with a quick pullup, similar to Tynice Martin's on the women's team today; she had range and was also fearless going to the basket against players twice her size.
You watch a lot of male college players these days going to the rim and you can clearly see their eyes looking at the player with whom they are about to make contact instead of concentrating on the basket.
Not Rosemary. She plowed right into defenders like Evel Kneivel, her eyes ALWAYS locked on one thing – the rim. It's hard to make a shot when you're not looking at the basket. That's how you score 2,061 career points and average 24.3 points per game in one season.
She was also masterful at setting up opposing guards by using her quickness to force them to the sideline where she would pounce and deflect the ball whenever there was a small crack of daylight.
In the snap of a finger, she had the basketball in her hands going in the other direction for a layup. I can't tell you how many thefts like this she had during her career, but it's easily worth 5- to 10-years at Alderson.
Yet for the most part, nobody outside of the small collection of women's basketball supporters and a handful of others watched Rosemary play.
The games weren't on television. Radio coverage was relegated to a few broadcasts carried locally on commercial radio and the student radio station's weak signal couldn't even reach Cheat Lake.
But during her senior season in 1992, gradually, as the team won game after game and gained momentum, more people began coming out to the WVU Coliseum to see these Mountaineers.
The Mountaineers had a couple of eye-opening early season wins over Florida and Indiana and just missed knocking off nationally ranked Western Kentucky a week before Christmas.
Then, a winning streak that began with a victory over Pitt swelled to 22 games by the end of the regular season, including key wins over nationally ranked George Washington and Rutgers.
The GW wins were important because Joe McCuen, today coaching at Northwestern, had a system based on precision and intelligence that always gave West Virginia fits. Rutgers had far better athletes than West Virginia and the Scarlet Knights usually beat the Mountaineers by running past or jumping over them.
And when Penn State was still in the league, the Nittany Lions were a combination of the two.
Rosemary remembers absorbing the worst beating of her college career at Rec Hall during her sophomore season in 1990.
West Virginia had a co-head coaching arrangement where Kittie Blakemore was considered the CEO of the program, much like you see in football today with Ed Orgeron at LSU, while Scott Harrelson handled the strategy and game planning.
In that Penn State beat-down, the Nittany Lions students began chanting for Harrelson to sit down and let Kittie do the coaching! Rosemary doesn't recall hearing that, but she does remember one of the referees refusing to throw Harrelson out of the game.
"I was on the court and I could hear one of the refs tell him, 'I'd really like to throw you out of this game, but I think making you sit through this is far more enjoyable to me,'" she laughed.
"And, yes, those fans were r-e-l-e-n-t-l-e-s-s," she added.
It wasn't until Rosemary's junior year in 1991 when West Virginia finally snapped its long losing streak to Rutgers, spanning 18 games and 11 years, and the Mountaineers also collected a pair of big wins over the Lady Knights during her senior season.
The 23-point victory over Rutgers at the WVU Coliseum to conclude the '92 regular season came in front of 2,597 – at the time one of the biggest non-double header crowds in school history.
The triumph capped a perfect regular season in Atlantic 10 play for West Virginia and helped it rise to No. 11 in the national rankings. Incidentally, the Mountaineers' history in the women's basketball top 25 then spanned just a month and a half, dating back to their first appearance earlier that year in late January.
Soon, people throughout the state were reading in the newspapers about this great little West Virginia point guard named Rosemary Kosiorek and a WVU women's basketball team that hadn't lost a single game in 2 ½ months.
While reading about the eventual Frances Pomeroy Naismith National Player of the Year, West Virginians also began learning that it wasn't a one-person show, either.
Huntington's Donna Abbott was every bit as tough as Rosemary, and just like Rosemary, Donna learned how to play the game out on the blacktop with the neighborhood boys.
Martinsburg's Jocelyn Braham, who years later tragically died as a result of a domestic violence incident, was an accurate outside shooter who always made teams pay whenever they tried to double-team Kosiorek.
Parkersburg's Lori Wilson was a terrific role player who could set screens, pass, rebound and defend. Circleville's Christy Cooper, once a prolific high school scorer, came off the bench to score points, as did local prep stars Lori Quertinmont and Jodie Runner, as well as Bellaire, Ohio's Debbie Blazek.
Tricia Fore and Chris McGuire gave the team length it sorely lacked.
And Ann Murray, Anna Tillman and Selese Neal were also very important players who provided athleticism and additional toughness to the team.
Every single one of them understood her role and embraced it.
"We didn't have blue-chip recruits during that period," Rosemary recalled. "We didn't have Top 300 ESPN athletes; we were very good high school players, and we outworked everyone. We came together under good coaching and good team camaraderie."
