Coaches of No. 1 Teams Both Credit Each Other

Temple’s men’s basketball program may never have climbed to the top and the Iowa women may have never become No. 1 if Cheyney University could have afforded a second gym.

Iowa women’s Coach C. Vivian Stringer, who has guided the Hawkeye women to their first No. 1 ranking this year and has held it for six straight weeks, said she was forced to adopt some of Temple Coach John Chaney’s style and he some of hers because of the conditions when they both coached at what was then called Cheyney State from 1972 to 1982.

“We only had one gym,” Stringer said.

Chaney’s men would line up at one end of the floor and run 10 offensive sets against whatever defense her women put up and then Stringer’s women would go on offense and try to penetrate Chaney’s zones and man-to-man.

“Vivian and I had to adopt a philosophy that was basically the same, because we couldn’t be doing different drills at the same time,” Chaney said.

Stringer said her Hawkeye team never could have made it to the top without Chaney’s influence.

Chaney, whose team jumped to the fore of the Top 20 for the first time this week, says, no, it was Stringer who helped him.

Maybe they are both right.

“Any coaching success I’ve had has the touch of Vivian Stringer,” Chaney said. “She’s been one of the most influential people in my life.”

“The success that I have is his success also,” Stringer said. “I really mean that.

“So he can sit back and smile very smugly and know that, at this point, he has controlled all of basketball, men’s and women’s. He’s had a profound effect on it.”

The incubator which hatched this top coaching talent was Cheyney State near Philadelphia.

Chaney coached the school’s Division II men’s team to a national title in 1978 and to the Final Four in 1979. In ten years there, his team was 226-56, winning 79 percent of its games.

Stringer’s Cheyney State women, who played Division I basketball, were runners-up in the first NCAA women’s Final Four in 1982 with a 28-3 record and finished the 1982-83 season 27-2. Stringer was NCAA women’s coach of the year in 1982.

Now each coaches the top-rated Division I team in the country.

“What do you think the odds are of that happening like that, in the same season?” Stringer asked. “You have a better chance of hitting the $10 million lottery.”

“But I don’t think it’s an accident,” she said.

Neither does Cheyney State men’s head Coach Charles Songster, who was Chaney’s assistant and took over when Chaney went to Temple after the 1982 season. Songster watched as the relationship grew between Stringer and Chaney.

“They worked very closely together,” Songster said.

“The men and the women would work out together,” he said. “That was unheard of back then.

“I don’t think that would happen anymore. The situation here was unique at the time.”

“Vivian used to pick John’s brains,” Songster said. “She would go to him and seek advice at times but I think it just developed from a friendly exchange, two coaches sitting down and saying, well, what do you do with your 1-3-1.”

George Heaslip, the Cheyney State sports information director who was a sportswriter covering the teams during Chaney and Stringer’s days there, said the mutual influences changed women’s basketball and strengthened Chaney’s system.

“Vivian’s teams were running these complex defenses before the 1-3-1 and 1-2-2 were seen in women’s basketball,” he said. “She got a lot of that from John. She was doing these things on defense -- with women -- before anybody else in the country.”

Stringer said she still follows any advice Chaney offers.

“Anything he tells me, I’m going to do,” she said. “I’ve never had reason to doubt the man. I respect him to always give me the truth.”

Comedian Bill Cosby suggested in an appearance at the University of Iowa recently that maybe the men’s team from Temple, his alma mater, and Stringer’s women should arrange a game.

“I don’t know if John would accept it, though,” Songster said. “Vivian knows his system too well.”