University of Virginia issued the following announcement on Feb. 11
She will forever rank among the greatest players in the history of University of Virginia women’s basketball, and she was the first player from that program to have her number retired. But Cathy Grimes-Miller’s accomplishments extend far beyond the basketball court.
She went by Cathy Grimes when she arrived on Grounds in 1981, a few months after graduating from T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria. By the time she left seven years later, she had earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the College of Arts & Sciences, where she minored in Spanish, and a juris doctor degree from the School of Law. And she did all that at a time when African Americans were a tiny minority of the undergraduate and graduate student bodies at UVA.
“I enjoyed the experience,” Grimes-Miller, an attorney who works for the U.S. Department of Education, said in a recent Zoom interview, “but it was an experience, I will tell you that.”
At T.C. Williams, she’d been a part of a much more racially diverse student body than the one she joined at UVA. Grimes-Miller, who was born and raised in Alexandria, wasn’t the only Black player on the Virginia women’s basketball team, then coached by Debbie Ryan, but she believes she was the first one who “was really from the inner city, from an environment where I didn’t have the resources that might have been available to some of the other students, other players who may have come from two-parent households or who may have grown up in more of a suburban area and been exposed to a little bit more in terms of athletic or educational opportunities.”
Even so, she’d received an excellent education at T.C. Williams, Grimes-Miller said, and “I was just very disciplined and very focused. I knew what I wanted. And in my community, when people see that you’re working hard, that you’re a good person, that you’re trying to accomplish great things, you find that you have a lot of support.”
At T.C. Williams, Grimes-Miller played for head coach Ralph McGirk, who died last month.
“From day one, Coach McGirk believed in me and, along with my mother, was my biggest fan, advocate and supporter,” Grimes-Miller said.
McGirk, who was white, “ironically gave me some of the best advice I have ever received about being a Black athlete in America,” Grimes-Miller said. “At the end of the first day of tryouts after Coach McGirk was hired, he pulled me to the side, asked me about myself and my grades, and told me that I had a bright future ahead of me. He also told me that I would be doing many media interviews and that it was important for me to present myself well and to show that I was intelligent and articulate in order to knock down the false stereotype of the ‘black dumb jock.’ I never forgot that advice and live by it to this day.”
Before she enrolled at UVA, Grimes-Miller said, basketball had afforded her “the opportunity to travel and be exposed to a lot of different environments and communities. A lot of my friends who I played with and who I competed against lived in the surrounding area of Fairfax County and attended predominantly white schools. So I wouldn’t call it culture shock [at UVA], but it was very different. I think that because I was on the women’s basketball team, I was somewhat insulated from some of the larger issues that a Black student who was not part of a group coming in might have been exposed to, or I didn’t face a lot of the same challenges because I already had a built-in support system. A lot of my [older] teammates kind of took us under their wings and guided us and supported us and showed us the ropes.”
She and her husband, Wendell Miller, have been married for nearly 31 years. They live in Fort Washington, Maryland, about 20 miles outside Washington, D.C. Also in the area are their three children, all of whom have graduated from college: sons Geno and Wynn from the University of New Hampshire and Bard College, respectively; and daughter Chaise, from UVA. (Grimes-Miller’s great-nephew Khalek Shepherd played football at UVA, and her niece Reka Barton also graduated from the University.)
Chaise enrolled at the University in 2010, near the end of Ryan’s illustrious tenure as the Cavaliers’ head coach. Ryan had been in that position only four years when Grimes-Miller arrived on Grounds in 1981.
“Cathy was just a really soft-spoken, very intelligent person,” Ryan recalled recently, “and I’m positive that she chose UVA as much for the academics as she did for the basketball, probably more for the academics than basketball. We were really growing then. We weren’t really great, but she was one of those people that helped to build this thing to what it became, and she was one of the major foundation-layers of the UVA women’s basketball program.”
Grimes-Miller, who played forward, ended her UVA career as the program’s all-time leader in points (1,745), rebounds (932) and field-goal percentage (52.8). She was twice named All-ACC and was a two-time academic All-American.
“She was a captain, a really easy choice,” Ryan said. “She was just so intelligent that when she opened her mouth, everybody would stand there and listen to her. She was quiet and introspective, but very, very intelligent, and you knew that the minute she would start talking.”
When Grimes-Miller was a freshman, the Cavaliers defeated No. 6 Old Dominion, which was led by All-America center Anne Donovan, at University Hall and finished the season with a 17-11 record. They dipped to 15-13 in 1982-83, but as a junior she helped the Hoos win the ACC regular-season title, advance to the NCAA tournament, and post a 22-7 record. In her final season, UVA won 21 games and returned to the NCAAs.
“My last two years is when we really started making an impact,” Grimes-Miller said. “We had some huge wins over great teams.”
To have her number, 25, retired at UVA was an unexpected honor, she said. “That’s not something you think about as a player. All you do is you get out there and you play and you try your best to win and try to be a good teammate.”
Grimes-Miller laughed. “[Big East commissioner] Valerie Ackerman and I have a running joke, because she wore number 25 when she was at UVA. I came in just as she was graduating, and she told me one time, ‘I tell everybody that my jersey number was retired. I just don’t tell them who retired it.’
“It was just a great honor, and it still is. When I come back to the University and see my jersey in the rafters or on display, it gives me chills. When you’re young, you take a lot of that for granted sometimes, because you think you’re going to be young and flying high for the rest of your life.”
When she arrived at UVA, she was not intent on attending law school. She planned to major in psychology, but that was short-lived.
“I ended up taking a writing course my first year at UVA and I did really well,” Grimes-Miller said. “I got straight A’s and I realized that I was a pretty good writer. And I remember speaking to someone who said English is a great major for law school, because you have to be able to write. So when I heard that, I thought, ‘Well, let me major in English. It seems like I’m pretty good at it. I enjoy it, and it would leave an opportunity for me to apply to law school if I decide to do so.’ And then the more I got into the subject area, I really fell in love with it.”
She originally planned to play professional basketball overseas for a year or two, possibly in a Spanish-speaking country, and then attend graduate school, for law or a Ph.D. program in English literature.
Original source can be found here.
Alerts Sign-up