Minium: Adrienne Goodson Knew She Would Play Women's Basketball for ODU When She Was 13
By Harry Minium
NORFOLK, Va. – Adrienne Goodson was a precocious, 13-year-old girl growing up in a rough-and-tumble New Jersey neighborhood. She lived in Bayonne, a city on the Jersey waterfront across the Upper New York Bay from Brooklyn.
Bayonne is surrounded on three sides by water and newspapers often carried stories at the time about young people drowning.
Adrienne had wandered too close to the water one day and her mother, Margo Goodson, was furious.
“My mother was paranoid about that and ended up punishing me,” Adrienne said. “She told me I wasn’t going out the rest of the day and to go into the other room and watch the girls’ basketball game on TV.
“I told her, ‘Mom, they don’t have women’s basketball on TV. Only men’s basketball.’ She told me to go into the other room and see for myself.”
Sure enough, the AIAW national championship game was being televised by NBC. Women were playing basketball on national TV and Adrienne was captivated.
Adrienne was a natural athlete, a tomboy often put down by girls because she played sports with the boys. She swam and played softball and ran track before finally finding her place on the basketball court, where she excelled against the guys.
“I would run around the streets and play tag, stick ball, all the things contrary to being a girl,” she said with a laugh.
Her idols were men, as there was no professional women’s basketball.
But on March 23, 1980, the day she got too close to the water, she discovered that women, too, can also be basketball stars. For two hours she watched and was captivated as Old Dominion rolled over Tennessee, 68-53, to win its second national title.
Inge Nissen led ODU with 20 points while Anne Donovan added 17, Nancy Lieberman 12, Rhonda Rompola 10 and Angela Cotman nine. Lieberman, Donovan and Nissen would all end up in the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.
Rompola would win 438 games in 25 seasons as head coach at SMU and Cotman would end up in ODU’s Athletics Hall of Fame.
Few teams dominated a national tournament as did the Lady Monarchs, who were coached by Marianne Stanley – they won four games by an average of 18 points.
When the game was over, Adrienne walked into the kitchen and told her mother, “I’m going to play basketball for Old Dominion. My Mom looked at me like I was crazy and told me that I was getting on her nerves and to go outside.
“I was already in love with their program.”
True to her word, just five years later, Goodson was on the court as an 18-year-old freshmen with ODU in Austin, Texas as the Lady Monarchs defeated Georgia to win their first NCAA national championship.
Talk about living out a childhood dream.
On Saturday, Jan. 17, Adrienne will live out another dream when her jersey number 24 will be retired at halftime of ODU's game against Marshall at Chartway Arena.
The 2 p.m. game is also alumni night and the annual Anne Donovan Classic. ODU will pay homage to Donovan, who passed away in 2018, and her family.
“The fact that this is happening on the same night as Anne Donovan is being honored makes it special,” Adrienne said. “I adored Anne Donovan.”
Like Adrienne, Anne Donovan was a Jersey girl.
But what makes it most special for her is that her mother and father, the two people who helped Adrienne fend through a childhood filled with adversity, will be there.
Her mother struggled for years as a single mom and Adrienne experienced death at far too young an age.
Margo Goodson was a 17-year-old high school senior when she had Adrienne. “My biological father walked out on her before I was born,” Adrienne said. “But that was OK. God put the right people in my life.”
Margo worked at a warehouse in nearby Jersey City and often walked to work, even when it snowed and rained. They didn’t have a lot when Adrienne was a child.
“She made my clothes for me,” Adrienne said. “She had to go on public assistance for a while to take care of me, but she told me, ‘I won’t be on this long. As soon as I get a better job, I’m going to get off welfare.’”
Her uncles, Skip and Butch, were her primary male role models. Skip was her substitute father who often met her at 7 a.m. in the playgrounds to help her hone her basketball game. He did so after working the graveyard shift.
Butch was a lover of nature who taught her how to crab and fish and spent as much time in his boat on the water as he could.
