Menu
What's new
By:
Filters
AllBuffs | Unofficial fan site for the University of Colorado at Boulder Athletics programs

This is a sample guest message. Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

  • Prime Time. Prime Time. Its a new era for Colorado football. Consider signing up for a club membership! For $20/year, you can get access to all the special features at Allbuffs, including club member only forums, dark mode, avatars and best of all no ads ! But seriously, please sign up so that we can pay the bills. No one earns money here, and we can use your $20 to keep this hellhole running. You can sign up for a club membership by navigating to your account in the upper right and clicking on "Account Upgrades". Make it happen!

Ceal Barry Hall of Fame

buffgal

buffgal

Club Member
Club Member
http://cubuffs.com/news/2018/2/12/b...ns-basketball-hall-of-fame-class-of-2018.aspx

Congratulations to Coach Barry. It was a pleasure watching you coach at CU for 22 years.

LILBURN, Ga. – Former University of Colorado women's basketball head coach Ceal Barry has been selected as part of the 2018 Women's Basketball Hall of Fame Class in an announcement Monday night. She is among seven inductees that are set to enter the Hall in Knoxville, Tenn., on June 9. (the full class is listed in the bottom of the article)

Barry was CU's head coach for 22 seasons from 1983 to 2005, leading the Buffs to four regular-season Big Eight championships, four Big Eight Tournament championships and one Big 12 Tournament championship. She also guided the Buffs to the NCAA Tournament 12 times, including three teams that reached the Elite Eight and three more in the Sweet Sixteen.

She is the winningest head coach in CU athletics history across all sports with 427 wins.

Barry was named Big Eight Coach of the Year four times, including 1989, 1993, 1994 and 1995. She was also selected as the WBCA District Coach of the Year in 1993 and 1995, and was chosen as National Coach of the Year in 1994 by USBWA, Basketball Times and Basketball America. Her teams were recognized with the Big Eight Sportsmanship Award three times and she was named the Colorado Sportswoman of the Year in 1990. Barry also earned the WBCA Carol Eckman Award in 1995, given annually to an active coach who "exemplifies Eckman's spirit, integrity and character through sportsmanship, commitment to the student-athlete, honesty, ethical behavior, courage and dedication to purpose." In both 2001 and 2002, she was a finalist for the Naismith Coach of the Year.

Three of Barry's players earned AP All-America awards, including first-team honoree Shelley Sheetz in 1995. Sheetz was one of three of Barry's players to earn Big Eight Player of the Year honors, joining Bridget Turner in 1989 and Jamillah Lang (co-winner) in 1994. Barry also helped four of her players earn Big Eight Newcomer of the Year. In total, Barry's teams had 57 players earn all-conference honors from either the Big Eight or the Big 12.

She was hired at CU on April 12, 1983, by former athletic director Eddie Crowder. She replaced Sox Walseth as head coach, who had spent three seasons as the women's team's head coach following a 20-year stint as the men's team's head coach. Walseth, one of Barry's mentors, is second behind Barry among all CU sports with 338 career coaching victories between the men's and women's teams.

Barry guided CU to its first NCAA Tournament appearance in 1988, helping the Buffs win their first-ever postseason game over Eastern Illinois in the first round that season as the team finished the year 21-11 overall. The following season she led CU to its first Big Eight championship and first conference tournament championship as Colorado went 27-4 overall and 14-0 in the Big Eight.

One of Barry's proudest moments came in the second round of the 1989 NCAA Tournament when the Buffs broke the Coors Events Center record with a sellout crowd of 11,199 fans on March 18, 1989 vs. UNLV. She notes that every ticket for that game was purchased; none was given away.

After missing the postseason with two winning records over the next two seasons, Barry's squad returned to the NCAA Tournament in 1992 and finished 22-9 overall, placing second in the Big Eight during the regular season before capturing the tournament championship. That season sparked a stretch of dominance that has not been seen in team sports at CU.

In 1993, her team went 27-4, including 12-2 in the Big Eight, to win its second conference championship. After a double-overtime loss in the Big Eight semifinals, Barry's team caught fire in the NCAA Tournament, reaching the Elite Eight after upsetting No. 6 Stanford in the Sweet Sixteen.

