The Bluder Era: A lot of wins, a lot of kindness and a whole lot of fun
As Iowa's Lisa Bluder retires, it’s best to appreciate her impact beyond the numbers
A long time ago, I was covering a Drake women’s basketball game at the Knapp Center when, despite a 50-point Bulldog lead, the officials continued to call ticky-tack fouls. When one was called, again, with a few seconds left in the game, I threw up my pen and pounded my head on the press row table.
After the game, I was quizzed about that.
“I saw you banging your head on the table,” the woman said to me. “Shouldn’t you have been watching the game?”
All I could do was laugh. Because the woman who asked me that question was Lisa Bluder, who had been seated on the Bulldog bench across the court from me supposedly coaching her team.
“Shouldn’t YOU have been watching the game?” I said.
Lisa laughed, too.
“Yeah, it was pretty bad, wasn’t it?”
There was very little that was bad in Lisa Bluder’s 40-year career as a college basketball coach in the state of Iowa, which ended when she announced her retirement as the University of Iowa’s coach on Monday. At St. Ambrose, a job she started at age 23? She turned the Queen Bees into an NAIA power and Final Four regular. At Drake? She took a once-strong but sinking program and turned it into the mid-major success it remains today.
And Iowa? Only those who have recently emerged from a coma need to be told what happened there for the past 24 years. But the beauty of that is that the incredible success she built at the University of Iowa happened a mere 45 minutes from where she grew up.
Who gets to do that? Lisa Bluder.
The basketball bit of Bluder’s career will be detailed in many media outlets, and there is much to talk about. There’s 884 career victories and her standing as the Big Ten’s winningest women’s basketball coach. There are two NCAA runner-up appearances to go with 22 trips to the Big Dance in her career. There are all-Americans and attendance records and any number of things that make it clear she was pretty good at this coaching thing.
But when you know someone for 34 years there are things that go beyond statistics, particularly when those years go back to a time when reporters really got to know coaches and players because there were fewer of us covering the women’s game and papers actually paid you to do things like go on the road with a team.
So there are a lot of big wins and fun seasons, but the stories I remember best about Lisa are more personal. One in particular illustrates just what a master motivator she has been all along.
In 1994-95, the Drake women opened the season with a 13-game winning streak and a national ranking. My Des Moines Register assignment was to cover every game as long as they were winning, but the paper wouldn’t spring for more travel when the streak ended.
So I walked into my hotel in Normal, Ill., as the Bulldogs, staying in the same place, walked out to go to their shoot-around prior to their game at Illinois State.
“We’ll try to get a win for you, Jane,” assistant coach Jenni Fitzgerald said.
“Doesn’t matter to me,” I replied. “If you lose, I go back to Des Moines and if you win I have to go to Terre Haute [for Drake’s next game at Indiana State] and I don’t want to go to Terre Haute.”
Hours later, the Bulldogs played flawless basketball, barely missing a shot in the first half. Next to nothing went wrong as they beat the Redbirds to push their winning streak to nine games. I waited for interviews after the game, and one by one players walked past me saying, “Ha ha! You have to go to Terre Haute!”
Finally, I asked Bulldog star Kristi Kinne why everyone was teasing me about going to Terre Haute.
“It was Coach Bluder’s halftime speech,” Kristi said. “She said, ‘If we have to go to Terre Haute, Jane has to go to Terre Haute.’”
When I got done laughing I asked Lisa what the heck kind of halftime speech that was.
“You saw them play,” she said. “We had nothing to motivate them with. I had to think of something.”
Bluder created a fun environment to be in, but also a warm, human environment. She found players who fit that. And while I didn’t cover her teams at Iowa beyond a freelance piece now and again, it was clear that that remained the Bluder way until her final game last month.
That humanity was there when Iowa opened its 2022-23 season at Drake and the Hawkeye coaches were at center court before the game to honor former Bulldog Lisa Brinkmeyer, who died the following summer. The Iowa coaches, just like the Drake coaches, were decked out in “Brink’s Bench” T-shirts to celebrate Brinkmeyer and they were supportive throughout her illness.
Just last week, Nancy Stefani, the longtime official scorer for Drake women’s basketball dating back to the launch of the program in 1975, died. Lisa was a pallbearer (as was new Iowa head coach Jan Jensen, Iowa assistant Jenni Fitzgerald, current Drake coach Allison Pohlman and former Drake coach Jennie Baranczyk, now at Oklahoma).
Even I got to experience Lisa’s kindness in a way that extended well beyond reporter and source. In fall 1996, I was seriously ill with Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a neurological disorder that sent me to Iowa Methodist for two months as I learned to walk again and regain the use of the muscles in my body. Lisa, Jan and Jenni were regular visitors, and there were follow-up phone calls from Lisa checking in to see how I was doing.
I commented to my then-boyfriend about how nice that was.
“Well, they’ve got to be nice to the beat writer,” he said.
“No,” I replied, “being nice to the beat writer is sending flowers, not actually coming to the hospital.”
Not that flowers weren’t eventually part of it, too. When my mom died, there were flowers from Lisa and the Iowa staff – more than a decade after I had been her team’s beat writer. That’s a kindness I’ll remember well beyond any basketball game.
I have no idea what Lisa will do now. Maybe she’ll hit a bunch of dates on Donny Osmond’s summer tour (you talk about a lot of things when you’re on the road with a team). Maybe she can check off her bucket-list item of walking the 20 miles around Wisconsin’s Lake Geneva. Maybe she can buy me lunch, since I never let her over the years since a source should never pick up a reporter’s tab.
But I do know that after a tremendous career doing things the right way, she’ll have the freedom to do as she dang well pleases.
Who gets to do that? Lisa Bluder gets to do that, and all of Iowa knows she has earned that and then some.
Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”
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Oh my God, Jane, this is tremendous. My eyes are watering. Nothing's more true than something that comes straight from the heart and this is all that and a logo three with shots coming. Makes me like Coach Bluder even more. Selfishly proud she's a UNI alum since I went there my first two years and Waterloo-Cedar Falls is home. Thank you so much.
Great stuff, Jane. I hope you get that lunch. lol.