MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Mary Lou Retton recalls as an eight-year-old watching Romania’s Nadia Comaneci compete in the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. 

She was so inspired by Comaneci’s gold-medal-winning performance that she instantly wanted to become a gymnast, too. But sadly, there were no places for Mary Lou to learn the sport while growing up in Fairmont, West Virginia. When she found out that West Virginia University women’s gymnastics coach Linda Burdette was teaching a weekly class in nearby Morgantown, Mary Lou begged her mother to take her and her older sister, Shari, each week. 

WVU’s gymnastics training facility, at the time, was in the old basketball field house where Mary Lou’s father, Ronnie, once played with All-American Jerry West. The facility was far from ideal with the catwalk spanning one side of the gym to the other serving as the runway to the vault, but for a little girl wanting to pursue a dream, it was the greatest thing in the world.

If not for Linda Burdette’s gymnastics class, who knows if little Mary Lou Retton from Fairmont, West Virginia, becomes Mary Lou Retton, Olympic legend?

“What a pioneer Linda was in the world of gymnastics,” Retton, now living in suburban San Antonio, Texas, said earlier this week. “She was 100% instrumental in all my successes.”

Mary Lou ended up moving to Texas to train with Comaneci’s coach, Bela Karolyi, but Shari enrolled at WVU and became the school’s first All-American gymnast on its first team to qualify for nationals in 1982 when West Virginia was a member of the AIAW.

That was the beginning of a 29-year run that saw Burdette’s West Virginia teams win 10 conference championships and qualify for NCAA championship appearances in 1995, 1999 and 2000. Five of her athletes earned All-America recognition and five times she was named coach of the year, including 1995 NCAA Southeast Regional Coach of the Year.

Earlier this week, Burdette-Good, 74, died unexpectedly in the Hilton Head, South Carolina, home she shared with her late husband Lee Good. It’s been a very difficult week for all of those who knew and loved Linda.

“It was hard making calls to other coaches and retired coaches that I knew she was close to and kind of going through it with them,” Michigan coach Bev Plocki said. Plocki, then Bev Fry when she earned All-America honors for WVU after transferring from Alabama, led Michigan to a national championship in 2021. She is considered one of the most successful coaches in Big Ten women’s gymnastics history.

Like Retton, Plocki said Linda Burdette was instrumental in charting her life’s course.

Plocki was physically and emotionally unhealthy after a successful but unfulfilling freshman year at Alabama, and when she went home for Christmas during her sophomore year, her parents wouldn’t let her return to Tuscaloosa. 

She spent the following spring living with her sister in Florida and working as a customer service representative at American Express with no intention of returning to gymnastics. Burdette tracked her down in Florida and convinced her to return to college to get her degree. If she regained her elite form at WVU, great, and if not, at least she was going to have a college education.

“I hadn’t even trained for how many months, came back and started in summer school and started training again and ended up competing for three years at West Virginia,” Plocki said. “I became her graduate assistant coach, staying two more years while I got my master’s degree, and then I came here to Michigan. She saved me. I don’t know if I would have completed my college education, and I had no idea what would have become of me.”

Umme Salim-Beasley, now head coach at Rutgers, remembers vividly Burdette’s amazing instincts and unique understanding of people. Umme graduated high school early at 16 and was terrified of the college party scene.

Linda sensed this quickly and adjusted. On Umme’s recruiting visit to WVU, instead of house parties it was haunted hayrides for Umme.

“The other schools I visited were not doing this and that scared the heck out of me,” Salim-Beasley laughed. “Linda was so smart about the athletes she was recruiting, the environments they came from, their families and their coaches to be able to relate to each individual athlete.

“Linda was well beyond her time when it came to recruiting and very much out of the box in her thinking,” Salim-Beasley added.

Jay Ronayne, recently retired after coaching 17 seasons at Iowa State, spent 13 years as Burdette’s assistant during her most successful seasons at WVU. He agrees.

Some of the best gymnasts in school history were athletes Burdette convinced Ronayne to recruit, such as All-American Kristin Quackenbush.

“Linda said, ‘Jay, there is this little kid from a small town up in New York and she’s being recruited right now by George Washington, and she is WAY better than them. We need to get on her right now!’

“Well, I saw her, and I was like, ‘Yeah, Linda, she’s pretty good’ and Linda said, ‘No, she is going to be a star’ and she was right,” Ronayne recalled. “Linda advised me to keep recruiting her, and it was just her great persistence and instincts. It was all because of her.”

Salim-Beasley also fell into that category, as did 1994 All-American Lajuanda Moody. In Moody, Ronayne saw an athletic and powerful performer, but also a gymnast whose routines were somewhat sloppy and thought that would not translate well to college where judges, at the time, were looking for clean, pretty routines.

What Linda saw was a difference maker.