CU made it back-to-back Big Eight championships in 1994 as the team went 27-5 overall and 12-2 in the Big Eight. The Buffs were upset in the tournament championship game in overtime, but recovered to win two NCAA Tournament games over Marquette and Oregon. CU was ranked as high as No. 2 in the AP and WBCA polls in March, the highest rankings in school history.

Colorado returned to the Elite Eight in 1995 and had its best season in school history, going 30-3 overall and 14-0 in the Big Eight with its third straight conference championship. The Buffs cruised through the Big Eight Tournament with a 61-45 win over No. 23 Kansas in the championship game. Only a last-second loss to Georgia in the Elite Eight kept the Buffs out of the Final Four. CU matched 1994's high ranking of No. 2 in the final AP poll of the year.

The Buffs won the Big Eight Tournament in 1996 and advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament. They won the conference tournament again in 1997, the inaugural season of the Big 12, when they reached the Sweet Sixteen before bowing out to eventual national champion Tennessee in an eight-point loss. The 1996-97 season was the sixth consecutive NCAA Tournament appearance and eighth of Barry's CU career.

Barry's team had one more stretch of dominance in the early 2000s before her retirement from coaching. In 2001 she guided CU to the second round of the NCAA Tournament. Her 2002 squad then returned to the Elite Eight, defeating No. 22 LSU and No. 5 Stanford in the second and third rounds before a loss to No. 2 Oklahoma ended the season. CU made another deep postseason run in 2003 to the Sweet Sixteen, upsetting No. 12-ranked North Carolina in the second round before suffering a two-point loss to No. 11 Villanova. Her final NCAA Tournament appearance came in 2004 to cap a 22-win season.

Barry retired from coaching after the 2005 season, wrapping up her 22-season CU career with a 427-242 (.638) record, including 191-134 (.588) in conference games. She has the most wins, conference wins, regular-season conference championships (4), conference tournament championships (5), and NCAA Tournament appearances (12) of any other coach in Colorado women's basketball history. She had 17 winning seasons in 22 years and finished in the top three of the conference standings 13 times.

In her team's 13 seasons in the Big Eight Conference, Barry's teams went 184-96 in conference games. She won more regular-season games (118), league titles (4), tournament titles (4), coach of the year honors (4) and coached more newcomers of the year (4) than any other coach in Big Eight history, while tying for the most NCAA Tournament appearances with seven during that span.

Off the court, her teams excelled in the classroom. Barry graduated all but two of her players during her 22 seasons as head coach and had 85 student-athletes earn academic all-conference.

Prior to joining CU in 1983, she spent four years as the head coach at Cincinnati, leading the Bearcats to an 83-42 (.664) record. In 26 total years as a Division I head coach, Barry had a 510-284 (.642) record. In Feb. 2004, she became the 24th coach in NCAA history to win 500 games.

Only Frank Potts (track, 41 seasons), Les Fowler (golf, 29), Mark Simpson (golf, 29), Richard Rokos (skiing, currently 28th), Frank Prentup (baseball, 24), Dick Gray (men's tennis, 23) and Mark Wetmore (cross country/track & field, currently 23rd) have served more seasons than Barry as a head coach at CU. Anne Kelly (women's golf) is currently in her 21st season as head coach at CU.

Following her coaching career, she joined CU's administrative staff and is currently Colorado's Senior Associate Athletic Director for Internal Operations and Senior Women's Administrator. She is in her 35th year at the University of Colorado. In her current position, she oversees the men's and women's basketball and women's golf programs. She also supervises several student services arms of the department, including sports medicine, strength & conditioning, academics and student wellness.

Barry is still very involved in women's basketball and is viewed as an ambassador for the sport. She currently serves on the NCAA Women's Basketball Division I Championship Committee and as the secretary on the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame board. From 2007-11, she was on the NCAA Women's Basketball Oversight Committee. She also occasionally joins the broadcast ranks as a color analyst for both men's and women's basketball for Root Sports (now AT&T SportsNet), FSN Rocky Mountain, and for the preseason and postseason WNIT championships.

