It was early October 2017 when Joy Boyenga-Woods got a call from the Merced High School athletics director.
 
Thirty years after she'd last played for the Bears, she had been voted in as part of their third Hall of Fame class. The next day, she visited her father, Jim, at his nursing home, a 10-minute drive from her house.
 
"Well," said Jim, smiling in his wheelchair. "It's about time."
 
A month after that call, he passed away from lung failure.
 
A middle school basketball coach for 35 years, James Joy Boyenga gave his daughter his name, a fierce competitive edge and her jump shot. It was their relationship that formed the foundation of a renaissance for the University of San Francisco's women's basketball program, a legacy that will be honored this month when Boyenga-Woods is inducted into the Dons' Athletics Hall of Fame.
 
"Without him," she said, "I wouldn't be here."
 
Though Boyenga-Woods never reached the NCAA Tournament herself, as the first recruit under co-head coaches Mary Hile-Nepfel and Bill Nepfel, she was a foundational piece for a program that would go on to win four conference titles in five years and make back-to-back trips to the Sweet 16.
 
"I think she probably was the catalyst to help turn the program around," said Hall of Fame point guard Tami Adkins, a 2017 inductee, one year Boyenga-Woods' junior. "I know their team accomplishments were much better, but individually, she was better. She was definitely a much better college player than me."
 
The 1989 West Coast Conference Freshman of the Year and a 1992 co-WCC champion, Boyenga-Woods finished her San Francisco career among the program's top-10 in eight statistical categories. She's still ninth in points (1,397) and fifth in rebounds (752). At 5-foot-11 with touch from long distance, Boyenga-Woods was a stretch four before such a term even existed.
 
Her signature follow-through — with her wide-spread hands held high — finished off a quick, economical shot honed over thousands of hours spent shooting with her father.
 
"We should have hired Jim as our shooting coach because he did a good job with her," said Bill Nepfel, who coached the Dons from 1987 to 2000.
 
An avid sportsman who played golf, bowled and fished, the Iowa-born Boyenga loved basketball more than any other sport.
 
Joy was only two when she began sitting on the bench next to her father as he coached boys basketball at Weaver Middle School in Merced, Calif. When Joy got old enough, she kept stats and accompanied him to high school and community college games, where they watched his former players.
 
"I was definitely my dad's little girl, that's for sure," she said. "I went everywhere with my dad."
 
In the fourth grade, Joy began riding with her father to Weaver every morning, where he would unlock the gymnasium and let her shoot before class. Most days, if he didn't have yard duty or meetings, he'd rebound and help her with her shot. They continued the routine for five years.
 
"If I'm in there shooting, and I miss one, he told me why and how I missed it," Joy said. "If I didn't use my left hand on the left side of the basket, I got yelled at."
 
Joy's image of her father is as her coach: Polished black tennis shoes and shin-high socks, with khaki shorts, a polo shirt and wide, gold-rimmed glasses, topped by a baseball cap pulled over his buzz-cut white hair.
 
"There was never a time he wasn't coaching," she said.
 
He bought Velcro-strap shot trainers to keep Joy's elbow straight and her follow-through true. He used a Polaroid camera to take photos of her shot so they could study her form together.
 
"You had to practice the right way," Joy said. "That old adage, 'Practice makes perfect'? No; perfect practice makes perfect."
 
When Joy entered seventh grade, Jim — who had long coached boys — switched to coaching the girls so he could continue to spend more time with his daughter. She'd already started beating him in H-O-R-S-E on the hoop in the family's backyard.
 
"In our household, you didn't let anybody win," said Boyenga-Woods, who competed with her father at everything from basketball to ping pong (she didn't beat him in the latter until she was an adult). "Any day I beat my dad at something was a great day, because my dad was good at everything."
 
"There was always constant competition, whether it was something simple or against another team," said Curtis Boyenga, Joy's brother.
 
When they moved to a four-bedroom, one-story stucco house closer to the high school the year before Joy enrolled, Jim nailed a backboard over the garage and painted a white-lined key in the driveway. Every day after school, the two would shoot together.
 
Even though Jim hardly missed any of Joy's high school games, his wife, Chris, filmed every one, so father and daughter could watch the tape as soon as they returned home. When Joy was a junior, about to board a bus for the first night of a tournament in Fresno, she was told that her father, then 50, had suffered a heart attack while teaching at Weaver.
 
"I knew if I didn't play in the game that night, he'd have had another one," Joy said. Merced won that night, and the next and the next, as the Bears took the tournament title. Joy played in every game and returned to see her father in the hospital every night.
 
Fearful Jim would have another heart attack, his doctors instructed him not to put himself in any more high-stress situations. That meant no more games, in person, at least.
 
For the rest of that season, Chris would come home with Joy after her games and dutifully plug the camcorder into the VCR so the two could break down tape. It was supposed to be less stressful that way.
 
"He would just be waiting at home on pins and needles," Boyenga-Woods said.
 
They continued their postgame breakdowns even when Boyenga-Woods headed to San Francisco.
 
The only times they didn't delve into postgame dissections were when she was helping one of her teammates out of a slump with hours-long shooting sessions after they finished up in the locker room.
 
The daughter of a coach, she knew how to take care of her teammates.
 
Off the court, she would help sooth broken hearts or bruised egos by driving them to Ghiradelli Square in her 1965 light blue Ford Mustang.
 
On the court, her father's competitiveness manifested itself on Boyenga-Woods' ferocious rebounding (pulling down 19 against Auburn in 1991), but it was her versatile offensive game that made the Dons a tough matchup. She could score at all three levels, but was particularly effective as a sniper for the Nepfels, setting program records for 3-pointers in a game (six against Texas Tech), in a season (40 as a senior) and for a career (78) with the shot her father engineered.
 
"She was a big reason why I chose USF," said Amy Touli, radio voice of the Dons and Boyenga-Woods' former teammate. "To be able to play with someone like her, who doesn't have a big ego, who's generous as a teammate, wanting to win, competitive — Joy certainly fit that bill, but wasn't a spotlight hog — she wanted her team to win. When you have that in your culture, you draw more girls in with that kind of attitude."
 
In 1992, Boyenga-Woods, flanked by Adkins, Touli and team scoring and rebounding leader Marlene Henderson (another USF Hall of Famer), won a share of the regular-season WCC title, and a berth in the first-ever conference title game. With the conference's first automatic berth to the NCAA Tournament on the line, San Francisco lost, 67-62. Boyenga-Woods was named first-team All-WCC.
 
After her collegiate career ended, Boyenga-Woods became a physical education teacher like her father, and eventually a coach at Merced High, where Jim helped keep stats and, as a favor, coached the girls' freshmen team for two years.
 
Boyenga-Woods and her father fished and golfed together, and she was even present for one of his nine holes-in-one. She was planning a fishing trip for them up to Canada four years ago, before he started to have trouble breathing as his lungs began to fail.
 
When Joy made her near-daily visits to Jim's nursing home, they'd watch sports on television, or she'd take him to watch her son's football games. He passed away on Nov. 5, 2017, four months before Joy was inducted into her high school Hall of Fame, and just weeks before Joy's son David played his first high school basketball game.
 
When Hile-Nepfel called Boyenga-Woods at home this past December to tell her she would finally be inducted into the Dons' Hall of Fame, 28 years after her final game, she felt a pang of sadness.
 
"The first person I wanted to tell was my dad," she said. "I know he's looking down, and he probably would be saying, 'About time.'"