MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – The mother of West Virginia University women’s sports has died. Kittie J. Blakemore, “Miss Kittie” as she was known to thousands of students during her 36-year tenure at West Virginia University, died this morning in her native Manassas, Virginia, following months of declining health.

Blakemore and Dr. Wincie Ann Carruth, chair of the women’s physical education department, were responsible for getting women’s sports off the ground at WVU when the Title IX provision of the Educational Amendments Act became law in 1972.

This law required West Virginia University and other public educational institutions that received federal money for research and scholarships to become compliant with the Title IX provision in order to continue receiving federal funding.

At the time, West Virginia University’s two biggest issues were how to add women’s sports and more importantly, how to pay for them?

Blakemore and Carruth were the ones with the answers.

“We knew (Title IX) was going into law, and we were ready for it,” Blakemore recalled in 2013. “At the time, the decision makers at the University saw the handwriting on the wall. You have a big land-grant institution that is going to lose a lot of federal money if they don’t go with this. With all of those kinds of things in your corner, you can go after the possibility of starting this.”

In early August 1972, West Virginia University athletic director Leland Byrd, on the job for just one week, walked into his office and was greeted with a telephone message from Blakemore requesting a meeting.

What Blakemore and Carruth had planned for Byrd was more like an ambush than a meeting, if that was possible for two women as sweet and kind as Blakemore and Carruth. But underneath all of that sweetness and kindness was a steel bar. 

And the Educational Amendments Act had exposed it.

Blakemore had methodically collected financial data from other institutions when she was asked in 1969 to help author the constitution for the women’s portion of the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, and her cabinets were full of bulging files stuffed with memos, hand-written letters from women’s student organizations, carbon copies of proposed women’s sports budgets and suggested policy statements for the adoption of women’s athletic programs.

She even had the University of Kansas’ women’s sports budget for the 1972-73 academic year - $11,987.42 allocated for the Jayhawks’ seven women’s sports that season.

It was also itemized, with the Kansas women’s gymnastics team receiving the most - $3,539.76 – and the women’s tennis team receiving the least - $575.95.

She had somehow gotten her hands on Fairmont State women’s basketball budgets dating back to the late 1960s, as well as sample game contracts from Pitt, Illinois and other schools that sponsored women’s sports.

Every question Byrd asked Blakemore could answer.

How much control will the AIAW (Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women) impose upon the member institutions?

Do women have any mechanisms for enforcing its regulations?

Where are the women going to get the finances to function?

How does one determine or enforce rules concerning the length of a season?

Where do administrators send the verification of eligibility?

Where will the women dress and practice?

Kittie deftly handled them all. This was her moment - her life’s calling. And then, she pulled out a one-paged typed document titled “Discussion of Intercollegiate Program for Women at WVU.”

This was to become the Magna Carta of women’s sports for West Virginia University.

Born out of this document was the creation of basketball, tennis and gymnastics in 1974, followed by volleyball, swimming, track and softball in 1975. In ensuring years, other women’s sports such as swimming and diving, soccer and rowing were added to the docket.

The plan, execution and administration of this was all Blakemore’s, Carruth’s and Martha Thorn’s doing.

When women's sports were added, Blakemore became the women’s basketball coach, Thorn took over women’s tennis and Nanette Schnaible coached the gymnastics team. 

A year later, Linda Burdette-Good replaced Schnaible.

“They pretty much started the whole thing,” Burdette-Good recalled earlier today. “I wasn’t ready to go protest or anything, but I was the one who always wanted things sooner, and Kittie would always say, ‘Linda, you have to pick your battles.’ 

“Whenever I wanted something done she would say, ‘Come to me first and we will come up with a plan.’ She was quite a mentor and was really effective in helping us get things done.”

Veronica Hammersmith started the softball program and eventually transitioned to volleyball when the sport was dropped in 1982.

Blakemore, Thorn, Burdette-Good and Hammersmith were virtually inseparable during the time they coached together at WVU.