Outside of her collegiate coaching career, she coached with USA Basketball eight times, working with Tara VanDerveer in coaching several national teams. She was an assistant on the 1996 gold medal-winning United States Olympics Basketball team and was head coach of the 2004 U.S. Junior World Championships qualifying team, which went undefeated en route to the gold medal in the qualifying tournament.

In addition to all of the awards she earned while she was coaching, she was inducted into the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame in 2006 and CU's Hall of Fame in 2010. In January 2011, she became the third recipient of the University of Kentucky's Susan B. Feamster Trailblazer Award.

In 2003 she was presented with the CU Alumni Association's Robert Stearns Award in recognition of one's extraordinary contributions to the university. Making the award even more special for her, she was nominated by her team's captains that year, Linda Lappe, Sabrina Scott and Diana Spencer.

She is a native of Louisville, Ky., and graduated from Assumption High School in Louisville, where she lettered in basketball, volleyball and field hockey. She earned her bachelor's degree in accounting from Kentucky, where she was a four-year letterwinner in basketball and a three-year letterwinner in field hockey. She was among the first class to earn women's basketball scholarships at Kentucky and was coached by Feamster and Debbie Yow. She followed her bachelor's degree from Kentucky with her master's in education from Cincinnati in 1979.
 
Outstanding! I'm a big Ceal Barry fan ... so happy to hear this.
 
Well deserved.

bow-down-gif-3.gif
 
I guess I'm pretty ignorant of this... ....but with the Naismith Basketball HOF inducting women, I didn't know that there was a separate Women's Bball HOF. Regardless, congrats to Coach Barry.
 
Impressive resume....clear leader....perhaps one of the greatest coaches of any sport in CU history. Congrats.
 
The Women's Basketball Hall of Fame honors those who have contributed to the game of women's basketball. It is not limited to women only.
 
I started one when it was first announced during the season.

I was at the first game Ceal coached at CU and at her last game, as well as many in between.

I have always enjoyed Coach Barry and my interactions with her.

This is well deserved and I hope to see some coverage this weekend.
 
Woelk: Buffs' Barry Set For Saturday's Hall Of Fame Induction

http://cubuffs.com/news/2018/6/6/wo...set-for-saturdays-hall-of-fame-induction.aspx

