Mary Pat Travnik Connolly: Illinois’ first female scholarship recipient
April 20, 2022 | General, Women's Basketball, Title IX, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
FEATURE
By Mike Pearson
FightingIllini.com
Mary Pat Connolly readily admits that, as a teenager, she was a tad bit immature. She didn't have a clue about the history young Mary Pat Travnik was making in becoming the University of Illinois' first women's athlete to earn a full scholarship.
The lanky six-footer from Chicago's Marquette Park and West Lawn neighborhoods had made a fairly significant mark for herself as a player at Lourdes High School. Only four years earlier had she been formally introduced to the game by her eighth-grade science teacher, Bob Lenihan.
"He asked me if I'd ever played basketball before," Connolly remembered. "I said that I hadn't and then he told me that every Saturday he was going to take a group of us girls over to Gage Park to play. For an hour and a half, we'd do right-hand layups and left-hand layups, and then we'd play a game. There wasn't any other girls' team that we knew about, so we went for a whole season without playing because no boys team would play us. Then when we got to Lourdes, we didn't have a girls' team, so he asked our principal if he could begin a basketball program there."
The principal liked Lenihan's idea and four years later, during Mary Pat's senior year, Lourdes won the girls City Catholic League title.
"I recall scoring 32 points and pulling down I don't know how many rebounds in the championship game," she said. "Well, I didn't think that was anything unusual. I was always tall and a good rebounder. We had a great point guard who would always lob it to me, and no one could ever stop us. I remember the mother of one of my teammates telling us 'You girls are way ahead of your time.'"
With women's collegiate programs sprouting up around the state because of Title IX, Lenihan took it upon himself to promote his players to the college coaches. He received positive feedback from Steve Douglas, the assistant athletic director Karol Kahrs had appointed to head up UI's first-year program in 1974-75.
"I remember Bob telling me one day, 'Hey, Mary, this guy, Steve Douglas from the University of Illinois wants you to take a visit.' I said, 'Oh, okay, sounds good.' So I drove my parents' station wagon down to the University of Illinois by myself and Steve met me outside the football stadium. Then he took me to IMPE … and wow … I saw all of these racquetball courts and basketball courts and the swimming pool. I'd never seen anything like that before. After a while, he asked me if I thought I'd like to come to school here and I said 'Oh, my God, yes!' He started telling me about Title IX. He told me that I'd have to pay my own tuition that first year, but in my sophomore, junior and senior years, I'd get everything paid for … tuition, books, fees, housing. I couldn't believe it!
"My parents had six kids and we were just middle class and I thought they were going to be ecstatic. The tuition at Illinois at that time was $600. Well, that was the same as my high school tuition. So I told Steve, 'Oh, my God, I would love to come here!' So, when I got home, my parents asked me about my trip. I told them about Steve. 'He's really nice, just a gentle giant of a man. He's going to give me a full basketball scholarship.' And they're like, so what does that mean? When I told them that after that first year the University was going to pay for everything, they said 'Are you sure? I think he's pulling one on you.' I said, 'No, that's what he said!' My dad dropped me off at Illinois that Fall, and it all came true. So, I was the first women's scholarship athlete at Illinois."
Upon her arrival at Illinois in the Fall of 1975, Connolly initially practiced with UI's junior varsity squad, but her height and talent quickly prompted a promotion to varsity. She credits an upperclassman for making her transition more comfortable.
"I was pretty immature as a person that freshman year and I remember Sue Bonner taking me under her wing," Connolly said. "She was so honest and so tactful with me and I appreciated that. She was feisty and she put me in my place."
The conditions that surrounded the Illini women were pretty crude as compared to what today's athletes enjoy.
"Our locker room was at Huff Gym and we had to lift weights in the football weight room," Connolly said. "Huff was cozy, but it was better than what I'd had in high school. Then, when we moved over to the Assembly Hall, it was beautiful. By the time I was a senior, they started scheduling the girls' games ahead of the boys' games."
Travel to games wasn't anything fancy either.
"We traveled everywhere in vans and I remember us always fighting about getting to sit in the back seat," she said. "I never looked at our long road trips as a negative because that was time when we bonded with our teammates. Steve Douglas was noted for stopping at these roadside diners. Everyone would get seven or eight dollars. Then we started getting per diem and I was like 'Oh, my God, someone's handing me an envelope full of money.'"
Connolly's best Illini season came as a junior when she averaged 13.4 points and 11.2 rebounds and that drew interest from the fledgling professional organization, the Women's Basketball League.
"We were playing the state (college) tournament at Northern Illinois University and Doug Bruno (coach of the Chicago Hustle) was there watching," she said. "I was still six-to-eight credit hours short of graduating that summer when I got a call from Doug to tell me that I was going to be drafted into the pro league. He wanted me to play in the summer league that was taking place. Well, he didn't have to ask me twice. I just packed up and left."
As a pro, the rewards may have been minimal, but Connolly was grateful.
"I was making $8,000 a year and I felt rich," she said. "I was getting paid to play basketball!"
Connolly competed for three seasons, then had to find another job when the WBL folded.
She then worked as a foreman for six years for Chicago's Ryerson Steel in Chicago, but her real passion was to get into coaching. Married and raising three young sons, her first gig was as an assistant at Chicago's Maria High School. Jobs at Moraine Valley Community College and an assistant coaching position at UIC followed. When Marist High School went co-ed in 2002, the opportunity to build a girls' basketball program piqued Connolly's curiosity.
Twenty years later, Connolly—with more than 400 career victories in hand—remains as the head coach of the Marist Redhawks. Her teams have captured regional, sectional and super-sectional titles, as well as a fourth-place finish in the Illinois state tournament in 2008. She has produced numerous players who've gone on to collegiate success, including Sydney Affolter who is currently a freshman guard for the Iowa Hawkeyes. In 2021, Connolly was inducted into Marist High's Hall of Fame.
She's now in her 35th year of marriage with husband Mike and their family includes four sons, three daughters-in-law, four granddaughters and three more on the way.
"I've had a wonderful life," Connolly said. "I'm so grateful that I had the opportunity to do what I got to do."
