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Joan McDermott stood in the middle of a Hagen Gym volleyball court, and turned to watch as a teammate chased a ball. In her first semester at San Francisco in the fall of 1974, after transferring from San Diego State, McDermott had shown an affinity for the game during her P.E. Activities class, so much so that her professor — Dr. Geraldine Lauro — approached her during the break in the action. "We have a volleyball team," she said. "We're really trying to get things going."
McDermott recalled thinking, "What volleyball team?"
McDermott played for three years, and, thanks to Lauro's continued counsel, embarked on a career that has led her back to the Hilltop as Athletic Director — the second woman to hold the post in school history. In the years before Title IX, Lauro was the driving force in building the foundation for women's varsity athletics at San Francisco, and in the decades since, she's also been instrumental in the continued health and development of the program.
"It was Gerri's vision and energy that really got it moving," said Mary Hile-Nepfel, the Dons' Hall-of-Fame women's basketball coach and player who, like many USF athletes over the last 50 years, was also one of Lauro's students.
Athletes from Lauro's early courses in tennis, golf and volleyball formed the rosters of what would become the Dons' first women's varsity teams. In the classroom, she shared her excitement not just for women's athletics, but for education, inspiring generations of future teachers and coaches, including Hile-Nepfel — who attributes her coaching career to Lauro — and Suzanne Enos O'Meara, the first woman to receive an athletic scholarship from San Francisco.
Lauro was on the committees that recruited Sandy Hill — San Francisco's associate athletic director for 25 years and a pioneer in post-Title IX Dons athletics — and Bill Hogan, San Francisco's Athletic Director for 15 years. "She was just kind of the visionary," Hile-Nepfel said.
Creating opportunities for women in sports was a passion project for Lauro. As a young girl growing up in Brooklyn of the 1950s, she was admittedly her father's daughter. After World War II, Gerry Lauro — a former semi-pro football player —had opened a driving range at the end of Flatbush Ave., just a seven-mile drive from his family's Manhattan Beach home.
Gerry and Gerri spent days at the range as he taught her to golf. Later, the facility added tennis courts, and he taught her that, too. When she went to high school, she tried to join the golf team. Because she was a woman, she was turned away. There was no such thing as a girls' golf team.
"There was no intercollegiate sports or Interscholastic sports in the '50s in New York City," Lauro said. "Girls were not allowed to compete. They had no structure."
Lauro came to San Francisco in 1970 as a physical education professor and women's sports coordinator after doing undergraduate work at Wisconsin, then graduate work at Columbia and Cal.
Having seen women's sports work on the high school level while coaching track and field at Drake High School in Marin, and seeing the women's intercollegiate teams at Berkeley, she lobbied Dons athletic director Pete Palleta to let her sign San Francisco up for the Northern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, where the Dons' female students could compete against other nearby schools. He enthusiastically agreed. She continued to lay the groundwork for women's intercollegiate athletics by drumming up interest and participation in women's sports, as she did with McDermott.
"In those days, there wasn't a lot of, you know, hands in the pot," Hile-Nepfel said. "If you wanted something done, you kind of had to do it yourself. And I think she just took it upon herself."
When Title IX passed in 1972, the teams Lauro helped stock were ready to evolve into San Francisco's first true women's varsity teams. She coached the first women's tennis team herself and wrote the NCIAC's handbook in 1973.
Lauro attended league meetings, helped schedule matches and games and arranged for equipment. Her work led directly to that of Hall of Famers Hill and Dr. Anne Dolan, the vice-president for student development who oversaw the transition of women's sports from the physical education department to the department of intercollegiate athletics.
"Providing opportunity and being a teacher was my life's work," Lauro said. "Providing opportunities for valuable experiences been my job, has been my work — and good work — all along."
Enos O'Meara — a Hall of Famer in both basketball and volleyball — knew coming into San Francisco that she wanted to go into physical education, which became a major her sophomore year.
Enos O'Meara and her husband — now a professor at San Francisco's school of management — met on the Hilltop, and took Lauro's activities classes together, but it was Lauro's classes in the pre-professional teaching focus that had the most enduring effect. She's been an educator and school administrator for the last 40 years, including posts as a varsity volleyball and basketball coach.
