Lynette WoodardWoodard, the talented Wichita native, started making her mark early on the basketball court. As a ninth grader at Marshall Junior High School, Woodard was asked by the coach at Wichita North High to join the junior varsity team, but she declined. She preferred to wait until the following year to join the varsity team. At five-foot-eleven, Woodard was a standout in women's high school basketball. As a sophomore, she led her team to win the 5A state championship in 1975 and two years later received national recognition as an all-American high school team member. Woodard took her team-playing philosophy to the University of Kansas in 1977. The Lady Jayhawks won three straight Big Eight Championships during Woodard's career with a 108-32 record (1978-1981). Woodard scored a total of 3,649 points in four years. Many of her records and honors are still unchallenged today. The Kansan next put her talent to work for the U.S. Olympics. In 1980 Woodard was selected as one of twelve on the Olympic women's basketball team, but due to the U.S.-led boycott, her team did not participate. However, Woodard led a second Olympic women's basketball team to victory and to a gold medal in 1984. In 1985 Woodard was signed as the first woman on the world famous Harlem Globetrotters. She played as a Globetrotter for two years before competing professionally on Japanese and Italian teams. In 1990 she was inducted into the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame. The Cleveland Rockers signed her in 1997 to play in the new Women's National Basketball Association. Woodard served as the first athletics director for the Kansas City (Mo.) School District, as vice president of marketing for Magna Securities Corporation in New York City. In 1999 she began work as special assistant for external relations and women's basketball at the KU Athletics department, and head coach beginning in 2004. She was named one of Sports Illustrated's hundred greatest women athletes in 1999. In 2005, Lynette Woodard was inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame. Dr. Robelyn GarciaDr. Robelyn Garcia had a stellar prep school, college and professional basketball career. As an all-star shooting guard she has had high scoring games of 56, 46, and 40 points. As a professional player Garcia won the first WBA championship alongside her Kansas Crusaders teammates in 1993. The following year her Kansas City Mustangs team went undefeated with a 15-0 record. She was also a 4-time WBA All-Star featured on the collector WBA All-Star Card Set by Fair Play Sports. “Robbie” lead the nation in scoring her freshman year in college with 31.5 ppg, she was a NJCAA VI All-American, and she is the career all-time leading scorer at Dodge City College where she is being inducted into the Athletic Hall of Fame in May, 2015. Dr. Garcia has been a multidisciplinary professor for over twenty-five years. She currently teaches criminology, bio-gerontology and lifespan health and wellness at Arizona State University (ASU), Senior University and Personal Professors Online Academy. Dr. Garcia has eight college degrees and is currently working on her second doctorate at ASU as a Post-Doc Scholar in the Behavioral Health Program. In addition to her teaching she has several publications and has most recently been awarded a seat on the editorial board of International Journal of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Colleagues, family and friends call Dr. Garcia an academic nomad and basketball gypsy because she has played, studied and worked at so many universities and lived in so many places. She has taught and studied at 23 colleges and lived in 11 different states including Arizona, California, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, British Columbia (Canada) and Nuevo León (Mexico). So far she has lived in 21 cities with the most time accumulated in Scottsdale, AZ, Wichita, KS, and Paradise Valley, AZ. Garcia is currently a resident of Scottsdale, Arizona where she is excited to be launching her “Dr. Robelyn Garcia Scholarship” program in mid 2015.
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