An Atlantic 10 Tournament championship would have given West Virginia 28 regular season victories and likely a 3- or 2-seed in the NCAA Tournament.
That would have meant avoiding No. 1 seeds Virginia, Stanford, Iowa or Tennessee until later in the tournament, which could have equated into an Elite Eight or Final Four run.
But West Virginia lost its opening round A-10 Tournament game to seven-win Duquesne, whose best player was Darcie Vincent from nearby Fairmont, West Virginia.
"It was terrible," Rosemary recalled, the frustration still evident 28 years later. "That speaks to taking teams lightly and not being prepared for your opponent. It obviously taught us a lesson."
What it didn't do was deter the growing interest and enthusiasm the state had for the team.
When it was announced that West Virginia was seeded fourth in the NCAA Tournament and would be hosting a second-round game against either Clemson or Tennessee-Chattanooga, Mountaineer fans got on their telephones and began ordering tickets.
Initially, West Virginia was hopeful of selling out the lower ring of the 14,000-seat WVU Coliseum, but that soon changed when it was learned that Clemson was going to be the Mountaineers' opponent.
Fans were still filing into the arena when the game tipped off.
When it was over, after Jodie Runner's 14-footer with 11 seconds left gave West Virginia a thrilling 73-72 victory, many of the 8,185 who attended the game came out of their seats to celebrate with the players on the court.
It was a remarkable scene, especially to the WVU women's coaches and administrators who had worked so hard for years to be taken seriously.
An old story used to circulate in the Coliseum about the time volleyball coach Veronica Hammersmith predicted that a women's team would one day fill the Coliseum, giving many of the older male coaches a hearty laugh.
When it finally happened in 1992, there were a lot of women beaming with pride – and rightfully so. It was a watershed moment for women's sports at West Virginia University, and on a much bigger level, the state of West Virginia.
Who knows how many young girls in West Virginia picked up a basketball, a volleyball or a soccer ball for the first time after that game or how many of those girls later earned an athletic scholarship and then received a fantastic West Virginia University degree?
Some of them are today our doctors, nurses, first responders and medical specialists out on the front lines taking care of us like Dr. Rebecca Burbridge, a former WVU women's basketball player who is now an associate professor of medicine at Duke.
There are undoubtedly more.
Since 1992, there have been bigger crowds at the WVU Coliseum and West Virginia has enjoyed much greater sustained success under Mike Carey, but that 1992 team was the one that changed people's opinions about the potential of women's sports in West Virginia.
And it was done with players overlooked by all of the bigger schools, including its best player, who also happened to be the littlest one on the floor.
"That was a very, very special year for the coaches, the players and the community," Rosemary recalled. "I can remember months after that people on the street recognizing us … kids that we interacted with if we did school programs with them. There was an impact, but not just for basketball.
"It had a greater impact on women's sports in the state in general."
It certainly did.
Today, Rosemary and her college sweetheart and now husband, Doug Meyer, have two children, daughter Annika, a sophomore lacrosse player at Johns Hopkins, and son Harrison, a seventh grader at St. Margaret School.
She sometimes talks to her daughter and son about her playing career, but mostly it's in the context of what they need to do to become better athletes.
The game Rosemary usually brings up is the Duquesne loss, not the 22 straight games they won her senior year nor that great Clemson victory at the Coliseum.
"(The Duquesne loss) has lived with me just as much as the Clemson game or the number of wins we had that year," she admitted. "Forever, I tell my daughter that story when she asks me about my playing days. That's the one game I always talk about because it was terrible. We should never have been in that position."
By the way, did I mention that Rosemary was competitive?
Our final Mountaineer March Memories feature next Friday will profile West Virginia's 2010 NCAA East Regional victory over No. 1 seed Kentucky in Syracuse, New York.
Vingle, then sports editor of the Dominion-Post, figured there might be a few more people than normal attending Morgantown's first-ever NCAA Tournament women's event, so instead of sitting in traffic for an extra five or 10 minutes on Mon Boulevard, he would just zip around to the interstate to get to the game.
What he ended up encountering was a long line of cars backed up beyond the Star City exit waiting to get into town to see the Mountaineer women play.
That bears repeating – the Mountaineer women!
West Virginia's wonderful All-America guard Rosemary Kosiorek, the first etching on WVU women's basketball's Mount Rushmore, recalled playing before mostly empty blue seats at the WVU Coliseum during the majority of her college career in the late 1980s and early 1990s."We might get 500, or maybe a little bit more if the men were playing after us, but for the most part, that was it for a women's game," Kosoriek, now Rosemary Meyer, recalled from her home in Bel Air, Maryland, earlier this week.