"I can write lesson plans in my sleep because she did such a great job of teaching me," said Enos O'Meara, a Dons' Hall of Famer for both volleyball and basketball. "I kind of always knew what I wanted to do, but I just feel that she made that dream possible."
Lauro's passion for education inspired Enos O'Meara and others. For Hile-Nepfel, a freshman in 1977, that inspiration started in gold and archery classes on the grounds of what is now Negoesco Stadium.
"I was horrible," said San Francisco basketball's all-time leading scorer. "What amazed me was, it didn't matter what she taught us, whether it was motor development, if it was physical education curriculum or if it was archery. When she taught you something, it was hard not to get excited about it."
Unlike Enos O'Meara, Hile-Nepfel wasn't exactly sure what she would do after her basketball career was over. She hadn't thought about the possibilities of teaching or coaching until Lauro brought them up.
"She kind of gave me my start, in terms of just thinking about the possibility of teaching and coaching, regardless of what that level was going to be," Hile-Nepfel said. "At that time, I really had no idea what I was gonna do."
After graduating, Hile-Nepfel returned to coach women's basketball for 19 years, compiling 270 career wins and working in the same hallway as Lauro in the basement of War Memorial Gym.
The two chatted regularly, and Lauro was an enthusiastic regular in the stands, supporting both her current students and her former charge Hile-Nepfel guided her 1995-96 team to the Sweet 16.
Hile-Nepfel left the program in 2006, but in August of 2014, Lauro called to ask her to come back and teach the basketball P.E. class at San Francisco. Though she'd already agreed to came out of coaching retirement to take over the University High School girls' basketball team, she was happy to help out Lauro and teach a new generation of young women.
"I was thinking I'd probably just do it for a semester, mainly just to help her out because she was kind of in a bind to get somebody that late," Hile-Nepfel said. "I've been there ever since," Hile-Nepfel said.
When Lauro retired, she called Hile-Nepfel again to ask if she'd take the part-time job of overseeing the physical activity program, part of the kinesiology major. "Gerri, I don't know," Hile-Nepfel said. "I'm not really looking for any more work to be honest."
She's still doing the job, along with her duties coaching the Red Devils and teaching basketball to USF students.
When McDermott returned to the Hilltop from stints as a Division II athletic director to take the deputy AD job with the Dons, Lauro was thrilled. The two ran into one another at a Hall of Fame induction dinner soon after.
Lauro had vacated her office in the hallways below Memorial Gym a year earlier, but before she did, Lauro told McDermott, she'd found her old student files among her things, including McDermott's.
"I had it all these years," Lauro said.
After that mid-class chat in 1974, McDermott spent three years playing volleyball and later softball with the Dons, all while taking as any of Lauro's activities courses as she could. Eventually, she began taking educational theory courses with Lauro, as well.
As the semester went on, Lauro recommended McDermott take more P.E. classes, and then nudged her into maybe considering a minor in P.E., which she picked up as a junior.
When she reached her senior year, she knew she wanted to pursue coaching, but didn't quite know how. That spring, she had another conversation with Lauro. Down the street from USF — in the Richmond — Lauro said, was a small private school that needed a fifth-grade girls' volleyball coach: St. Thomas Apostle.
"I fell in love," McDermott said. "It changed my life."
The one-time sociology major (with a criminology minor) didn't realize, until Lauro advised her, that there was a professional path in women's athletics. They were growing, Lauro told her, and so were the opportunities.
"I think great teachers go out of their way to mentor students, and she's definitely one of those," McDermott said.
McDermott went from teaching P.E. at St. Thomas Apostle to becoming the school's athletic director, embarking on a collegiate volleyball coaching career before becoming an administrator, and eventually, the second female athletic director at USF, one of 39 female athletic directors in Division I sports.
Most rewarding for Lauro is the fact that, now, women's intercollegiate athletics are now a part of everyday campus life.
"I see that the opportunity is taken for granted, which is pleasing. It's okay," she said. "What do I see now? An enormous Increase in ability and an opportunity to achieve achieve an opportunity to experience all the good things, the value of being a collegiate athlete. That's truly a profound experience that stays with them forever."
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