Bridgewater College Hall of Famer Laura Mapp has impressive coaching tree 

When Laura Mapp arrived at Bridgewater College in 1961, she coached field hockey in the fall, basketball in the winter and tennis in the spring.

“I continued to coach all three of those,” Mapp reflected in a recent interview.

And did she ever – for more than three decades while also teaching physical education classes.

“I retired from field hockey in 1995, basketball in 1996 and I continued to coach tennis until I retired in 1998,” said Mapp, 93, sitting in her room at the Bridgewater Retirement Community on a weekday morning. “There were three years in there where I didn’t coach tennis.”

A member of the Bridgewater College Hall of Fame, Mapp spawned an impressive coaching tree with several of her former athletes following in her footsteps as a coach or athletic administrator, or both.

“I had some very outstanding athletes and many from the local area,” said Mapp, who graduated from Northampton High on the Eastern Shore in 1950. “I appreciate many of them who continue to stay in touch with me and visit me in my retirement. I don’t have any family in the area so I have appreciated the contact and staying in touch with me. Many were local students and many have come back to the Valley after successful careers elsewhere. That has been a pleasure to stay in touch with them.”

She also had many players who made their mark in other professions.

Kaye Gardner, a 1980 Turner Ashby graduate, starred two seasons in hoops for Mapp at BC before transferring to JMU (as a student) enroute to a long career in nursing. Gardner, who scored 460 points as a sophomore for the Eagles in 1981-1982, learned a lot playing for Mapp.

“If I had to describe Miss Mapp it would be that she is a woman with impeccable character, poised and eloquent, stern yet warm, fiercely loyal, kind during disciplining, compassionate and caring, competitive and driven, and self-disciplined beyond measure,” Gardner wrote. “She coached and lived her life with less words than most and more with how she carried herself and lived her life.  She was the epitome of a strong role model to countless young women, and I am so grateful to be one of them.  She profoundly impacted my life in ways that are still with me today.”

Some of her former BC athletes who went into coaching and teaching include:

• Fonda Harlow, who was recently named the principal of Fort Defiance High School in Augusta County and as a coach led the school to a state title in volleyball. “Coach Mapp was a special example of a leader with high expectations,” Harlow wrote. “Her passion for basketball went far beyond the court; she wanted us to be productive individuals and taught many life lessons throughout practices, team activities, road trips, post game meetings. Long after my playing days, she continued to check in on how I was doing as well as other teammates. She is truly one of the greatest women I’ve known. and I am beyond blessed that I was able to be coached by her.”
• Mary Frances Heishman, who played under Mapp for the Eagles and then was a head coach at the school in multiple sports. “She was at Montevideo High (in Penn Laird) for four years then came back to Bridgewater in 1970,” Mapp said. “She was the first coach in women’s lacrosse at Bridgewater and was an assistant in basketball when she first came back. She went on and got her doctorate at Virginia and continued to teach. She had a 40-year coaching career.”
• Yvonne Kauffman, a long-time coach at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania who led the school to Division III national titles in basketball in 1982 and 1989;
• Dee Morris, who coached several years in Maryland.
• Barbara Purkey, who taught at Broadway High before coaching in the Baltimore area in a career than spanned more than 35 years; “to one of the best,” Purkey wrote on Facebook when Mapp turned 90 in November of 2022.
• Sharon Will, who also coached in the Baltimore area after playing field hockey and basketball under Mapp.
• Jean Willi, who played basketball under Mapp and was her assistant before becoming the head coach of the Eagles.

Heishman (class of 2010) and Willi (2022) are both graduates of Turner Ashby and both are in the athletic Hall of Fame at Bridgewater. Also in the Hall of Fame at BC are Morris (2009), Kauffman (1997), Purkey (2001) and Will (2002).

Mapp posted a record of 484-262 in basketball with the Eagles. Due in part to that legacy, the school entered the 1997-98 season with the second-most wins of a Division III school in women’s hoops. When Map retired, she was seventh among coaches at the Division I, II and III levels for wins.

Some of those wins came against Madison College, which is now JMU and competes at the Division I level.

From January 1973 to February 1979 the Eagles won two of seven meetings against the Dukes in basketball, according to the JMU website. The wins for Bridgewater came on Jan. 31, 1973 and Feb. 8, 1979.

The Eagles, under Mapp, also played several times against William & Mary, now a Division I member of the CAA.

Bridgewater first played the Tribe during the 1953-54 season and holds an edge of 12-10 in the series that lasted through the 1983-84 season. The Eagles are 29-24 all-time against JMU in a series that began during the 1920-21 season.

The Road to Bridgewater

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Mapp said she taught four years at Warwick High in the Tidewater region, got her master’s degree at the University of Tennessee, was at the University of Oregon and then coached two years at then Randolph-Macon Women’s College before arriving at Bridgewater in 1961. She played field hockey, basketball and tennis in college at what is now the University of Richmond.

“The NCAA did not have a women’s program until 1983,” said Mapp, noting that the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women existed into the 1980s.

Mapp gives a lot of credit to the Old Dominion Athletic Conference, including former commissioner Dan Woolridge and current leader Brad Bankston. “The ODAC has been very progressive in promoting women’s sports,” she said.

Mapp said it is hard to compare different eras.

“It is really difficult with men and women to compare records now and what they were in the 1960s and 1970s. You play more games now,” she said. “And in basketball, you have the three-point shot, and for the women it is a smaller ball. When I was first here in the 1960s, we played 10 or 12 games (in basketball) and that was it, and two of them were against Madison. We played at Godwin Hall once or twice. We probably played William and Mary more than any of the others. We played Maryland in basketball; we played Virginia and Virginia Tech.”

In field hockey, she won 224 games at Bridgewater and posted 161 victories as the tennis coach – for a total of 869 wins at the school.

“One of my favorite mantras of hers was: ‘we may be out skilled, but we’ll never be out conditioned.’  We had practices that felt like marathons and for at least the first hour or so we never touched a ball,” added Gardner, who lives in North Carolina. “We ran and ran and ran, did a lot of foot work and cardio drills.  And we did run teams ragged. She was widely known for her intensive conditioning, and I remember once the men’s coach brought his team to watch us condition and chastised the guys about how the women were in much better shape than they were. She posted the dreaded practice schedule on 4×6 yellow legal paper on her office door every morning.  We had to decide each day if we wanted to torture ourselves ahead of time by knowing how brutal practice would be. She had an infamous pointer finger up-in-the-air wag when she was upset or frustrated. You never liked looking over at the bench during a game and seeing her wagging finger while looking at you over the top of her glasses. Not good.”

These days, Mapp is now able to attend Bridgewater games in person. “I have not been able to go for a couple of years. I watch online. I watch the stats and follow them that way. Then I get the box score after the game,” she said, spoken like a true coach.