Edwina Qualls savored chance to show young Black coaches that 'anything is possible'

Edwina Qualls laughed at the assumption she had once made. 

In the fall of 1976, she had just been hired as the women's basketball coach at Wisconsin, making history as the first Black woman to ever coach the sport in the Big Ten. These were early Title IX days and a lot of women's athletic programs across the country were trying to find their footing.

Qualls is from Connecticut and had experience bracing for cold weather. And so she thought that when the Badgers traveled across the Midwest during the winter basketball season, transportation wouldn't be an issue. Sure, a plane would be nice, but she figured the school would at least provide a bus with a driver to safely take her team to and from games in places like Michigan, Ohio and Minnesota.

That was not the case.

"We had to drive vans to the schools we played," Qualls told FOX Sports last week as she reflected on what became a trailblazing career. "And I mean, this was during the wintertime, not the summertime!"

The coaching staff back then consisted of Qualls and one part-time assistant. The two of them drove players hours to games no matter the forecast. She had to hit the road for recruiting trips, too, and lost control of a car once or twice because of icy conditions.

Qualls was just 28 years old navigating her first head coaching job at a big-time university, and she persisted no matter the obstacle. With limited budgets — Qualls remembers being paid somewhere in the "$9,000 to $10,000 range" — she always fought to live up to Title IX's promises of gender equity.

Qualls, who died unexpectedly on Feb. 19, just a few hours after speaking with FOX Sports, led the Badgers from 1976-86, guiding the program to a winning record in five of her 10 seasons. Wisconsin came in second in the Big Ten in 1983-84, which is still the best finish in school history for women's hoops. She was revered on and off the court, especially by her loving family. Growing up, her nieces and nephews thought of their aunt as a "badass basketball coach" who was "spunky, feisty and a fighter."

Those innate qualities served her well from the beginning. Prior to her career at Wisconsin, Qualls coached at RC Lee High School in New Haven, Connecticut, where she amassed an 82-15 record and won a state championship. She was named state high school coach of the year in 1975, though that award didn't account for the fact that she was quietly pulling not double but triple duty. Qualls simultaneously served as an assistant coach at Yale working under her mentor and Women's Basketball Hall of Famer Louise O'Neal, who coached her at Southern Connecticut State College. She was also taking graduate school classes at her alma mater because she was required to have a master's degree to achieve her goal of coaching college basketball.

How did she make time for all of that in her schedule?

"Most of the classes for graduate school were in the evening," she coolly explained. She coached high school girls' basketball in the afternoon, Yale in the evening, and pursued her degree after that.

Qualls' competitive childhood prepared her for that kind of grind. Growing up in the New Haven suburb of North Haven with three brothers and two sisters, she loved "anything dealing with running." She played softball, which sometimes meant being the catcher for her brother Nathan, who was a Little League pitcher.

Her earliest memory playing basketball was when she was 5 or 6 years old and Nathan tacked a peach basket onto one of the trees in their yard, and she attempted to shoot a ball through it. She became more serious about the sport once she got to high school, though at that time there weren't any girls' teams for her to play on other than a recreational team "usually with players four or five years older than me."

At Southern Connecticut State College, Qualls was on the basketball, field hockey, track and softball teams. But it was being coached by O'Neal that impacted her life the most.

"She had a great deal of influence on me to get into coaching," Qualls said.

After graduation, Qualls started teaching physical education at RC Lee High School. There wasn't an athletic program for girls at the time, so she created one. That meant filing a lawsuit against the New Haven Board of Education to pay for girls' athletic programs at three local high schools. Eventually, they settled out of court and each school received $5,000 to start a program.

That same year, Qualls led Lee to the state championship game, where the team finished in second place. The next year, it won it all.

"And four of my starters went on to become first-team all-state in Connecticut, which is unheard of because they only name five people to the first team," Qualls said. "And the fifth player was on the second team."

Qualls' next challenge after starting and developing one of the top girls' basketball programs in the state was coaching in college. And after cutting her teeth at Yale for a year, she was hired at Wisconsin.

"I felt that I would get the job at Wisconsin because they flew me out first class," Qualls said with a chuckle. She remembered her early impressions of the school being that it was bigger than the ones she knew on the East Coast.

