Stringer, the acclaimed coach of Rutgers University’s top ranked girls basketball team, the Scarlet Knights, had triumphed over so many personal hardships that Imus’ vicious words are just a small footnote in her life story.

She’s a tough, yet spiritual woman, who has overcome a multitude of private obstacles. She is the caregiver for Nina, her special needs adult daughter who has been wheelchair bound and unable to speak or walk since being struck with spinal meningitis as an infant. She is a single mother and widow, who held her husband Bill when he was struck with a fatal heart attack. She is a breast cancer survivor, who is a healthcare advocate.

Through it all, her faith has been steadfast. Whether she was coaching in Pennsylvania or Iowa, Stringer and her husband would gather their two sons and Nina and journey to church. “Sometimes when you don’t think you can make it, you really wonder if God is guiding you through,” Stringer told The Positive Community. “It reminds me of that poem ‘Footprints’ and the question was ‘when I needed you, where were you?’ It explains that one set of footprints when that person was walking on the beach was really the Lord carrying the person through.”

One of the “Winningest”

Over her 30-year career in college basketball, Stringer has victoriously carried through. She is considered one of the “winningest” coaches in women’s basketball history. On February 27, 2008 she joined college basketball’s most exclusive club, when she chalked up her 800 th victory—only the third women’s basketball coach and the first African American in history to accomplish that feat—and has taken three different teams to the Final Four, college basketball’s equivalent of the world series. Her perseverance, discipline and integrity has thrilled audiences and inspired over two generations of young women.

“At the core of everybody are the need and the desire to make a difference and to make people smile,” she explained. “Here we want our young ladies to understand that you have a tremendous impact on the young people who desire to be just like you. You have a responsibility in the positions you’ve been placed in to set the best example that you possibly can; and to remember whether its parents or friends, somebody impacted them in a very positive way too.”

In her poignant new book Standing Tall: Lessons on Turning Adversity into Victory, Stringer explores the life lessons she learned from basketball. “You can never really give up,” she stressed. “Winning is not always measured in the winning and losing. It’s where you came from. Not necessarily how you started, but how you ended.”

“In life you don’t know what your time clock is,” she pointed out. “You don’t know if you have today or tomorrow or you could live to be 105. All you have is here and now. You have the responsibility to try to be the best person that you can be, because, you don’t know how that is going to effect some one else’s life.”

The Coal Miner’s Daughter

Stringer grew up a coal miner’s daughter in rural Pennsylvania. In 1964, the NAACP intercepted so that her and a friend could become the first Black cheerleaders in the local high school. The eldest of six children, she was the first in her family to attend college. It was Slippery Rock University outside of Pittsburgh, where she also earned a masters degree and met her college sweetheart Bill, an athlete and educator. By 1971, there were married. Together she and Bill, were a team that spanned over 20 years.

During the seventies and eighties, Stringer reigned as the women’s basketball coach of Cheyney State in Pennsylvania. She not only created the team, in 1982 Stringer took this small black college to the first NCAA Final Four in women’s college basketball history. It was bittersweet moment. She discovered the NCAA spot while in her daughter Nina’s hospital room.

For awhile, the family commuted between the Philadelphia area and Syracuse so Bill could attend medical school. “I lived in a dormitory with the kids,” she recalled. “It was so funny. I was just as happy and I could be.” She even applied for a coaching position at Syracuse, but was dismissed and recommended that she look at coaching high school. Ten years later Syracuse was courting her to coach women’s basketball. “I told the guy, ‘do you realize I tried to apply for this job 10 years ago? I had just played in the Final Four and they thought that I was the maid,” she remembered. “He said: ‘Please don’t tell anybody.’ He felt so bad, surprised and upset. ” Ironically, years later Syracuse did hire one of her basketball protégés to coach women’s basketball.

Love, Loss and the Language of Hate

By the mid-eighties, Bill had dropped out of medical school and switched careers so that the family could to move to the University of Iowa for her career. In Iowa, a core of doctors was selected to help manage Nina’s care. Bill even designed special furniture to help Nina. He created an early version of the three-wheeled children’s stroller used by joggers.

“He still has an impact on my life. Bill was so kind and warm, always looking to help someone. He wouldn’t have it any other way,” she explained. “He would always look at the practical side of things. I will just shake my head and I know that I have been so blessed and so fortunate. It was just so strange that he was the one that death usurped and not me. It always seemed it would be me, because I’m the one who is always going at an extremely fast pace, getting very little sleep, and just not taking care of myself.”

Five months after Bill’s death, Iowa was headed to the Final Four, the first time a Division One coach had taken two teams from two different schools. Family beaconed her to move back to the East. Springer and her children moved to New Jersey, where she headed the Rutgers women’s basketball team. After her first year at Rutgers, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“I looked to find the answers when my daughter was devastated with meningitis. I was angry. I went through all those phases and yet, I’ve been told that I’ve been able to help others,” she said. Stringer found herself counseling people about care-giving, losing a spouse, and surviving cancer. “It is your faith. It is people helping people to get beyond the daily struggles of life. Sometimes it’s just that quiet voice.”

Sometimes Stringer can have a quiet voice. She had been attending Rev. DeForest Soaries’ church for over a year before they met. “When I met her, I was shocked that she had been coming to church with some regularity,” explained Rev. Soaries, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, NJ, and former Secretary of State for New Jersey. “It occurred to me that she was not interested in a relationship with the pastor from the largest church in town as much as she was seeking an authentic experience worshiping God.”

When the Don Imus situation happened, Stringer was stunned. “My initial reaction was that I was very angry and I cried to myself, ‘Why would somebody do this?’ Why did we have to be singled out?’” she recalled. “My first reaction was to find out how the kids felt about this.” At first her team tried to avoid the subject with her and only talk about the championship. “Their parents expressed anger. They said it was very hurtful and it was wrong,” she said. “The young people didn’t understand why their parents were so upset. They understood it better when they saw their parents or grandparents cry.”

A Quiet Spirit with a Forceful Will

Springer turned to her pastor for spiritual and strategic guidance. Rev. Soaries not only advised her in handling the media, he coordinated the meeting with Imus and the team members at the Governor’s (Corzine) mansion. At the meeting, the students directly confronted Imus about the implications of his insults.

“If it hadn’t been for Rev. Soaries, I don’t know what we would have done. What we went through with that Imus thing. He was the only one we could honestly trust. At the end of the day, he cared so much about us as young women,” she said. “It was his spiritual guidance and his ability to lead. He was my pastor and someone who the kids just love and respect. He had nothing up his sleeve other than the desire to have people respect us and our dignity.”

To Rev. Soaries, Stringer is a woman of history. “The more that you find out about Vivian Stringer, the more you see the kind of qualities that you imagined that people like Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells had,” Rev. Soaries pointed out. “You see her with the kind of quiet spirit on the one hand of Rosa Parks and you see her with the forceful will of Coretta King.”

Through Standing Tall, Stringer will inspire readers with her real life lessons learned from basketball. “Life is a change. The game is constantly changing,” explains Stringer. “How do you teach young people that success and failure are just points in the spectrum? So, you shouldn’t get too excited about either one. Or too worked up about it, because it could easily happen one way as it did the other.”