Santa Ynez’s Reck makes an everlasting impression

In the pastoral setting of the Santa Ynez Valley, where horse farms, vineyards and ranches dot the rural landscape, a girls’ high school basketball coach, Jo Ann Reck, has spent 30 seasons making a difference.

Her success isn’t measured only by 18 league championships, 22 consecutive playoff appearances, three Southern Section championships, dozens of players who have moved on to the college ranks and a career record of 576-176 at Santa Ynez High.

Rather, it’s the impact she has made in preparing teenage girls for life after high school that has left a lasting legacy.

“Anyone who has played for her, their life has been changed,” said Ariana Gnekow, a freshman at UC Santa Barbara and four-year starter at Santa Ynez.

What’s remarkable about Reck is her staying power. She arrived in 1976, the second year girls’ basketball existed as an interscholastic sports team at the school. She didn’t get to use the gym in the afternoon because the boys’ teams had priority. And the girls hardly knew how to shoot lay-ups.

“They didn’t expect anything,” she said of the school’s administration. “They thought the boys would run everything. My first year, I had my head down. Every year, it got better.”

No obstacle was too big and no insult too lasting for a woman who grew up in a rabid sports family in Anaheim, the third of six children to Joe and Dorothea Stephenson.

Older brother Jerry pitched for the Boston Red Sox in the 1967 World Series. Two other brothers played in the minor leagues. Jo Ann and her younger sister played college basketball.

Her father was a scout for 50 years with the Red Sox, signing every top Red Sox prospect from Southern California, including Fred Lynn, Bill Lee, Rick Burleson and Dwight Evans.

Jo Ann, who’s 5 feet 11, graduated from Anaheim High in 1968, went to UC Santa Barbara and left college the same year that Title IX, the federal law that opened the door for female athletes, was enacted.

“In our family, the girls were treated the same as the boys, sports-wise,” Reck said. “It was so far ahead of the times.

“For most girls, it was a stigma to play sports. I was really tall for a girl. Tall girls didn’t play sports. They hid somewhere. When my dad would be sitting with all the scouts and here’s his daughter keeping score, he would brag if I had been a boy, I would have been the best. It really made me proud.”

Reck was convinced sports competition could do for girls what it did for boys: give them an advantage competing for jobs and leadership positions in the real world. Every season except for 1980-81, when she was on leave traveling to Japan and Southeast Asia, and 1981-82, when she coached junior varsity, she has been passing along lessons to her varsity players.

They’re simple but profound: Work hard, treat teammates like family and use sports as a training ground to prepare for dealing with a boss, a spouse or motherhood.

“I think girls’ sports gives them a head start,” she said. “It gives them independence, leadership and a strength I don’t see others having. If you don’t play a sport now for a girl, you’re behind as far as going out to the business world and dealing with males.”

One of Reck’s first players in her coaching career, Sheri Jepsen, returns every year to present a $500 college scholarship at the basketball banquet as a gesture of thanks to Reck for what she gained from sports. She became a pharmaceutical salesman and lives in Florida.

Another former player is a firefighter with twin girls. Another is a math teacher with a daughter born last year. Another is a tennis coach with a 4-year-old boy.

All are following the example of Reck, who showed her players how to juggle many responsibilities.

“She is the ultimate woman, but is a coach, an awesome mother, a great wife,” Gnekow said. “She made it look easy. I admire her so much for sticking it out. She’s a great role model.”

Reck married her husband, Jeff, a former Santa Ynez boys’ basketball coach who still teaches at the school, in 1984. The couple lives in Santa Barbara, in a house atop the San Marcos Pass.

Their daughter, Casey, is a senior starter on this year’s girls’ team, and their son, Connor, is a promising eighth-grade basketball player.

Asked what makes her mother a good coach, Casey said, “The fact basketball isn’t life. It’s just a life tool. You’re preparing yourself for situations that come later.”

Much has changed in girls’ sports since Reck first started playing and coaching.

“When I played in seventh grade in Anaheim, girls were allowed three dribbles and you had to stop,” she said. “I guess they thought girls couldn’t sweat.”

Reck said she has as much passion, “if not more,” for coaching today as when she started. Her 576 coaching victories rank fourth in state history for girls’ basketball, according to Cal-Hi Sports.

But for family reasons, Reck has decided to give up coaching at the end of this season. She wants to be able to watch Connor, an A student, top chess player and terrific basketball shooter, as he goes through high school while also seeing Casey play in college.

“I would never see him play high school basketball,” she said. “If I kept coaching, it would just be me. I can’t do it.”

So this year’s Lady Pirates team is doing its best to make it a season to remember. The team is 19-6 and is seeking its seventh consecutive Los Padres League championship.

Reck has been the rarest of coaches, a women’s trend-setter who never used a whistle in practice because “I can’t use it during a game and they have to hear me and I don’t have a loud voice.”

All these years, it’s clear her voice has been heard and her contributions continue to echo through the Santa Ynez Valley, and beyond.

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Eric Sondheimer can be reached at eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.