Across 50 years of history, Randolph-Macon Women’s Basketball has excelled on the court and built unbreakable bonds and timeless memories.

2024-2025 was a record-breaking season for Randolph-Macon Women’s Basketball—an impressive feat for a program with 50 years of history. On March 8, the Yellow Jackets defeated Elizabethtown inside Crenshaw Gymnasium to advance to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Division III Tournament. The game also marked RMC’s 28th consecutive victory, extending a record for the longest win streak in school history.

In the afterglow of the big win, Head Coach Lindsey Burke-Eberhart noticed that Marisa Ziegler ’25 and her family were overcome with emotion.

“They were all upset because they knew it was going to be their last time in Crenshaw as a family,” Burke-Eberhart said, noting that Ziegler was part of a senior class that went undefeated at home during their senior year. “It’s so special in such a short time window of their lives, and it was their whole family that was invested in it.”

The moment encapsulated what has made RMC Women’s Basketball an exceptional program for half a century: a group of closely connected women making lifelong friendships and memories, in addition to success on the court.

Pioneering Beginnings

A successful program, one with 11 Old Dominion Athletic Conference championships and 13 NCAA Tournament appearances, was not made overnight. In fact, a women’s athletic team of any kind at Randolph-Macon was only possible after the College enrolled its first class of female residential students in the fall of 1971, breaking from over a century as an exclusively men’s college.

Allison McCabe O’Brien ’77 and Nancy Simpkins Brashear ’77 had become fast friends as some of the first women on campus, bonding over their experience playing high school basketball in Northern Virginia and Tennessee, respectively. Both women were student assistants in the Admissions office where they worked with Billy Wood ’71. Wood had been a standout baseball player for RMC, and the girls knew he coached boys’ high school basketball.

“We need to get a women’s basketball program going here, what do you think it would take?” O’Brien posed to Wood in the office one day. Wood had played baseball under Head Coach Hugh Stephens, who also served as RMC’s Athletic Director at the time. Leaning on that relationship, Wood secured Stephens’ blessing to start a women’s basketball team, on the condition that they find enough players.

O’Brien and Brashear hit the pavement to recruit teammates, knocking on dorm room doors and eventually collecting around a dozen women to field the inaugural RMC Women’s Basketball squad in 1975-76. They had a roster, but the path to being a competitive team was a longer one.

That first year, the team practiced late at night, only after the men’s team was done in Crenshaw. They provided their own makeshift uniforms and drove themselves to road games. “I think I crammed eight girls into my Volkswagen,” O’Brien said.

The 1975-76 schedule was provisional, with the Yellow Jackets playing club teams, high school teams, church teams—really anybody that agreed to play them! The game itself was different from the six-on-six variation that many of the girls had played in high school, where guards were prohibited from crossing half court or shooting the ball. 

“Early on, someone at Randolph-Macon–someone who should have known better–told us that we couldn’t expect girls to be serious enough to come to practice on a regular basis,” recalled Jim Jump ‘76, who served as an assistant coach from 1976-78 and later joined the faculty in the Philosophy department. “The basketball players proved that wrong from the very beginning.”

In 1976-77, RMC Women’s Basketball went from being a club team to an intercollegiate team. The idea was to play a junior varsity schedule, but no other college had a JV team, so RMC faced a slate of varsity opponents. Despite being a fledgling squad, RMC went 5-5. “We loved being the first women’s team on this campus,” O’Brien said. “We worked our tails off because we were bound and determined to prove everybody wrong and to prove to them that women had the right to have programs here, just like the men did.”

A Transformational Leader

Much of the evolution from a rag-tag group of pioneering women to a nationally ranked squad came under the guidance of one legendary leader: Carroll LaHaye spent 38 seasons as the head coach of RMC Women’s Basketball, amassing 647 wins across a decorated career.

Recruited by her friend Rachel Anderson, RMC’s women’s athletics coordinator, LaHaye served as an assistant coach for the Yellow Jackets for two years before assuming head coach responsibilities at the start of the 1982-83 season. As a sign of the times for women’s athletics, she was also head coach for women’s soccer and women’s lacrosse.

The Yellow Jackets originally competed in the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), but as the landscape of women’s athletics evolved in the early 80s, the NCAA took over governance of women’s college basketball. To align with the school’s men’s teams in the NCAA, RMC Women’s Basketball began competing in Division II in 1983, which meant offering scholarships and competing against teams who are mostly now Division I programs.

The growth of women’s basketball at Randolph-Macon paralleled the growth of women’s sports nationwide following the passing of Title IX in 1972, and the gradual progress in the years to follow.

“We did the best we could with the resources that we had and just kept plugging along, trying to get better and better,” recalled LaHaye. “Not only as a team, but also with the resources and things that we could provide for our athletes.”

The team had modest success but also faced significant challenges. LaHaye drove the van to get the team to games, taking time away from normal coaching duties like game planning and evaluation. The team’s home locker room still had urinals. On the road, locker rooms often didn’t even exist, forcing the team to change in bathrooms.

The program turned a corner in 1990 when the College decided to have all its teams compete at the Division III level without athletic scholarships. LaHaye had spent the better part of a decade advocating for resources for her team alongside Anderson. Now, the athletic department committed to reinvesting the resources from the Division II level into the women’s basketball program at the DIII level.

