Английская Википедия:Catana Starks

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Catana Rhoda Johnson Starks (December 30, 1944 – September 6, 2020) was an American athletics coach. She was the first African-American woman to coach a men's team at the collegiate level, when she coached the men's golf team at Tennessee State University from 1986 to 2005.

Early life

Catana Johnson was born in Mobile, Alabama. She graduated from Tennessee State University, where one of her classmates was Olympian Wilma Rudolph. She earned a doctorate from Tennessee State in 1989, with a dissertation titled "An analysis of three methods of teaching physical fitness and their effect on strength, flexibility, and cardiovascular endurance" (1989).

Career

Starks coached high school swimming and basketball in Saginaw, Michigan in the 1970s. She became a swimming and diving coach at Tennessee State in 1980. She became head coach of the school's new golf program in 1986, the first African-American woman to coach a men's golf team at the highest collegiate level. She coached the men's golf team at Tennessee State from 1986 to 2005; her efforts to boost the team's profile included recruiting international students, which caused some controversy, especially in the 1998 season, when the team had only one African-American player. In her last year as coach, the team won the National Minority Golf Championship. Her former players included Canadian golfer Sean Foley, who in turn coached Tiger Woods, and Scottish golfer Robert Dinwiddie. She was also head of the Human Performance and Sports Sciences department at Tennessee State.

Starks' life story was dramatized in a film, From the Rough (2011), starring Taraji P. Henson as Starks. In 2014, Starks was inducted into the National Black College Alumni Hall of Fame.

Personal life

Catana Rhoda Johnson married Alfred Donnie Starks in 1964 and had a son. She later remarried. Starks died in 2020, aged 75 years, in Nashville, Tennessee.

External links

• "Pioneering Female Golf Coach Who Shaped Star Players", a 2014 profile of Catana Sparks on CBS Sunday Morning, on YouTube.
• "Barrier breaker: The Catana Starks story", a 2018 profile of Catana Sparks on the Golf Channel.