MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Teresa Lucas, now Teresa Lucas-Kamm, once won a teenage pageant and remembers riding in a convertible behind Marshall University’s president during one of the little parades they used to do in West Virginia.

She had participated in acrobatics while growing up in Alloy, near Montgomery, West Virginia, and competed in gymnastics at the West Virginia Junior Olympics each year while attending Gauley Bridge High. But that was about all there was for women’s sporting activities in the state during the late 1960s and early 1970s when she was growing up. 

So, when she saw the Marshall president riding in the car behind her, she hopped off during one of the breaks, ran back to where he was sitting in line and told him that they needed to start a women’s gymnastics team there.

“I just want you to know, y’all need to get a women’s gymnastics team,” she told him. “I spent my elementary years in Huntington at Miller Grade School, and I would love to come back to Marshall, but y’all don’t have a team, and I’m going to WVU!”

Back then, state schools were picking and choosing which women’s sports to sponsor because of the passage of Title IX in 1972. 

Unfortunately, WVU was one of the last schools in the state to sponsor women’s sports and delayed doing so until the fall of 1973, one full year after Title IX was passed. The reason for the delay was because the school wasn’t sure how it was going to pay its women’s coaches.

When it became known that coaches could be paid through the School of Physical Education as instructors, the die was cast. Women’s sports at West Virginia University began in the fall of 1973 with women’s tennis, coached by Martha Thorn, and continued in the winter of 1974 with women’s basketball and women’s gymnastics.

Thorn and Kittie Blakemore, who coached women’s basketball, were staunch advocates of women’s sporting opportunities at WVU. They teamed with esteemed School of Physical Education instructor Wincie Ann Carruth to run the women’s intramural sports programs at WVU and wanted athletics to take it over on an intercollegiate basis.

Then, when Title IX passed, the University was put on notice.

“You have a big, land-grant institution that is going to lose a lot of federal money if they don’t go with this,” Blakemore recalled in 2013, seven years before her death. “With all those kinds of things in your corner, you can certainly go after the possibility of starting this.”

To begin women’s sports at WVU, Blakemore, Thorn and Carruth wisely chose sports that were already established on a club or intramural basis. Thorn was familiar with tennis, and the women’s tennis club had enough capable players for her to start the team and coach them in the fall of 1973. Blakemore had a basketball background while running the intramural sports program, did some high school basketball officiating, and took over leadership of women’s basketball in the winter of 1974.

The third sport with a strong club presence, gymnastics, was without a coach. Dr. Leland Byrd, West Virginia’s director of athletics at the time, hired South Bend, Indiana, native and Southern Illinois graduate Nanette Schnaible to coach the first team. Schnaible had been coaching the SUNY-Brockport gymnastics squad while earning her master’s degree in physical education.

The 16-member roster of West Virginia’s first women’s gymnastics team was a menagerie of athletes with varying degrees of talent and experience. All were volunteers.

The West Virginia girls – Lucas, Charleston’s Rebecca Jewell Bailey, Wheeling’s Sandy Mendenhall, Weirton’s Judy Niesslein, St. Albans’ Barb Shank, Kingwood’s Lavon Smith, Huntington’s Wendy Steirn and Oak Hill twins Maria and Rosemary Torre – were all athletic but raw, and lacked formal gymnastics training, as Lucas recalls.

Most of the out-of-state girls – Winchester, Virginia’s Mary Dickson, Pittsburgh’s Michelle Gilson, Monessen, Pennsylvania’s Melcena Hunter, Randolph, New Jersey’s Nancy Jones, Camp Hill, Pennsylvania’s Karen Kennedy, Singapore’s Joan Monahan and Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania’s Lee Musselman – did have some formal gymnastics training.

Melcena Hunter, now Melcena Mendicino, trained at the highly successful BG School of Gymnastics, owned and operated by Baldo “Bud” Giannini. His daughter, Joanne, coached Cathy Rigby and later was the assistant technical director in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games and a judge in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. She earned a “Lifetime Achievement Award” from the USA Gymnastics Association in 2006.

“We were called the BGs, and we competed in Chicago and other national events, and from that, my high school in Monessen formed a gymnastics team and we were the state champions,” Hunter recalled. “Most of our good gymnasts went to either Pitt or Slippery Rock.”

Hunter’s older sister attended WVU and when she found that West Virginia had a gymnastics club, she opted to enroll here as well.

