She thought her coaching days were behind her.
She was wrong.
She had hung up her whistle and filed the clipboard away. Her 12 seasons on the bench coaching the girls' team at Hixson High School to more than 200 wins were on their way to becoming fond memories.
She was in her first year happily teaching fifth graders when a man she didn't recognize appeared in the doorway of her makeshift classroom at the back of the Hixson Elementary School auditorium.
“I thought he was a parent of one of my students,” she said. “I thought he was the daddy of one of my students who had gone home unhappy.”
It turned out to be Harold Wilkes, Director of Athletics for Chattanooga. He was there to offer her a job.
“My old principal at Hixson High School was fishing buddies with Harold and the assistant superintendent,” Grace said. “He had recommended me for the job.”
With the advent of Title IX, university and college athletics departments around the country were starting women's basketball programs and UTC was no exception.
After years of fielding an intramural team that played against other intramural teams at nearby schools, the athletics department introduced full court varsity women's basketball in the fall of 1974.
That's where Grace entered the picture. She was two years removed from coaching and after a day of consideration, she returned to the court “for love of the game.”
It was just a part time gig with little pay and full time work. She spent her breaks and some class time at Hixson Elementary on the phone scheduling games, booking hotel rooms, arranging for spending money on trips, reserving a van and recruiting. When school let out, she hustled to the downtown campus for practice at Maclellan Gym.
She didn't have an office to work out of and the team shared the women's PE locker room with the rest of the women on campus.
“We had designated lockers,” she said. “But we didn't have our own locker room."
As the only coach, she was tasked with scheduling their games, plan for transportation, drive the van and rush to UTC before the business office closed at 5 p.m. to pick up the travel check the day before the team headed out for a game.
“The van was always on empty and dirty,” Grace remembered.
Home game situations weren't much easier.
“I had to arrange for the gym to be set up,” she said. “I had to scrounge around for someone to run the clock and keep score. I also had to schedule the referees and pick up their checks.”
After a few months of getting a team together, Chattanooga's varsity era opened. Women's teams competed in the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW). It would be eight more years before the NCAA took over.
For the women, it was an opportunity to compete on the same level as the men's teams.
“The women were happy,” Grace said of her teams. “They just wanted to play.”
She had a few standouts from the team that first year who were local. Several had played at Hixson including Beverly Narramore. Patty Lane came from Red Bank and Sharon Cable [Fanning] was a star across many sports from City.
“When Sharon was in her heyday at City, I was in my heyday at Hixson,” Grace recalled. “If you shut Sharon down, you were able to beat them.”
In her two years, Chattanooga went 21-23 and advanced to the AIAW South Region Tournament both years. In her second season, the Mocettes as they were known, won seven of their first nine games and posted the first winning season in school history at 13-12.
UTC topped the 100-mark three times that year. Chattanooga's 113-86 win over Carson Newman ranks fifth on UTC's all-time list for most combined points and third for most points scored by the women's team.
One of her more memorable games was against Tennessee in her second season. It was the fifth time the two teams had met. Pat Summitt (then Head) was in her second season at the Knoxville campus. Chattanooga had not been able to get a win despite being close on two occasions.
While the Mocettes still couldn't top the Lady Vols, it was an exciting, down-to-the-wire 67-66 final.
“We had the chance to win it on the last shot,” Grace said. “It was a wide-open layup that just didn't fall our way.”
After that season, with an AIAW region runner-up trophy in hand, Grace Keith stepped down and went back to being a full-time fifth grade teacher at Hixson where she stayed until her retirement.
Keith is one of five individuals going into the UTC Athletics Hall of Fame this weekend. The banquet is Friday at 7:00 p.m. at the Chattanooga Country Club. Each will also be honored during the men's game against ETSU on Saturday.
