VanDonge honored for pioneering girls basketball at Jackson Heights

In the fall of 1971 — two years after four northern Jackson County schools merged to form Jackson Heights High School — Nancy VanDonge was approached by district superintendent Robert Clark about coaching a new high school girls’ basketball team at the school.

“I knew it was important to start a girls’ program,” said VanDonge, who was an elementary teacher at Circleville at the time. “But I also thought it was important to start one that you could make into a decent one.”

For four years, VanDonge was the head coach — the only coach — of the Cobra girls’ basketball team, but two of those years saw her leading that team to the final four in the state tournament.

“I am proud of it. It had to start somewhere, and we did the best we could,” said VanDonge, who was recently honored for her work not only as a “pioneer” of girls’ basketball at JHHS but also for more than 33 years of teaching young people in the district.

It was a career that wasn’t exactly her first choice, but after she got to college, she decided to switch her major to education and become a physical education teacher.

“I decided that if I wanted to have a family, being a teacher would give you a little bit of time off in the summer, and you’d get a break for Christmas, and it works a little better for family stuff,” VanDonge said. “But I liked kids, and I liked sports. I set out to be a P.E. teacher, but I never got to be one.”

VanDonge’s career in education started in 1968 in Circleville, where she taught first and second grades, starting in the middle of the year after Frank Rosser, the first superintendent of the Jackson Heights district, contacted her about a teaching job.

“I wanted to have a job that was fairly local, because we had a farm and we weren’t going to move,” she said, referring to her husband, the late Robert VanDonge. “Mr. Rosser says, we have a job open in the middle of the year, and it’s first and second grade. I said, I’m a P.E. teacher and a science teacher, and he said, well, if you’re interested, we’ll work it out… That was how it started.”

VanDonge spent a year and a half in that position, then spent three years, from 1969 to 1972, as a fifth-grade teacher. It was during her fifth-grade teaching years that Rosser’s successor, Clark — whom she described as “an awesome, awesome superintendent” — came to her about starting a girls’ high school basketball team.

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