As she settled in, Qualls could appreciate the historical context and weight of her position.

"Once I was there, I got more of an understanding of what it meant to have that job as the women's basketball coach and be in the Big Ten Conference," Qualls said. "Going around the conference, seeing some of the big-time men's coaches [at that time], you realized how important it was."

Qualls wasn't the only Black coach on campus at that time. In 1975, Pam McKinney was hired to coach the women's tennis team, and she became the first Black coach at Wisconsin. A year later, Bill Cofield was hired as the first Black men's basketball coach in Big Ten history. Qualls was hired later that same year.

"Wisconsin was actually very unique," Qualls said. "You felt they were progressive in that sense."

That didn't mean she wouldn't face challenges. The men's and women's basketball teams shared a court and sometimes, the men's practices would bleed into the women's. There were times that even a visiting men's team would get priority of the court, or the wrestling team would leave their mats out, according to a story on Qualls in the Badger Herald. In 1978, she filed a Title IX complaint alleging sex discrimination against Wisconsin.

"The disparities were there," Qualls said.

Initially, her position wasn't even full-time, though that eventually changed. Same thing with scholarships. In Year 1, players received partial scholarships where their tuition was covered, but room and board was not.

"You have to realize that most of your bigger universities were not putting money into women's sports [at that time]," Qualls said. "It was Title IX that accelerated everything for the women to have better funding in their athletic programs. So, therefore, I had a losing program in my first year. I lost more games than I did in my high school coaching career. So it was like, did I really make the right decision?"

Qualls said that members of the university board noticed the success Pat Summitt was having at Tennessee and thought women's basketball could be a "money-maker" at Wisconsin.

A few years later, the basketball program became the first women's team at Wisconsin to receive four full-ride scholarships, which helped her recruit some of the best players in program history. Theresa Huff, who played for the Badgers from 1979-83, was a finalist for the 1983 Wade Trophy, was inducted into the Wisconsin Athletic Hall of Fame and is still the program's all-time leading rebounder (1,201).

And, around this same time, the school finally started providing buses for road games.

"In one year, we were able to turn the program around," Qualls said.

Recently asked what it was like to be a pioneer, Qualls said that the most important thing about being the first Black women's basketball coach in the Big Ten was how it laid the groundwork for future generations.

"It allowed younger people to see that anything is possible," she said. "You don't realize it at the time, but it may have influenced others out there, young girls watching or coaches seeing a Black female in the Big Ten."

Qualls, who briefly overlapped with Vivian Stringer in the Big Ten when Stringer was coaching Iowa, was proud to see more Black women get opportunities in coaching positions, and of course wanted for there to be more. 

While she didn't have the chance to recruit her, Qualls watched South Carolina coach Dawn Staley play when she was a high school freshman in Philadelphia. Wisconsin was recruiting the center on her team, but Staley immediately caught her eye.

"I didn't know anything about Dawn Staley at the time because she was a freshman, but I said, ‘Wow, she could play in the college ranks right now,'" Qualls said, laughing.

"It's nice to see that Dawn is taking over now. And you're gonna see others as well. But Dawn Staley, she's gonna be in it for a long while."

Wisconsin didn't renew Qualls' contract in 1986. But by that time, she was burned out and ready for a change anyway. Qualls moved to North Carolina to take care of her mother. While she never coached basketball or worked in athletics again, she missed certain aspects of it.

"Coaching was always in my blood," Qualls said. "I loved the X's and O's."

Plus, Qualls continued, "I can live vicariously and watch on TV," which is something she said she always dreamed of. She knew one day that when the women's game was on TV, "everybody is going to be amazed."

"The women's game has really improved tremendously over the years, and it's great to see people like Caitlin Clark, she's making everybody watch women's basketball who maybe never watched it before," Qualls said. "It's so nice to see the growth."

Laken Litman covers college football, college basketball and soccer for FOX Sports. She previously wrote for Sports Illustrated, USA Today and The Indianapolis Star. She is the author of "Strong Like a Woman," published in spring 2022 to mark the 50th anniversary of Title IX. Follow her on Twitter @LakenLitman.