“We were all good friends,” Hammersmith said. “There wasn’t anybody who didn’t know Kittie. Everywhere we went there were always people who stopped her and talked to her like she was their best friend. She was interested in everybody. People you thought were just acquaintances considered Kittie their good, good friend because she did ask about them - and listened to what they had to say and what was going on in their lives.”

Blakemore’s WVU teams won 301 games over 19 seasons, including a 1989 Atlantic 10 tournament championship and a 1992 Atlantic 10 regular season title that led to two NCAA Tournament berths.

Her 1992 squad, co-coached by Scott Harrelson, won 26 games, reached No. 11 in the national polls and advanced to the Sweet 16 where it lost to Final Four participant Virginia.

Prior to Harrelson, Blakemore also had a co-coaching arrangement with Bill Fiske, who handled game strategy and tactics while she oversaw administrative duties and took on the role of counselor and surrogate mother to her athletes.

Her top players at WVU included All-American guard Rosemary Kosiorek as well as standouts Cathy Parson, Janice Drummond, Olivia Bradley, Alexis Basil, Jenny Hillen, Donna Abbott and Georgeann Wells, the first player to dunk a basketball during a women’s collegiate game.

“Since I found out about her passing, I’ve done nothing but think about what coach Blakemore has meant to me,” Rosemary Kosiorek-Meyer said today. “She was a coach, a teacher, a mom, a friend and she became a mentor to many, many student-athletes at WVU.

“She didn’t care if you played a minute in a game or you were an All-American – every one of those kids was important to coach Blakemore,” Kosiorek-Meyer added.

Following her retirement from coaching in 1992, Blakemore became WVU’s first senior woman administrator, a title she held until her retirement in 1997. It was Blakemore who advocated hiring a young, unknown Division II coach from West Virginia Wesleyan named Nikki Izzo to begin the women’s soccer program in 1995.

“I owe so much to Kittie for what she saw in me as a young coach,” Izzo-Brown said today. “She was such a role model, and her charisma in a room full of people was so amazing. I’m so sad because she meant so much to me.”

Blakemore received a bachelor’s degree in physical education from James Madison University in 1950 and a master’s degree from WVU in 1961. She began her teaching career at Stratford Junior High in Arlington, Virginia, and then spent six years as a teacher and basketball coach at Fort Meade (Florida) High before coming to WVU in 1960 as a physical education instructor.

It was during her tenure at Fort Meade when she found time to get a part as an extra in an Esther Williams movie, teaching herself how to water ski to get the role. 

When she was a physical education instructor at WVU teaching swimming, basketball or bowling, she would begin the day wearing a skirt and heels and would change three or four times into her coaching apparel before ending the day dressed the same way she began it in full business attire.

“Eventually, they allowed women to wear pants on campus,” Burdette-Good recalled.

Later in her coaching career, she worked hard to keep current with her players. Whenever the B-52s song “Love Shack” was played on the team bus she would instruct her players to turn it up.

Blakemore was well-known for having purses to match each outfit and requiring extra space in the overhead storage bin for all of her luggage. Her purse, which more closely resembled a small medicine cabinet, always remained in her possession.

Eventually gaining the rank of associate professor, Blakemore was named Outstanding Teacher in the WVU School of Physical Education five times. 

She was the 1989 recipient of the Morgantown Touchdown Club’s Proficiency Award, the 1992 recipient of the Mary Catherine Buswell Award in recognition for her service to women and the 1993 recipient of the Celebrate Women Award in the field of sports from the West Virginia Women’s Commission.

“I am deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Kittie Blakemore,” West Virginia coach Mike Carey said. “As the first coach of this program, she set the bar and developed the foundation Mountaineer women’s basketball stands on today. Even after her retirement, her love and support for this team was unquestionable, and we are so thankful for her. We will greatly miss Kittie and forever remember her in our hearts.”

Blakemore was inducted into the College of Physical Activity and Sports Sciences Hall of Fame in 1994, the WVU Sports Hall of Fame in 1997 and was named inaugural member of the Mountaineer Legends Society in 2017.

“For those who knew her she enriched our lives,” said Sandra J. Elmore, Blakemore’s first WVU assistant coach in 1974.

Kittie was 91.