Mendenhall came from a family of wrestlers, beginning with her father, Bob, who attended WVU and wrestled for coach Steve Harrick. He was a longtime high school wrestling official and was instrumental in starting the wrestling program at The Linsly School in Wheeling and contributed the funds necessary to re-institute Bridgeport High’s boys wrestling program.

Sandy’s two younger brothers, Bob and George, wrestled for WVU in the late 1970s and the Mendenhall family’s generosity has continued to benefit Tim Flynn’s Mountaineer program even today. Sandy’s passion was cheerleading and joining the gymnastics team was a byproduct of her love of cheering.

“I was just a cheerleader, and I actually joined the gymnastics team to get better at cheerleading,” Mendenhall, now Sandy Brunswick, recalled.

Michelle Gilson was another cheerleader who looked at gymnastics to improve her cheering.

“I wanted to be on a gymnastics team, and I wanted to be a cheerleader at a major university,” she said. “I was 17 years old when I graduated high school, and I knew they had gymnastics at WVU, but I didn’t realize that it was a club before they started the team. I really wanted to go to the University of Michigan, got accepted, but they only had guy cheerleaders at the time.”

Gilson, now Michelle Kollig, was like Mendenhall - bouncy and acrobatic – which worked out well for the floor event and the vault.

Nancy Jones competed in club gymnastics while growing up in Randolph, New Jersey, and was looking for a major university to attend on the East Coast that also had gymnastics.

“When I heard that WVU was starting their first gymnastics team I thought, ‘Well, that sounds perfectly appropriate for my level,’” she remembered. “I went and enrolled in a class that had gymnastics and a day or two later, I walked up to the instructor and said, ‘Hey, I heard you are starting a women’s gymnastics team and I want to join.’ She was elated.”

Her first memory of WVU was visiting the old Field House on Beechurst Avenue where Reynolds Hall, home of the John Chambers College of Business and Economics, is now located.

“Someone escorted me to the Field House and the second floor was where the team practiced, and I thought it was just the coolest thing because everything was covered in white chalk,” she said. “There was nobody there and it was all fenced in. I thought, ‘Wow, I want to be a part of this. How exciting!”

As Lucas remembers, the big issue for Schnaible that first year was finding enough gymnasts capable of performing the more technical events such as the uneven bars and the balance beam. Monahan and Musselman were probably the two best at those events the first year.

“Lee and Joan were really solid,” Lucas recalled. “A lot of those bar girls had good gymnastics backgrounds and you really had to work on that to build up your upper body strength.”

Five women competed in each event, but only the top three scores are counted in the four events – vault, beams, bar and floor. In 1974, West Virginia’s schedule included meets against Pitt, Fairmont State three times, Frostburg State twice, Slippery Rock and SUNY-Brockport, where Schnaible had coached.

Hunter recalls having a good meet at Pitt because the judges there were familiar with her routines.

“Their gymnasts were some of the people that I knew, and the judges were the mothers of some of the gymnasts that I competed with in Monessen,” she said.

It was a big learning experience for the gymnasts when they went to away meets and observed what the other athletes were doing.

“There were no springboards in the floor exercise or anything like that, but Nanette worked with us very hard and every place we went it was like, ‘Oh, they’re doing this,’” Lucas said.

“Nanette expected a lot out of us, and we trusted her to spot us,” Lucas added. “I felt like she had her hands full with such a young team that first year, but I thought she did a very good job.”

The Mountaineers scored high enough to win six of their nine meets that first season, but there was hardly any coverage in the school’s student newspaper, The Daily Athenaeum. The men’s team got most of the gymnastics coverage and Hunter recalls them being helpful to the women when they practiced together.

“It was a group effort, and we were very close to the men’s team,” she said. “I thought (men’s coach) Bill Bonsall helped us a lot. We would watch how he worked with the guys, and he would actually take the time to show us some things. He could still do back handsprings at his age. I was just amazed that he could do that.”

Mendenhall took things one step further. She went to Bonsall to recruit some of the men’s gymnasts to be on the cheerleading squad.

“My first year of cheerleading, I was not happy because we were an all-girls team, so I got permission from our captain, Debbie Book, and I went to Bill Bonsall,” Mendenhall said. “I said to Bill, ‘We don’t have any men and it’s too late to get men to try out for cheerleading. Will you let us use the men’s gymnasts, just for football?’