Her father wasn't in her life, but Tommy Ware, her father's brother, was also a mentor.
Her grandmother, Margaret Goodson, often cared for her while her mother worked. A native of Culpepper, Virginia, Margaret taught Adrienne to love country music. Her favorite? “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” by John Denver.
When she was 14, her mother married Ralph Feuker, an electrical engineer, and his income was large enough that Margo Goodson Feuker could quit work and become a stay-at-home mother.
“That brought some stability to my life,” Adrienne said.
Ralph had been in Adrienne’s life since she was seven. By the time Ralph married her mother, he was already Adrienne’s substitute father.
“When I introduce him to people, I introduce him as my dad,” Adrienne said. “There’s nothing step about him. He helped me get up so many stairs.
“My biological father is still alive. But Ralph, he’s my dad.
“God bless all the men in the world who marry women who already have children. It’s not an easy thing to do.”
He is 81, and her mother is 77 and Adrienne is so glad they both are alive to see her jersey retired.
“I watched a lot of people be honored and their parents weren’t there. I heard some of them say, ‘I wish my Mom could be here,’” she said. “I would have loved for my uncles and grandmother to get to see this.”
Alas, her uncles, Butch and Skip, died in a boating accident when she was in the ninth grade. Her grandmother passed when she was a senior at Bayonne High School.
Losing three people so young in life tested her but also said strengthened her deep Christian faith.
“I’m glad that at least my grandmother was able to get to know ODU’s coaching staff,” Adrienne said.
Not that it was a given she would end up at ODU. By the time she was a senior, she had more than 200 college offers. She set what was then a New Jersey high school record, scoring 2,333 points and was a first-team All-Hudson County selection – on both the boys’ and girls' basketball teams.
Boys and girls competed on separate teams, but a Jersey sports writer thought if she had played with the boys, she’d have been one of the county’s best.
She made every girls All-American high school team.
An aside here: she also might have been a standout football player. As a young teenager, she tried out for and made a local Pop Warner team. When she came home from her first practice, dirty and bruised, her Mom reacted quickly.
"She wasn't having any of that," Adrienne said. "Her girl wasn't going to play football."
Stanley spent a ton of time in Jersey, but it was up to Wendy Larry, also a New Jersey native and an ODU assistant coach, to land Adrienne. At the time, there were few rules regarding how many recruiting trips you could make.
“I would have lived in Jersey if Marianne had allowed me to,” Larry said. “Adrienne and her family lived over a fruit stand and there was this little, narrow staircase that led to her place. You almost had to turn sideways to get up the stairs.”
She remembers walking past Tennessee’s Pat Summit, Louisiana Tech’s Leon Barmore and Texas’ Jody Conradt heading up those stairs.
“For whatever reason, Adrienne loved Camaros. So, whenever I rented a car, I made sure to rent a Camaro.”
Adrienne honed her final list to five schools – ODU, Georgia, Iowa, Notre Dame and USC before choosing ODU.
Adrienne was the first player off the bench for ODU as a freshman. She averaged 9.5 points, but it was her defense that helped ODU win its first NCAA title.
Georgia had an All-American by the name of Teresa Edwards, who made just five of 15 shots and finished with 11 points, half her average.
While that season occurred 40 years ago, Goodson said the memories are seared in her mind as if it was yesterday.
When the team returned from Texas more than 5,000 fans crammed into the old ODU fieldhouse to welcome them home.
Bob Rathbun, now a hall of fame announcer for the Atlanta Hawks, was the ODU play-by-play radio announcer, and the team had a pair of super fans in then United States Congressman G. William Whitehurst, a long-time ODU professor, and his wife, Jennette.
“Bob Rathbun, Dr. Whitehurst and his wife and so many other people rallied around us,” she said. “We won that title for the people in the city of Norfolk.”
She would lead ODU to three Sun Belt Conference titles and three NCAA Tournament bids in her four seasons at ODU. In her final season, Larry took over as head coach and the Monarchs were ranked as high as fifth nationally.