SUZVGNGAKDGRRCP.20101108223214.jpg


By: Neill Woelk, Contributing Editor
Release: June 06, 2018
BOULDER — It's been more than 20 years since Shelley Sheetz last played for legendary Colorado coach Ceal Barry — but to this day, Sheetz still operates via a simple guideline:
WWCB.
"It's pretty simple," said Sheetz, now an assistant coach at Loyola-Maryland. "What Would Ceal Barry do? If you think along those lines, it's pretty hard to go wrong because she did things the right way. She carried herself in a professional manner, she handled the business of athletics and the recruiting side with great ethics and values, and she won a lot basketball games. That's a pretty good checklist."
It is indeed — and it is a checklist that will no doubt be referenced Saturday in Knoxville, Tenn., when Barry is officially inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame.
Sheetz is in her 16th year of coaching at the college level. She will serve as Barry's escort at Saturday's ceremony that will see seven coaches, players and contributors inducted.
"It's an absolute honor to be the one that she asked to represent her walking to the stage and represent all the players that she coached," said Sheetz, who is still CU's only first-team All-American (1994-95). "You could go on forever on the list of players that she's coached that she could have chosen, let alone her family. It's an amazing honor that she's being inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame and an honor just to be part of her legacy. The foundation and the path that she has paved for young coaches and the sport of women's basketball and what she has always stood for is phenomenal.
Barry's numbers at Colorado (she also served as the head coach at Cincinnati before accepting the job in Boulder) are certainly enough to warrant Hall of Fame induction. In her 22 years at CU (1983-2005), she compiled a 427-242 record, a mark that still makes her the winningest coach in Colorado history. In that span, she led the Buff to four regular season Big Eight championships, four Big Eight tournament championships and one Big 12 tourney title. Colorado made 12 NCAA Tournament appearances under her guidances, reaching the Sweet 16 six times and the Elite Eight three times.
But Barry's impact reached much farther than "just" championships and NCAA Tournament appearances. She now accepts the title of "pioneer," a term she once joked "just means that I'm old."
"It is impossible to adequately capture the impact Ceal has had on women's basketball overall and, specifically, in Colorado," said USA Basketball National Team Director Carol Callan. " She inspired several generations of young girls to enjoy the game by putting talented, hard-working teams on the floor who competed with discipline from beginning to end. Simply, she modeled what she expected from her athletes. She stands for competing with integrity, dignity and grace. And, she has fun along the way – it is still a game."
Barry, the first woman ever to earn a basketball scholarship at the University of Kentucky, started her head coaching career at Cincinnati in 1979, an era when women's sports were just beginning to feel the impact of Title IX. After four seasons there, she accepted a job offer from then-CU athletic director Eddie Crowder at Colorado, where she found a department still in the throes of a financial crisis.
It was a less-than-optimal beginning. In her first two years, the Buffs went just 16-40, a record that tested even her steely confidence.
But her boss — Bill Marolt had replaced Eddie Crowder soon after her arrival — never lost faith.
"Bill was a great motivator and leader and mentor," Barry said. "We were losing those first two years and he looked me in the eye and said, 'Keep doing what you're doing. You're recruiting good players, you're building a foundation, you're on the right track.' He's the one that really reinforced that we were on the right track."
Marolt's confidence paid off. Barry's Buffs went 21-9 in her third year, and the program was off and running.
(Side note here: Marolt is also the A.D. who handed former football coach Bill McCartney a contract extension in the midst of his third straight losing season, a 1-10 year that proved to be the last losing season in McCartney's tenure.)
Barry's teams soon took Boulder by storm. The Buffs won their first Big Eight title in 1989 with a perfect 14-0 mark, leading to their first NCAA Tournament appearance — and the first-ever CU Events Center sellout crowd when CU hosted the first round of the tournament.
That began an era when crowds for the CU women regularly matched the CU men. To this day, Barry's teams still have four of the top 25 crowds in Events Center history.
Those team also helped women's sports at Colorado gain a much-more equal footing with the men's teams. When Barry first arrived in Boulder, she and her assistant coaches and trainers regularly drove vans to transport the team on the road.
But soon, they were enjoying the same treatment the men's teams were receiving — chartered planes, then buses from the airport.
"To watch women's sports go from not being valued to being valued was really very special," Barry said. "You look back and you see the advancements that have been made, and it's a good feeling to know you had a role in that."
Sheetz, who played at Colorado from 1991-95, said playing for Barry "was like going to class every day."
"She was a great teacher," Sheetz said. "I loved every minute playing for Coach Barry. She challenged me to think the game more than I had ever had to. She taught me how to be an extended coach on the court and how to be a good teammate. She taught me how to wrap my arms around everybody on the floor and enhance their strengths and not get caught up in their weaknesses. She made me think strategically. If you paid attention, you learned something new every day."
Sheetz played on four straight NCAA Tournament teams — including two Sweet 16 groups — that compiled a 106-21 record in that span. She will be part of a large contingent of former players, assistant coaches, family and friends who will be in Knoxville for Saturday's ceremony.
Barry retired after the 2005 season and assumed a role as an associate athletic director in the department. But there's no doubt her coaching days are still some of the most special times in her life.
"Just a flood of memories," Barry said of her thoughts leading up to Saturday's induction. "Probably the best time of my life professionally. A lot of things came together at the right time to allow us to compete at a high level in a very competitive women's sports environment.
"But you also remember the great relationships. If you are involved in this business, it's about relationships and my time as a coach certainly allowed me to develop so many of those over the years."
Sheetz said she has heard from a long list of former teammates and players who will attend Saturday's Hall of Fame festivities.
"I think we were all impacted by Coach Barry in a lot of ways," she said. "But if there's one thing that says how much she meant, I think it's this: even today, I try not to do anything that would disappoint her."
Contact: Neill.Woelk@Colorado.edu
 
Always loved what she has done at CU, but even better are the conversations I have had the pleasure of sharing with her. She is a beautiful soul, with great talent and is well deserving of the accolades.
 
