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Kitty Baldridge is the consummate teammate

By Jack Copeland
NCAA.org

Kitty Baldridge stood in the Atlanta ballroom where Division III had just wrapped up its 2010 Convention business, picking up one camera, then another to snap photos of a group that was posing on the dais.

She was taking pictures of one of her most recent teams – the Division III Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, on which she serves as a representative of the Division III Management Council – and she was making sure her teammates had something to remember the year by.

“It’s almost like coaching again, though I don’t have the role of a coach,” she said of her work with SAAC. “But I’m a team member, and I like that.”

She can give you a long list of memorable teams she’s been associated with, all the way back to when she was a grade-schooler, going on the road with her dad’s basketball squads from the Missouri School for the Deaf.

“I remember when I was 6 or 7… riding the bus with the team, sitting on the bench, and when the players would come out of the game, my dad would talk to them, and then on the bench I would talk to them, I think modeling what my dad said. I’d guess they just sort of thought I was a cute little mascot, but I thought I was coaching.”

After playing on the first five-on-five women’s basketball team at Indiana University, Bloomington, she followed in her father’s footsteps, coaching at Indiana School for the Deaf and then serving for 29 years as women’s basketball coach at Gallaudet, the nation’s foremost institution of higher education for the deaf.

All those Gallaudet teams might seem extraordinary, too, being deaf student-athletes tutored by a hearing coach. But Baldridge, a child of deaf parents who communicated easily with deaf students, tackled coaching pretty much like anyone else in college athletics – learning the same lessons as colleagues in the profession, while becoming a teacher as well as a coach.

And the members of her teams responded pretty much like student-athletes anywhere else, learning from mistakes and taking charge of the game.

“I evolved as a coach. I learned from my mistakes,” she said. “Mistakes and failures are great teachers … so I’m a firm believer in allowing students to make mistakes.

“What I enjoy about athletics and education is that the classroom is where students should feel free to make mistakes – to question, to spout off ideas that may or may not make sense, to test the ground. And then that prepares them for taking the test, where they demonstrate what they’ve learned and the tools that they have. It’s the same with basketball.”

Now, as director of Gallaudet’s general studies program and as the university’s faculty athletics representative, she is part of Division III’s leadership team, serving on the Management Council.

In that role, she again can draw from the example of her dad, a member of Gallaudet’s Athletics Hall of Fame who also starred in student plays, and from hundreds of women under her tutelage who thought of themselves not as “deaf student-athletes” but as college students who played a sport to win.

“The thing I love about Division III athletics is the fact that it gives student-athletes the opportunity to engage in other things that happen on campus,” Baldridge said. “Like my dad, for example, was able to be in the drama club, and performed on Broadway (he and a Gallaudet cast were invited by actor Boris Karloff to perform “Arsenic and Old Lace” one night at the Fulton Theatre).

“Those kinds of opportunities are available to our student-athletes now. They can be members of different clubs and organizations, and they really get to experience what college life is like. It’s not just two-dimensional; it’s multidimensional.”

It’s not just a snapshot from a camera, though it’s nice when your coach, your teacher or your teammate makes sure you walk away with a keepsake, too.