She finished with 1,574 career points and 863 rebounds but her primary contributions often didn’t show up in the box score.
“She was such a great scorer and rebounder, but her identity was how passionate she was about defending,” Larry said, who added that she and Mery Andrade were two of the best defensive players she ever coached.
When Adrienne graduated, there was no professional women’s basketball in America, so she went to Brazil and played five seasons.
“Going to a country where I didn’t speak the language and where the culture was very different was scary,” she said. “But I taught myself to speak Portuguese and it helped me to grow.”
She returned to America in 1996 to play in the new American Basketball League, which folded after 2 ½ seasons. She was an ABL all-star and ranked fourth in career ABL points with 1,658.
She then moved onto the WNBA, where she played seven seasons, averaging 12.5 points, 5.2 rebounds and 2.0 assists. She twice played in the WNBA all-star game and often tangled with a power forward for the Los Angeles Sparks by the name of Delisha Milton-Jones.
Milton-Jones, now ODU’s head coach, and Goodson were two of the WNBA’s fiercest defenders. Milton-Jones was so feared she was nicknamed “D-Nasty.”
“She was such a force on the court,” Milton-Jones said. “She was no nonsense. We bumped heads, we locked horns.”
On one night in LA, it got a little out of hand as they scuffled after a hard foul and were both ejected from the game.
“They didn’t have anyone else who could guard me, so we went at it,” Adrienne said, who recalls that night in LA “as a very heated situation. There was no love lost between us. It was good healthy competition between two teams that were rivals and didn’t like each other.
“Obviously, we’ve grown past that. We sit now and talk about it and laugh about it
“I think a lot of DeLisha and what she is doing with ODU’s program.”
While in the WNBA, she became a member of the players committee that helped negotiate a collective bargaining agreement. She sat across the table from then NBA Commissioner David Stern, whom she praises for recognizing early-on that women’s basketball players deserve to be paid well and that the women’s game had great potential.
When her WNBA career ended, she acknowledged that she was a little lost. She was 39 and basketball had defined her for most of her life.
But it is what she has done in the 20 years since her career ended that truly defines her life. She’s been a teacher and coach at several high schools and twice was an assistant coach at ODU.
She mentors kids in Jersey and raises money to hold camps for kids all over the country. She participated in numerous NBA and WNBA programs to mentor young people and work with players to help them understand they need to save their money and prepare for life after basketball. She's worked in camps across the globe, from Africa to South America.
She is in her sixth year of doing a podcast and her 162 episodes are a stream-of-consciousness smorgasbord of everything from talking with WNBA stars and mental health experts to discussions of issues from league expansion to the ongoing salary dispute between the NBA and women’s players.
CLICK HERE for a WNBA State of Mind Podcast
She also wrote a book, entitled “Elevate Your Game,” that while it focuses on her basketball career, it focuses more on the adversity the faced in life and the people who helped her through it.
CLICK HERE to see Elevate Your Game
She separated the chapters of her book with quotes from the Bible.
She ended the book by writing: “It is God’s plan to help you prosper and give you the desires of your heart. Therefore, seek first the kingdom of God and all things will be added unto you.”
The book was published by Vid Lamonte’ Buggs Jr., an ODU graduate who wrote in the forward to the book that Adrienne challenged him to become a better person.
“No one will realize how talented and smart you are because you have such a piss poor attitude,” she told him. That stark advice helped him turn his life around.
"Adrienne mentors kids and she does her podcasts and does a healthy dose of philanthropic work that puts the cherry on top of who she was as not only a player but a person,” Milton-Jones said.
She nonetheless added that Adrienne earned having her jersey retired in her four years at ODU.
“This is long overdue,” she said. “She won a national championship. She won three Sun Belt championships. Isn’t winning championships what this is all about?”
Minium is ODU's Senior Executive Writer for Athletics. Contact him at hminium@odu.edu or follow him on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram
To see past stories from Minium, CLICK HERE