The team took a charter bus to games, the soccer and lacrosse teams got their own head coaches, and LaHaye was able to hire an assistant coach for basketball. All these factors led to better recruiting and more competitive teams, kicking off an era where the Yellow Jackets were regular contenders in the Old Dominion Athletic Conference.

“You don’t realize, in the long run, how worthwhile those struggles and fights are going to be in making history,” LaHaye said.

Championship Pedigree

Randolph-Macon’s first ODAC Championship came in 1995-96, led by a veteran roster with five seniors: Sandy Crispin Standley ’96, Zandar Smith ’96, Liz Crafton Forsberg ’96, Katy Parrish ’96, and Jenn Kohler Del Rossi ’96, the 1996 ODAC Player of the Year. That group was augmented by the freshman twin duo of Allison Beightol McGuire ’99 and Aimee Beightol Levy ’99, the latter of which was the 1996 ODAC Rookie of the Year.

The Yellow Jackets entered the 1996 ODAC Tournament in Salem, Va., with a 23-1 overall record, the only blemish a home loss to six-time defending conference champion Roanoke College. But RMC got its revenge on the rival Maroons in the title game, winning 84-73 and booking the program’s first trip to the NCAA Tournament. The Yellow Jackets hosted every game of their maiden NCAA tourney run, defeating Shenandoah and Millsaps en route to the Sweet 16, where they fell to Bethel.

“I think the 90s would be defined as the growth of the program,” Del Rossi reflected. “And then they started to get bigger recruits and more talent, and the program has just taken off from there.”

RMC earned at-large bids to the NCAA Tournament in 1998 and 1999 after winning the regular season ODAC title both years. In the early-to-mid 2000s, the Yellow Jackets returned to winning conference titles and reached a new zenith.

“Megan Silva [Schultz ’06], Kristen Morgan [Klauder ’07], Salem Shaffer [Will ’07], they were all point guards in their high school,” LaHaye recalled. That point guard experience meant a team that was exceptional at ballhandling, and the depth meant the Yellow Jackets were difficult to defend.

After losing in the final of the 2004 ODAC Tournament, Schultz and her teammates went to watch the Final Four of the NCAA Tournament in Virginia Beach, where it would be held the following year as well. “We saw that environment and we saw the excitement around it, and very immediately knew, we don’t just need to be ODAC champions. We want to go to that national championship,” Schultz said.

The 2004-05 team still holds the best overall record in program history at 30 wins and two losses. After a dominant regular season, the Yellow Jackets breezed through the ODAC tournament, defeating Bridgewater in the final 72-55. RMC earned the right to host its NCAA Tournament games through the Elite Eight, defeating Mary Washington, Trinity, and George Fox before raucous crowds in Crenshaw. “We felt the energy,” Schultz recalled.

In the Final Four, the Yellow Jackets won a hard-fought game against Scranton with five different players scoring in double figures. Ultimately, RMC fell to Millikin in the national championship game, but finishing as national runners-up was a massive accomplishment and still serves as a high-water mark for the program.

On top of playing on great collective teams, Schultz made her mark as an individual player. She earned ODAC Player of the Year honors three times and, as a senior in 2005-06, was named the National Player of the Year after a run to the Elite Eight.

Elite players and championship titles have continued to flow through Ashland in the following years. Molly Ariail ’10 was also a three-time ODAC Player of the Year and helped guide RMC to ODAC titles in 2007 and 2009. Silva and Ariail were joined by Kelly Williams ’20, a two-time ODAC Champion, as First Team All-Americans.

LaHaye retired after the 2019-20 season, another title-winning year, as the winningest coach in ODAC history, men’s or women’s. Lindsey Burke-Eberhart took over as just the fifth coach in RMC Women’s Basketball history and continued the winning culture. The Yellow Jackets went 4-0 in a COVID-shortened 2020-21 season, and have won at least 17 games every year since, including the record-breaking win streak last season.

A Legacy of Love

When she was coaching RMC Women’s Basketball, Carroll LaHaye regularly completed a task that most coaches would happily delegate to a student manager or assistant coach: the laundry.

“I washed their practice uniforms every day, and I washed their game uniforms after every game,” LaHaye said. “When I took their jersey out of the washer or the dryer, it was an opportunity for me to think about that person and what she meant to me, what she meant to the College, what she meant to our program.”

That level of love and care, between coaches and players, between teammates, and between students and their school, are foundational to the history and culture of RMC Women’s Basketball.

“I think it’s about competing at a really high level, but also the friendships off the court,” said Del Rossi. “It’s about building a community that supports you and feeling the support from all the school, and I think it’s about the leadership of the coaches.”

“Friendships certainly go way beyond the four years spent here,” Schultz added. Both she and Del Rossi, and so many more alumnae, regularly receive birthday cards from LaHaye, despite having graduated years ago.

Every year, the Back to Hive event brings together alumnae from across generations of RMC Women’s Basketball to celebrate the remarkable program of which they are all a part.

“I love the fact that we have Back to the Hive and so many women come back each year,” said Allison O’Brien, the pioneering Yellow Jacket and one of three players from that era to become Trustees of the College. “You watch them come back with their spouses and then their children and then their grandchildren, and it’s just a big family.”

Because the foundation of the first 50 years of RMC Women’s Basketball is so strong, the future of the next 50 years is bright.

“I feel like the future of women’s basketball here is truly limitless,” said Burke-Eberhart, the two-time reigning ODAC Coach of the Year. “We’ve reached a lot of different pinnacles before, but I hope a national championship is next up on the docket.”