1975 Trinity Women's Basketball team beats Texas
In the 1975-1976 season, the Trinity Women’s basketball team had “the greatest victory Trinity has had in anything” according to coach Libby Johnson (Trinitonian 1975, p. 7). The Trinity women’s basketball team beat the University of Texas Longhorns 67-66 in a regular season game at Trinity’s Sam’s gym (Trinitonian 1975, p 7). It took a comeback effort from the Trinity Women’s team. In the first half, the Trinity women’s team found themselves down 19-10 but came back to only trail 28-27 at halftime. The second half turned out to be full of back and forth action and with 33 seconds left Trinity found themselves down 66-60 and without possession of the ball. This was before the three point line so making up a 6 point deficit in 33 seconds would take some magic. First, Trinity drew an offensive foul to get the ball back and followed that with Jill Harenberg getting a bucket to cut the lead to 66-62. In the next play, Harenberg stole the inbound pass and passed to Patti McBee who scored to make the score 66-64. In the following play, it was McBee who stole the inbound pass and passed to Harenberg who scored while being fouled to make the score all tied up 66-66 and had a free throw to take the lead. Harenberg made the free throw to put Trinity ahead 67-66 with 17 seconds left in the game. In the final possession of the game, the Longhorns needed to score to avoid losing the game but Trinity’s Harenberg stole the ball with 4 seconds left in the game sealing the victory for Trinity (Trinitonian 1975, p.7).
After the final buzzer, the crowd rushed Trinity’s bench with great excitement. After the game, Patti McBee was in tears of joy when asked about the game and being surrounded by the wild crowd. “I told the girls at halftime we could come back and beat them but I didn’t think it would be like this” said McBee. Coach Libby Johnson described this win as the “greatest victory in the history of this town” (Trinitonian 1975, p. 7).
This victory was very important in gaining interest and attention for the Women’s Athletics program at Trinity. This was in the second season in which the Women’s sports teams were referred to as Intercollegiate Athletics instead of Extramurals (Trinitonian 1974, page 11). Shirley Poteet brought up this game when describing some of Libby Johnson’s accomplishments. During her time as coach of the Intercollegiate Athletics Women’s Basketball team she was 60-64 from 1974-1980 excluding the 1976-1977 season which was not listed (Trinity, 2015).