Fagan has turned into a really good writer. I need to read more of her material.
 
Kate has written two books that I have read. One is a memoir of her time at CU. It's called The Reappearing Act.

Her most recent book is What Made Maddy Run? It is a look at suicide among college athletes. Sobering.

Both are available on Kindle.
 
http://www.buffzone.com/womensbasketball/ci_31919312/cus-ceal-barry-turned-love-sports-into-hall

CU's Ceal Barry turned love of sports into Hall of Fame career

Former Buffaloes coach will be inducted into Women's Basketball Hall of Fame on June 9

By Brian Howell
BuffZone.com Writer
Posted: 06/02/2018 03:32:06 PM MDT


Former Colorado coach Ceal Barry holds the game ball after defeating Nebraska in 2005 at Coors Events Center. (John Leyba / The Denver Post)

Former Colorado coach Ceal Barry shown playing for the University of Kentucky in 1976. (Courtesy photo/Ceal Barry)
In the spring of 1983, 28-year-old Ceal Barry arrived in Boulder hopeful of taking the next step in her career, but uneasy about the obstacles in her way.
A Kentucky native, Barry was lured away from her job as the women's basketball coach at Cincinnati by the opportunity to coach a Colorado team in a higher profile conference, the Big Eight.
In Colorado for the first time in her life, she had no idea where to shop, let alone recruit.
She also joined an athletic department that had no other females in coaching or administrative positions and was just three years removed from cutting seven varsity programs because it was severely in debt.
"My first year was gloom and doom," Barry, 63, said. "All I ever heard was budget cut, budget cut, budget cut. (CU president) Arnold Weber hired me because I was an accounting major and I had been a head coach and he said, 'Can you run it on this budget? ' And, I said, 'Yeah.'
"I felt like an outsider. I was afraid, a little bit scared. I'm out of my comfort zone. But, there's nothing like knowing if you don't win, you're going to lose your job. There's no greater motivator than fear, I think. If you lose, you're done; and I wanted to coach that bad."
Never one to let obstacles get in her way, Barry turned that motivation into a remarkable career. She won a lot of games, but also had a positive impact on countless people and played a role in the development of women's athletics around the country.
On June 9, she will be one of seven people inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Tenn.
"It's certainly an honor and it's humbling," said Barry, the senior women's administrator in the Buffaloes' athletic department. "It's nice to be recognized. I think anybody would like to think, 'Maybe I was a small part of pushing it forward. I was just a little segment in there to help push the whole thing.'"

Former Colorado coach Ceal Barry won 427 games during time in Boulder. (Karl Gehring / The Denver Post)
Barry has had an influential role in the history of women's sports, and not just because she posted a 510-284 record as a college basketball head coach, including 427-242 with 12 NCAA Tournament appearances in 22 seasons at CU.
"I think it's incredible," current CU women's basketball coach JR Payne said of Barry's impact on the university. "Everything she accomplished here just speaks for itself. The record and the young women she coached. What those women are out doing in the world — doctors and coaches and teachers and so many incredible things — speaks to the type of program she ran."
Barry recalls some fortunate circumstances and influential people that put her on the right path, but it's how Barry took advantage of her opportunities — and then made an impact on so many others — that has defined her career.
Barry grew up in Louisville, Ky., at a time when females didn't have many opportunities in sports, especially in public schools. She attended Catholic schools, however.
"There was a public grade school right across the street from my grade school and I would walk to school every day and be so happy I was going to the Catholic school because I got to play sports," she said. "The Catholic schools in the Midwest offered sporting opportunities for girls. We had all the things that probably the public school kids didn't get until the 1980s."
Barry played softball, volleyball, field hockey and track and field. When she got to Assumption, an all-girls Catholic high school, she starred in basketball.
The opportunities in her youth led her to the University of Kentucky, where, as a freshman in the fall of 1973, she played basketball but got a first-hand look at gender inequality in sports.
"It was the first public school I ever went to," Barry said. "The girls sport teams were not valued. There was a huge difference in the men and the women and I didn't like it."
Title IX, which provided more equal educational and athletic opportunities for women, was signed into law by U.S. president Richard Nixon in 1972, but didn't need to be implemented until 1975. Barry got an up-close view of the before and after of that landmark law.
"Experiencing Title IX at age 20, I had a much broader perspective of why it was needed," Barry said.