“For two years, he let us have the men’s gymnasts before we started having tryouts for the guys,” she said.

Florida’s Rick Hill became a crowd favorite at old Mountaineer Field because he could do back handsprings the entire length of the field to lead the team out. Recently deceased Gene Diaz, who coached the men’s team for one year after Bonsall retired before the sport was dropped, and for years operated a popular training center in Morgantown, was also one of Mendenhall’s partners on the cheer squad.

At the year-end all-sports banquet, Lucas was honored as the team’s most outstanding gymnast, and she became the first gymnast awarded an athletic scholarship when Linda Burdette took over the program in 1975.

Schnaible, quoted in the school’s student yearbook Monticola after the season, thought her young team made considerable improvement throughout that first season.

“Our strong areas were floor and beam, whereas bars were our weaker point,” she said. “The equipment hurt us a lot. At least the girls were used to competition and were used to being judged.”

Schnaible left WVU after just one year to take a similar job at Montclair State, leaving the program in the hands of Burdette. A Parkersburg native and a 1971 graduate of the School of Physical Education, Burdette was involved in club gymnastics while pursuing her master’s degree, and also taught dance at Fairmont State and drama at WVU.

“We didn’t really jell that first year the way we did after that with Linda,” Lucas said. “She was a dichotomy. She would cry her eyes out when someone did a really good job, or if we won and you would think she was a soft pushover, and she wasn’t. You did not mess with Linda, and if she wanted you to do something you didn’t think you could do, she would say, ‘Do it; do it now!’”

“Linda was amazing even though she was so tiny,” Hunter added. “I had a coach back at Monessen, and he was tall, so I thought I would crush Linda when I was on bars, but she was great. She was particularly good with our floor exercises and stuff.”

Hunter recalls once doing the floor exercise at Slippery Rock and completely forgetting her routine.

“I completely went blank and couldn’t remember it,” she laughed. “The music started, and I just couldn’t remember it and all of a sudden it came to me. It was funny because I had a lot of friends who went to Slippery Rock, and I think they just restarted my music or something.”

Like Schnaible, a lot of the gymnasts from the first team moved on quickly.

Gilson transferred to St. Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana, and became a cheerleader for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish when they defeated Houston in the Cotton Bowl. She also cheered for the Irish men’s basketball team the year they reached the Final Four.

After graduation, she became a journalist working in St. Louis and then Butte, Montana. One of her stops included a brief stint at WOAY in Oak Hill before landing a radio job in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she met her husband. They are now retired and living in Vero Beach, Florida.

Mendenhall focused on cheerleading when it became apparent that competing in both was too much of a time commitment. After graduating from WVU, she became a physical education teacher and cheerleading coach at Wheeling Park High before working at an athletic club in Phoenix. She eventually returned to West Virginia and now lives in Bridgeport where her husband runs her family trucking business.

Jones left WVU and completed her English degree at Rutgers. For a while, she pursued dance theater in New York City before eventually catching on with American Express. Currently, she is working in the biotech and pharmaceutical field and is living in Stow, Massachusetts.

Hunter competed for three seasons at WVU before getting accepted into the athletic training program.

“I had to make a decision,” she recalled. “I couldn’t do both, so I didn’t participate my senior year. What was so nice was I was actually the poster girl for the season. We had posters for all the sports, and I was the girl they chose, so that was kind of neat.”

After college, she became a physical education teacher and did some athletic training back in her native Monessen before retiring in 2013.

Lucas competed all four years at WVU, as did Smith, and they eventually earned scholarships, as did younger gymnasts Vanessa Rotruck from Keyser and Dana Davis from Charleston. Lucas is now retired and living in Atlanta.

The others from that first team have sort of scattered to the wind. The last Hunter had heard, Bailey was living in California. The last address listed for Dickson had her living in Fairfax, Virginia.

Smith is believed to be living in Stevensville, Maryland, while Rosemary Torre’s last address listed with the alumni office had her living in Chesapeake, Virginia. Her sister is believed to be living in St. Simons Island, Georgia. 

The others’ whereabouts are unknown.

As for the gymnastics program, the women began getting better coverage in the student newspaper after the first season. The season preview for 1975 took up the top page of the paper and spanned six columns. 

Incidentally, the author of the story just happened to be Judy Niesslein, the team's co-captain.