“I’m like, ‘Okay Linda, but it’s going to be a lot of work’ but Linda was like, ‘No, this is the kid’ and Lajuanda turned out to be my first big-time recruit at West Virginia, and it was all because of Linda,” Ronayne said.

“You have to start somewhere,” Plocki explained. “We were 2-19 early in my career at Michigan, and I was not out recruiting elite-level athletes. I was using the things that I learned from Linda about looking for people that we could develop, coach and treat well.

“Along the way, you try and get one flagship person and for us it was (national champion) Beth Wymer,” Plocki said. “I always said she kind of put us on the map, and as you start to grow and knock on doors to the next-level-up kids, they finally answer. It’s a slow and gradual process.”

Burdette built a lasting gymnastics program at West Virginia by identifying athletically gifted, raw gymnasts she nurtured and developed in a positive, supportive environment. Be firm and put your foot down when it was time to go to work, but have fun and enjoy each other’s company when the work was done.

Quackenbush, now Kristin DiBartolomeo, believes consistency was Burdette’s No. 1 attribute.

“She was always positive and was always the same,” DiBartlolomeo said while vacationing with her family in the Caribbean this week. “I rarely saw her angry, maybe one or two times, but she was always even. That’s how she approached practices. That’s how she approached meets, and that’s how she approached life. She was just a very consistent person.”

Despite her fun-loving personality and diminutive stature, Linda was by no means a pushover. Behind her welcoming smile and hearty laugh was a steel bar that ran down her spine. She never backed down from a fight if she felt it would benefit her gymnasts or female athletes at West Virginia University.

Kittie Blakemore, Wincie Carruth and Martha Thorn are given credit for getting women’s sports started at WVU, but it was the younger, more aggressive Linda Burdette who got things moving at a much quicker pace in the late 1970s when the administration stonewalled them on some of the things they felt they needed.

“Linda was small, but mighty,” Plocki said.

Kittie’s approach was to kill you with kindness and gradually wear you down, and that was usually the correct approach to take back then. But there were occasionally times when more forceful measures were needed, and Linda was never afraid to speak her mind. In that regard, both were successful in getting things accomplished for women’s athletics at West Virginia University.

Linda couldn’t have accomplished the things she accomplished at West Virginia University without Kittie Blakemore’s motherly guidance and support, and Kittie couldn’t have gotten things done so quickly without Linda Burdette prodding her along.

The two were an ideal pairing.

“I think a lot of Linda’s women’s sports contributions here have gone unnoticed,” WVU gymnastics coach Jason Butts pointed out. Butts spent six years working with Burdette as her top assistant. “I know a lot of the people who have reached out since her passing have mentioned that they wouldn’t be where they are today in life without the things Linda did to help them along.”

“One of the things I learned along the way from Linda was you always do your due diligence,” Plocki added. “You collect your facts, and you stand up. You can’t be afraid to stand up for yourself, for your program and your athletes.”

Butts laughs recalling the time Burdette did just that during a meet once at Ohio State. The teams were getting ready to rotate events and one of the athletes on another team had sustained an injury, and because of her injury, the allotted time West Virginia gymnasts had to prepare on bars had concluded.

The head judge looked at Butts and told him they had to get ready to perform.

“Linda went from being the kind, fun-loving, warm person she was into immediate mom protection mode,” Butts said. “She walked up to that judge, who was significantly taller than her, and she stuck her finger in that judge’s face and began with, ‘Now let me tell you something …’ The whole team was standing there watching her and eventually the judge backed down and allowed us more time to warm up,” Butts recalled.

Linda turned her back to the judge with an ear-to-ear grin, probably giving her girls a little wink and shrug, and offered her young assistant coach a sage piece of advice, “Never hesitate!”

Her team erupted in applause.

Linda also advised Butts to do things in person whenever possible. Don’t sit at your computer barking out orders via email or sending out texts on your phone. Human, eye-to-eye contact was always so important to her.

“When she hired me, she walked me around the Coliseum, and she took me to every office and introduced me to everyone,” Butts said. “She kept saying to me, ‘These are the people who run this athletics department’ – the business people, the maintenance workers, the communications staff – ‘you need to build really good relationships with them.’”

Burdette was a staunch advocate of constructing Cary Gym, which the team trains in today. It took an act of courage for the athletes to train in the old facility in Stansbury Hall above the basketball courts, from the catcalling and the whistling they sometimes endured from the rec basketball players below to flying basketballs whenever they practiced their routines.

When a ball made its way up to where they were practicing, Linda would pick it up and fire it right back down to them as hard as she could.

“That was really something,” Plocki recalled. “There was a balcony and like a chain-linked fence spanning it, and they put up a black-out curtain on the gym side, probably because it would have been super freaky to be up there, and you could see down to the floor below you.