CU associate AD Ceal Barry, right, has spent the past 13 years working in the athletic department under athletic directors Mike Bohn and Rick George. (Cliff Grassmick / Staff Photographer)
Barry's first coach at Kentucky, Sue Feamster, was the director of women's sports at the school and leaned on Barry, who was not only a driven accounting major, but poured her heart and time into athletics.
Kentucky had an annual budget of $3,000 for all of its women's programs combined, which meant players and coaches typically had to fund road trips and meals. Often those trips started with Barry picking up the station wagons for the team, which would leave at Noon, drive a few hours to a regional opponent, play that night, stop at McDonalds for dinner and drive back to Lexington.
"We did that all the time," Barry said.
When Title IX was finally implemented at Kentucky, the budget for women's sports went from $3,000 to $100,000. That was life-altering for Barry - who, as a senior, became the first women's basketball player in Kentucky history to be on scholarship - and many others around the country.
Prior to Barry's senior year, Kentucky hired a full-time women's basketball coach, Debbie Yow, for the first time.
"When Debbie Yow came, that probably changed me," Barry said. "That was probably the biggest switch for me in terms of what I wanted to do with my life."
While Feamster had been encouraging Barry to pursue a career as a women's athletic director, the hiring of Yow showed Barry that coaching - something she had long considered - was a real option. Barry was inspired by the way Yow ran the program. Yow, in turn, was grateful for the impact Barry had on that team.
"The squad she captained was Kentucky's first-ever nationally ranked women's team," said Yow, now the athletic director at North Carolina State. "She never takes credit for leading the team, but she did. It was obvious that the others respected her. She played all out and enjoyed the team environment.
"Her extraordinary success as a coach and administrator is, in part, a reflection of her ability to connect with people. That trait was present even when she was an undergraduate."
Shortly after Barry graduated, Yow helped her land a position as a graduate assistant at Cincinnati - first under former NBA player Tom Thacker and then Juliene Simpson. During those two years, Barry spent parts of her summers working in San Francisco at a camp run by Billie Moore, who coached Team USA's first Olympic appearance, in 1976.
"I learned a ton," Barry said. "There was never a better teacher I saw teach the fundamentals of the game - shot, footwork - it was stuff I used throughout my whole career."
At 24 years old, Barry was offered the head coaching job at Cincinnati and, at the urging of her father and legendary coach Pat Summit, she accepted it and used fear as motivation.
"I'm thinking, 'What if I mess up? What if I don't win? At this point, at age 24, you kinda know you have to win. We won."
After four years and an 83-42 record with the Bearcats, Barry took on the challenge of coaching the Buffaloes.
Although the early 1980s were tough on CU athletics, Barry looks back now and said that by the time she got there "probably the worst was over." It certainly helped that the football program was on the upswing with Bill McCartney entering his second season as head coach.
Barry was hired by athletic director Eddie Crowder, but a year later, he was replaced by Bill Marolt, a CU alum who had coached the Buffs' ski team to seven consecutive national titles in the 1970s.
Along with Yow and Moore, Barry considers Marolt to be one of the three most pivotal influences in her career.
"Bill could relate to a coach who was coaching a non-revenue sport," Barry said. "I think that helped me to report to someone who ... was a Coloradoan and gone to school here, had coached here and had coached a non-revenue sport."
Barry's Buffs went 16-40 in her first two years, but Marolt kept her going.
"He said, 'You're on the right track,'" Barry said. "I think Bill gave me a lot of confidence."
On the recruiting trail, Barry's first signee was Erin Carson, a 5-foot-11 guard from British Columbia. In-state stars Tracy Tripp, from Fort Collins, and Bridget Turner, from Aurora Hinkley, soon followed. Barry also convinced Crystal Ford, a 6-foot-2 center from Kansas City, to pick the last-place Buffs over first-place Missouri.
"My third year we did much better," she said. "We turned it around."
