Jane Stangl coached the women’s basketball and soccer teams from 1990-97. She led the 1990-91 women’s basketball team to a 15-6 record and a 14-10 record, including a 10-4 record in conference play, in 1996-97 en route to a conference tournament appearance. Stangl was voted the Midwest Conference South Division Coach of the Year in 1996-97. The entirety of her coaching career spanned 30 years during which she coached over 300 games, at least half of which were with Knox.
Her major successes at Knox came in everyday ways and small victories. Once described as “a sociologist who masquerades as a coach” by Knox graduate Jeffrey Dean Clark, beyond loving to coach —Stangl dedicated her professional career toward addressing representational imbalances in sport, focusing on female coaches in particular. Her later work honed in on the racialization of team naming practices. Knox provided the perfect setting for both, leaving Stangl caught in the liminal space of critiquing a place she loved.
Stangl took a hiatus from coaching the 1996 teams to complete her Ph.D. in sociocultural sport studies at the University of Iowa. During that time, she researched—over a one-hundred year period—the origins of the Knox team moniker Siwash through the ensuing name change of the Prairie Fire. Her dissertation titled, Naming and Social Privilege: A Century of (Mis)AppropriatingSiwash, stands as a rich historical document around the movement of team names, symbols and ideological practices. Built specifically around Knox College and the life of renowned Knox graduate, George Helgesen Fitch, (18)’97, Knox’s Siwash story serves as a unique case study in college sport histories and team naming conventions. Seymour Library holds a copy of her work.
Under Stangl's tutelage she coached six Knox-Lombard Athletic Hall of Fame inductees: Lloy (Brodnicki) Johnston, Kristin Garrison, Mary (Whiteside) Groll, Tiffany Felde, Brooke McKinney, and Kathy Hansen. Johnston and Sonya Matthews were also named All-Americans in women's soccer.
Stangl went on to serve as a graduate director of Smith College’s [Title IX—prompted] Coaching program. The program has functioned since Title IX’s inception and is designed to encourage, teach and train coaches of women’s teams and has produced hundreds of coaches of women’s collegiate teams since it began.
Her research has been published in various book chapters, the Journal of Sport History, the Sociology of Sport Journal, the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, the International Journal of Religion and Sport, the Journal of Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Identity and through various podcasts on somatic sport. Stangl served as the President of the North American Society of the Sociology of Sport, and currently works as the academic Dean of the First Year Class at Smith.
On the side she’s become a professional golf instructor (of still amateur playing ability) while working for PGA Golf Clinics for Women under the leadership of golfing legend, Jane Blalock.
She’s looking forward to a return to her belief and practice that the body is central to our well-being come January 5, 2024, when she is set to retire.