“I can remember walking out to the end of the vault way and there were guys whistling and all kinds of other stuff and you felt like you were kind of on display, but we always found a way to make it work. Our equipment was good, but we just didn’t really have a lot of space.”

“We didn’t care, we just did it,” Retton recalled.

The facility the team trains in today opened in the late 1990s and is still considered among the better ones in the country.

“For West Virginia gymnastics to get the facility I’m sitting in right now at that time, and the investment that was made, this is still one of the best training facilities in the country,” Butts admitted. “It needs some updates and refurbishments, and (Linda) knew that, and that was the goal of her gift to the University. I remember programs across the country winning national championships at the time that didn’t have a facility like this.

“Linda went to the administration and fought for it and we’re still reaping the benefits of this facility every day,” Butts added.

Perhaps Burdette’s most significant accomplishment was championing the creation of the East Atlantic Gymnastics League, which still exists today. When West Virginia left the Atlantic 10 for the Big East in 1995, West Virginia no longer had a gymnastics conference and Burdette knew the program was going to be dangerously exposed.

At the time, gymnastics programs across the country were being eliminated and not having a conference affiliation made it easier for administrators to consider cutting it. Linda rallied her coaching colleagues at George Washington, NC State, Maryland, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pitt and Rutgers and got them on board to form the new league.

Establishing the EAGL saved gymnastics programs.

“For us to be independent would have left WVU gymnastics vulnerable,” Salim-Beasley said. “Her taking the time to get all these coaches together and get them on board showed the strength of what she can do. She knew for the survival of WVU gymnastics, we needed to be in a conference and competing for conference championships.”

“She was at their conference championship this past year, and they honored her,” Butts said. “Without Linda, we would have probably lost programs like New Hampshire, George Washington, and maybe even NC State and UNC.”

Without Linda Burdette, West Virginia University would be without many good things.

She was raised by her grandmother in Parkersburg, didn’t have siblings and struggled to get to college when she attended WVU in the late 1960s. One of her dearest friends was Pam Braxton, wife of star Mountaineer football player Jim Braxton. Linda had empathy and compassion for the Black athletes integrating West Virginia University in the late 1960s and did her part to help them feel welcomed and appreciated.

One of her favorite phrases was “good people.” Linda always wanted to surround herself with “good people.” Linda didn’t make much money when she began coaching at West Virginia in the mid-1970s and had to supplement her income by teaching in the School of Physical Education.

“She would sometimes talk about those early days struggling to make ends meet, but I never once heard her complain about it,” Butts said.

“She would always say, I didn’t have MY mom, but I had a mom, and I always felt loved,” Ronayne recalled.

“(Growing up without parents) can go two ways,” DiBartolomeo pointed out. “You can continue that, or you can do something else, and she chose to build a life that was much more than what she had growing up.”

The shining light in Linda’s life was her daughter, Anna, who tragically died of cancer at age 32 four years ago, leaving behind two young sons. Linda also had to take care of her second husband, Lee, whose declining health finally led to his death a few months ago.

Linda was dealing with mobility issues because of a bad hip and would frequently talk to Mary Lou on the telephone seeking advice on how she dealt with her five hip replacement surgeries. The inability to golf and remain active was certainly difficult for her, but she never made her problems other people’s problems.

“She was a very strong-willed woman, and she always dealt with things head on,” DiBartolomeo said. “If there was an issue, she was going to tackle it.”

“No matter where we went or what we did, everybody knew, loved and respected Linda,” Plocki said.

“One thing I always remember Linda telling me was to have empathy and compassion for others,” Butts said. “You can’t let those emotions control and dictate how you do things, but every decision you make you need to ask yourself, ‘Am I being empathetic and compassionate?’ That is still something today that guides everything I do. You never know what’s really going on in someone’s life, and don’t make assumptions.”

“I called Linda many times throughout my coaching journey,” Salim-Beasley added. “I probably reached out to her at least every other month the entire time I’ve been coaching, and the advice she gave me was always right.”

“She was my mom,” Ronayne said. “I started working with her when I was 21, fresh out of college, and I was just a kid. She taught me how to golf; she taught me manners. Even though I was young, raw and inexperienced, she gave it all to me. She gave me 100% the recruiting and 100% the scheduling. She said, ‘You’ll figure it out’ and I did. 

“But every time I had a question, she had the answer.”

Always the right answer.

“I’m so sad, but I know Linda’s with Anna now,” Retton said.

There are now 16 USA Gymnastics member clubs in West Virginia - 16 more than when little Mary Lou Retton used to beg her mother to take her and her big sister up to Linda Burdette’s weekly gymnastics class in Morgantown in the late 1970s.

Today, thanks to Linda Burdette-Good, the next Mary Lou Retton living somewhere in West Virginia won’t have to travel all the way to Texas to train.