A 21-9 record in Barry's third season began a 12-year run of success that included eight NCAA Tournament appearances. Barry, of course, gives the bulk of the credit to her assistants and players, including Shelley Sheetz, Jamillah Lang, Jenny Roulier and other stars that came through Boulder.
"It was lot of hard work and it was a lot of fun," she said. "I worked at it along with my assistants. I had great assistants. We were all into it. All of Boulder was into it; all of Colorado was into it. It was fun."
Only once did Barry ever consider leaving, in 1988 when she interviewed at Kentucky.
"That had always been my dream job," she said, but added that during that interview she realized CU's program was in better shape.
"I thought, 'I'm where I need to be,'" she said.
She guided the women's basketball program for another 17 years and was only 50 when she retired from coaching after the 2004-05 season. The Buffs had gone 9-19 that season, and CU was no longer the main attraction to in-state recruits.
In her final years, Barry saw the top in-state players picking Baylor, Connecticut, Duke, Notre Dame, and Stanford over CU.
"It kind of crushed me really; it still kind of hurts, to see those in-state players in the 80s and the 90s who thought it was an honor to play at Colorado and the next decade they don't think we were good enough," Barry said. "I took that personally.
"I just felt like I wasn't doing the job at the level it should be done."
In the ensuing years, Barry's mother would tell her she never should have resigned, but Barry said, "You can't go through life second-guessing decisions that you make."
Chancellor Phil DiStefano immediately hired Barry as an administrator, and she has spent the past 13 years working in the department under athletic directors Mike Bohn and Rick George.
Barry, along with George, has played a significant role in CU's gender equity plan — which is among the best in the country — while overseeing positive changes in volleyball, soccer and other sports.
"Just an icon here on campus, and not just in the athletic department," said CU associate AD Lance Carl, who was a freshman football player during Barry's first season in Boulder. "When I think of Ceal Barry, I think of stability and I think of someone who really genuinely cares for CU and our student athletes and wants to see them be the best that they can be when they leave here.
"To me, she's been very valuable as a mentor for me. She was able to give me a one-on-one of the department and kind of hold my hand a little when I started here four years ago (in administration). Ceal and I have had a relationship over the years and she's just an amazing woman."
Growing up in a time of transition for women's athletics, Barry admits she was among the skeptics when Title IX was passed, wondering "how will we ever catch up?"
More than 45 years later, women's sports do not generate the same type of revenue that men's sports do, but in many ways there is equality. It's because of people like Barry, who cultivated a love for sports on the grade school blacktops in Louisville five decades ago, and then became a Hall of Famer by winning games and opening doors for others.
"At the end of the day, athletics and sports and activity and participation in all of those things are good for our country, good for our kids, good for students," she said. "It's a good thing for people to participate in; otherwise I wouldn't be involved in it."
Contact staff writer Brian Howell at howellb@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/BrianHowell33

Total 510-284

Colorado associate AD Ceal Barry will be one of seven people inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame on June 9. (Cliff Grassmick / Staff Photographer)
[TBODY] [/TBODY]
[TBODY] [/TBODY]
 
Just watched Coach Barry's acceptance speech. Her 93 year old mother is in the front row. Her parents used to come to a lot of games. Said many of her family members are there. Shelley Sheetz escorted Ceal to the stage. Benita Martin and Annan Wilson are also there. Several assistant coaches and staff members are in Knoxville including Barb Smith, LaTonya Watson, Tanya Haave, Kris Livingston and Teri Morrison.

Loved Ceal's stories about playing sports with her brothers and sisters and how her dad told the neighborhood boys to go home if they weren't going to let Ceal and her sisters play.

Hope the Colorado flag still flies proudly at the Barry household. Go Buffs!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top