Berea College Womens Basketball Oral History Collection, 2008

The collection consists of audio compact disc recordings and transcripts of sixteen interviews recorded by Tom Chase in 2008. (Click on the red Digital Object icon to hear recordings and read transcripts.)

Interviews are mostly with women who played varsity (intercollegiate) basketball at Berea College during the program's first three decades (early 1960s to 2008). The exceptions are three Berea College faculty members who coached and taught physical education (Martha Beagle, Mark Tobin and Martha Joyce May Hager, who gave two interviews) and an Eastern Kentucky University faculty member with many years of experience coaching, officiating, and writing about women's collegiate athletics (Peggy Stanaland). Two former players opted to submit written memoirs rather than be interviewed.

In interviewing former players, Chase designed interview questions to illuminate the whole person, not simply the athlete. The interviewees were asked about their home communities, hopes and expectations as students, campus labor assignments, and what they studied. Interviewees reminisced about their teachers and their coaches, classmates, and teammates and what they have been doing since graduation. They also noted benefits from their experiences as Berea College students and athletes. Their stories document the transition from the 1960s, when there were no varsity women's teams at Berea and other Kentucky colleges, to the present day, when experiences of female athletes closely approximate those of their male counterparts.