In the more than 35 years that I've been following West Virginia University sports, Rosemary Kosiorek was as competitive as any athlete I've ever watched, and that includes some of the very best ever … Rich Braham, Grant Wiley, Pacman Jones, Pat White, Steve Slaton, Dan Mozes, Tavon Austin, Mike Gansey, Da'Sean Butler, Jevon Carter … you name 'em.
Wrestling's Greg Jones is probably the most accomplished athlete WVU has produced in the last 50 years – perhaps ever – and Rosemary was right with Greg in terms of competitiveness.
She would knock down her grandmother to get to a loose basketball, and she had the bruises to prove it!
I once saw her walk into the media room to do an post-game interview and this very small woman, barely 5-feet-5 inches tall standing on her tip-toes, was covered from head to toe with bruises, each one of them earned just like a helmet sticker to a football player.
Rosemary was a terrific jump shooter with a quick pullup, similar to Tynice Martin's on the women's team today; she had range and was also fearless going to the basket against players twice her size.
You watch a lot of male college players these days going to the rim and you can clearly see their eyes looking at the player with whom they are about to make contact instead of concentrating on the basket.
Not Rosemary. She plowed right into defenders like Evel Kneivel, her eyes ALWAYS locked on one thing – the rim. It's hard to make a shot when you're not looking at the basket. That's how you score 2,061 career points and average 24.3 points per game in one season.
She was also masterful at setting up opposing guards by using her quickness to force them to the sideline where she would pounce and deflect the ball whenever there was a small crack of daylight.
In the snap of a finger, she had the basketball in her hands going in the other direction for a layup. I can't tell you how many thefts like this she had during her career, but it's easily worth 5- to 10-years at Alderson.
Yet for the most part, nobody outside of the small collection of women's basketball supporters and a handful of others watched Rosemary play.
The games weren't on television. Radio coverage was relegated to a few broadcasts carried locally on commercial radio and the student radio station's weak signal couldn't even reach Cheat Lake.
But during her senior season in 1992, gradually, as the team won game after game and gained momentum, more people began coming out to the WVU Coliseum to see these Mountaineers.
The Mountaineers had a couple of eye-opening early season wins over Florida and Indiana and just missed knocking off nationally ranked Western Kentucky a week before Christmas.
Then, a winning streak that began with a victory over Pitt swelled to 22 games by the end of the regular season, including key wins over nationally ranked George Washington and Rutgers.
The GW wins were important because Joe McCuen, today coaching at Northwestern, had a system based on precision and intelligence that always gave West Virginia fits. Rutgers had far better athletes than West Virginia and the Scarlet Knights usually beat the Mountaineers by running past or jumping over them.
And when Penn State was still in the league, the Nittany Lions were a combination of the two.
Rosemary remembers absorbing the worst beating of her college career at Rec Hall during her sophomore season in 1990.
West Virginia had a co-head coaching arrangement where Kittie Blakemore was considered the CEO of the program, much like you see in football today with Ed Orgeron at LSU, while Scott Harrelson handled the strategy and game planning.
In that Penn State beat-down, the Nittany Lions students began chanting for Harrelson to sit down and let Kittie do the coaching! Rosemary doesn't recall hearing that, but she does remember one of the referees refusing to throw Harrelson out of the game.
"I was on the court and I could hear one of the refs tell him, 'I'd really like to throw you out of this game, but I think making you sit through this is far more enjoyable to me,'" she laughed.
"And, yes, those fans were r-e-l-e-n-t-l-e-s-s," she added.
It wasn't until Rosemary's junior year in 1991 when West Virginia finally snapped its long losing streak to Rutgers, spanning 18 games and 11 years, and the Mountaineers also collected a pair of big wins over the Lady Knights during her senior season.
The 23-point victory over Rutgers at the WVU Coliseum to conclude the '92 regular season came in front of 2,597 – at the time one of the biggest non-double header crowds in school history.
The triumph capped a perfect regular season in Atlantic 10 play for West Virginia and helped it rise to No. 11 in the national rankings. Incidentally, the Mountaineers' history in the women's basketball top 25 then spanned just a month and a half, dating back to their first appearance earlier that year in late January.
Soon, people throughout the state were reading in the newspapers about this great little West Virginia point guard named Rosemary Kosiorek and a WVU women's basketball team that hadn't lost a single game in 2 ½ months.
While reading about the eventual Frances Pomeroy Naismith National Player of the Year, West Virginians also began learning that it wasn't a one-person show, either.Huntington's Donna Abbott was every bit as tough as Rosemary, and just like Rosemary, Donna learned how to play the game out on the blacktop with the neighborhood boys.
Martinsburg's Jocelyn Braham, who years later tragically died as a result of a domestic violence incident, was an accurate outside shooter who always made teams pay whenever they tried to double-team Kosiorek.
