Anne Dowie

IT IS AN ELOQUENT DECLARATION OF HER resiliency and steely resolve that Joanne Boyle says she’s tired of talking about the event that could have killed her, or at the least left her impaired forever. It’s not that she no longer recalls the surprise and suddenness of the searing pain in the back of her skull, or her first and last cogent thought for a while that an anonymous assailant had stabbed her from behind. She prefers to talk about here and now and about moving forward, about aspirations and challenges and living up to her responsibilities to help a group of young women student athletes meet theirs.

"Here and now" was a Monday morning with the January sun slanting into her Haas Pavilion office as Boyle sat meditatively overlooking Spieker pool. The previous day, her talented, freshmen-laden team had dropped its first home game of the season. Even with a thin bench, the Bears had played an up-tempo first half to scratch out a 9-point halftime lead over Arizona. But the deeper, fresher, and more experienced Wildcats overran the Bears midway through the second half, to lead by 13 with less than six minutes remaining. The Bears regrouped and cut the lead to 1 before poor free throw shooting doomed them to lose by 4.

"Specific things came back to bite us," she was saying, ticking off a list of deficiencies—the missed free throws, turnovers, poor defensive communication late in the game, letting the other team regain its confi dence, allowing too many Arizona fast-break baskets. "These are tangible teaching tools. I have been presented with a great teaching opportunity."

Four and a half years earlier, she was midway through her ninth year as an assistant women’s basketball coach at Duke University, where she’d played in the 1980s, when on November 28, 2001, after jogging on the Durham campus, she was felled by a brain hemorrhage. She spent 13 days in Duke University Hospital— many of them in intensive care—as friends and family held vigil. Her life flickered and her fate seemed up for grabs. An abnormal cluster of blood vessels was spotted in her brain. Surgeons removed the bunched vessels and gave her body a chance to right itself. Joanne Boyle did her part. She had to learn to walk again, to feed herself, to speak. She exercised with excruciating repetition to regain her motor skills. And by late winter 2002, she rejoined the Blue Devils and helped coach them to the NCAA Final Four.

"The sickness forced me out the door," she says, noting she is repeating what she has said before about her life-changing experience. "By overcoming this, I had given myself permission to take on new challenges." She was referring to the offer she received in spring 2002 to become the head coach at Richmond University, which meant taking over a basketball program that had been mediocre at best. "I had even given myself permission to fail."

Boyle was familiar with failure, having joined a Duke team that finished last in the Atlantic Conference the year before she arrived. Similarly, Richmond had gone 14- 16 during the 2001-02 season, the year before she accepted the challenge to turn things around. During the next three years, the Spiders went 67-29, with a 23-8 record in 2004-05, competing in the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 14 years.

That got first-year Cal Athletic Director Sandy Barbour’s attention. "I had known about Joanne through my associations with Duke, and I certainly watched her succeed at Richmond," she recalls. "She had character; she appeared to be a good academic fit here, and she had been involved with or directed programs that had reached levels we aspire to. She seemed to have exceptional standards and certainly some remarkable personal experience."

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