Parkersburg's Lori Wilson was a terrific role player who could set screens, pass, rebound and defend. Circleville's Christy Cooper, once a prolific high school scorer, came off the bench to score points, as did local prep stars Lori Quertinmont and Jodie Runner, as well as Bellaire, Ohio's Debbie Blazek.
Tricia Fore and Chris McGuire gave the team length it sorely lacked.
And Ann Murray, Anna Tillman and Selese Neal were also very important players who provided athleticism and additional toughness to the team.
Every single one of them understood her role and embraced it.
"We didn't have blue-chip recruits during that period," Rosemary recalled. "We didn't have Top 300 ESPN athletes; we were very good high school players, and we outworked everyone. We came together under good coaching and good team camaraderie."
An Atlantic 10 Tournament championship would have given West Virginia 28 regular season victories and likely a 3- or 2-seed in the NCAA Tournament.
That would have meant avoiding No. 1 seeds Virginia, Stanford, Iowa or Tennessee until later in the tournament, which could have equated into an Elite Eight or Final Four run.
But West Virginia lost its opening round A-10 Tournament game to seven-win Duquesne, whose best player was Darcie Vincent from nearby Fairmont, West Virginia.
"It was terrible," Rosemary recalled, the frustration still evident 28 years later. "That speaks to taking teams lightly and not being prepared for your opponent. It obviously taught us a lesson."
What it didn't do was deter the growing interest and enthusiasm the state had for the team.
When it was announced that West Virginia was seeded fourth in the NCAA Tournament and would be hosting a second-round game against either Clemson or Tennessee-Chattanooga, Mountaineer fans got on their telephones and began ordering tickets.
Initially, West Virginia was hopeful of selling out the lower ring of the 14,000-seat WVU Coliseum, but that soon changed when it was learned that Clemson was going to be the Mountaineers' opponent.
Fans were still filing into the arena when the game tipped off.
When it was over, after Jodie Runner's 14-footer with 11 seconds left gave West Virginia a thrilling 73-72 victory, many of the 8,185 who attended the game came out of their seats to celebrate with the players on the court.
It was a remarkable scene, especially to the WVU women's coaches and administrators who had worked so hard for years to be taken seriously.
An old story used to circulate in the Coliseum about the time volleyball coach Veronica Hammersmith predicted that a women's team would one day fill the Coliseum, giving many of the older male coaches a hearty laugh.
When it finally happened in 1992, there were a lot of women beaming with pride – and rightfully so. It was a watershed moment for women's sports at West Virginia University, and on a much bigger level, the state of West Virginia.
Who knows how many young girls in West Virginia picked up a basketball, a volleyball or a soccer ball for the first time after that game or how many of those girls later earned an athletic scholarship and then received a fantastic West Virginia University degree?
Some of them are today our doctors, nurses, first responders and medical specialists out on the front lines taking care of us like Dr. Rebecca Burbridge, a former WVU women's basketball player who is now an associate professor of medicine at Duke.
There are undoubtedly more.
Since 1992, there have been bigger crowds at the WVU Coliseum and West Virginia has enjoyed much greater sustained success under Mike Carey, but that 1992 team was the one that changed people's opinions about the potential of women's sports in West Virginia.
And it was done with players overlooked by all of the bigger schools, including its best player, who also happened to be the littlest one on the floor.
"That was a very, very special year for the coaches, the players and the community," Rosemary recalled. "I can remember months after that people on the street recognizing us … kids that we interacted with if we did school programs with them. There was an impact, but not just for basketball.
"It had a greater impact on women's sports in the state in general."
It certainly did.
Today, Rosemary and her college sweetheart and now husband, Doug Meyer, have two children, daughter Annika, a sophomore lacrosse player at Johns Hopkins, and son Harrison, a seventh grader at St. Margaret School.She sometimes talks to her daughter and son about her playing career, but mostly it's in the context of what they need to do to become better athletes.
The game Rosemary usually brings up is the Duquesne loss, not the 22 straight games they won her senior year nor that great Clemson victory at the Coliseum.
"(The Duquesne loss) has lived with me just as much as the Clemson game or the number of wins we had that year," she admitted. "Forever, I tell my daughter that story when she asks me about my playing days. That's the one game I always talk about because it was terrible. We should never have been in that position."
By the way, did I mention that Rosemary was competitive?
Our final Mountaineer March Memories feature next Friday will profile West Virginia's 2010 NCAA East Regional victory over No. 1 seed Kentucky in Syracuse, New York.
Players Mentioned
G
/ Women's BasketballTV Highlights: WVU 74, UCF 67
Sunday, February 15
Ross Hodge | UCF Postgame
Sunday, February 15
United Bank Playbook: UCF Preview
Friday, February 13
Ross Hodge | UCF Preview
Thursday, February 12
