Karyn Ridgeway keeps fighting the evils among us

The plan was to announce on Christmas morning that Karyn Ridgeway has been named the 2020 GoGriz.com Person of the Year.

It would have been an outside-the-box choice, but this year, one that was unlike any other in our lifetimes, just begged for something different.

It would have been topical. It would have been fitting and deserved. But the doctor of emergency medicine, who played for the Lady Griz in the 80s, wanted nothing to do with it.

She said that, certainly, there must be somebody more deserving. We'll let others be the judge of that.

She's a front-line worker when those servants have never been more in the spotlight and, collectively, more in harm's way since the arrival of the novel coronavirus.

As we've learned, "novel" and "virus," while thrilling to virologists, are not a good word pairing for the rest of us, especially those who are exposed to it as part of their working lives.

Yet there Ridgeway was, last spring, returning to Boston and her former hospital in one of the nation's first hotspots, answering the call to duty.

With her family in mind, could she have taken a pass? With her own well-being in mind, could she have turned it down? Yes to both.

Of course, as part of the Hippocratic Oath, Ridgeway a decade ago vowed that "I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings."

And she was needed. So she went.

To most of us, she was rushing into a burning building, putting others before self. To her, she was just doing her job.

"Most front-line workers are pretty courageous," she says, taking the focus off her and turning it on the collective.

"People come in with the flu or with any number of infections or conditions or mental-health emergencies and we take care of them. Front-line workers have taken care of those people for a long time. In that sense, it wasn't a whole lot different."

So this isn't a story about the 2020 GoGriz.com Person of the Year. That title will go un-awarded this year. But that doesn't mean we can't tell the story of one of the most interesting people you'll ever meet.

Because what future Division I basketball player skips out on a big game during her prep career to attend something she viewed as more important, a music competition? Ridgeway did.

What high schooler is willing to be the face of a contentious lawsuit that sought equality for girls before that idea had truly taken any root, so many decades ago? Ridgeway was.

"I believed in it. I think there are times in life when you need to take your turn and stand up, even if you get eggs thrown at you, and do what you think is right," she says.

In other words, she's been fighting for us, on our behalf, against those things that threaten us, for a long, long time now.

More: Who turns down the chance to play college basketball in order to pursue another passion and go to a school with a strong music program? Ridgeway did.

And who earns a degree in microbiology, with an eye on medical school, then puts that on hold for more than a decade so she can become a college basketball coach? Ridgeway did.

"As you can see, she is someone who can change her mind on what she's pursuing," says her former coach, Robin Selvig.

To keep it all straight, or as best we can with a line that zigged and zagged but ultimately ended where it did, it might be easiest to work backwards, from doctor to coach to player to a girl who just wanted to know why her brother had it better than she did when it came to sports.

Actually, in true Ridgeway spirit, we've changed our minds. Let's go back to that day, in the early 70s, when Ridgeway was sitting in the family car, a young girl at odds with herself.

All she can remember is wanting to play sports. All day, every day, with whomever would play with her.

Now she had her chance. But she couldn't get herself to pull the handle on the car door and join her brother at the baseball tryout. All she could see: boys, boys and boys. No girls.

"When I was a kid, I just couldn't get enough of playing catch, dribbling a ball, running. I loved my sports," she says.

"If I couldn't talk my mom or dad into playing catch with me, I'd go throw a ball against the wall with my mitt. I always had a racket or a ball with me."

In Utah, where the Ridgeways lived before moving to Missoula when she was in the seventh grade, the opportunities for organized sports for boys were endless. Name the sport and something was probably available.

For girls? Not so much. Until one day an announcement at school: there would soon be baseball tryouts and girls were invited to give it a shot. This was new territory being encroached upon indeed.

As for baseball, Ridgeway was in her comfort zone. It was a ball and bat and glove, things she'd grown up around. Why wouldn't she bound out of the car and join in?

But ... it was all boys. Certainly other girls had been interested. None had shown up. That's why she was in the car that day, complaining to her mom while her brother was going through the tryout.

She wanted to be out there more than anything. But she couldn't muster up quite what she needed to say, Here I am. Yeah, I'm a girl. Deal with it.

"I really wanted to do it, but I couldn't do it. I just couldn't. I didn't want to be the only girl," she says. "Finally my mom went out and talked to them. I think she was tired of hearing me whine."

For three summers she played organized baseball in Utah, the only girl in the league. She played basketball as well. There were a handful of other girls but never enough that there would have been consideration of a girls-only league.

So it was a revelation when the Ridgeways moved to Missoula. Montana was ahead of Utah in that regard. There were teams and leagues for just the girls.

And another revelation, this one not quite so exciting: girls' sports just weren't as important as those played by the boys. Judge it how you wish: opportunities, level of coaching, what have you.

Ridgeway had been spoiled during her time in Utah. She had been playing in boys' leagues, which meant the best of everything, uniforms, coaching, the works.

It felt like a step in the right direction that she now had access to all-girls leagues. But 10 steps back in how those leagues were managed. She wanted what she had had but applied to this new opportunity.

"I was coming from a very well-supported boys' little-league program in Utah, so one thing I noticed were the uniforms and refs and coaching," she says.

"There were some inequities, some glaring, some a little more subtle. The sports were kind of for fun and thrown together. It wasn't the same experience."

A battle was brewing, and others were arriving in town to join in the fight. The Deden family had arrived from Sandpoint. The matriarch of that athletic clan wasn't going to settle for second-best either.

"It didn't start with me, just some very concerned parents, like Nancy Deden, some concerned coaches who had been frustrated," says Ridgeway.

The ACLU was summoned. A town-hall meeting was called. Topics were discussed, which turned into talk of legal action. It would need a face, a name attached, someone who was right in the middle of it and felt strongly about being wronged.

Karyn Ridgeway stood up when others did not.

"I was kind of naïve, but I cared about this and that it was wrong and that we needed to make this better. I said, sure, I'll be the plaintiff," she says.

"A couple of other girls volunteered as well. It didn't start with us, but once you're the plaintiff, your name is on it."

It was indeed: Karyn Ridgeway v. Montana High School Association.

The class-action lawsuit covered it all: the number of sports being offered, the number of playing opportunities, the amount of funding, what coaches were paid, all the way down to uniforms and travel.

At the time, eighty-eight percent of Montana high schools provided sports for boys' in the fall, winter and spring. Just 16 percent did for girls.

And when the opportunities coincided, sports going head-to-head, you can bet the boys' teams tended to get the prime practice and game times.

"There were discrepancies in all those areas. We were representing every female athlete in the state of Montana to get some equality in the athletic programs at the high-school level," she says.

It's no wonder that Ridgeway and so many of the Lady Griz in those beginning stages of the program, back in the late 70s and 80s, were so thankful, so thrilled to come across Selvig.

In those early years, the women played in the large shadow of the men's program, but the coach made it feel like it mattered just as much. More important, he coached them like they wanted to be coached: as competitors, just like the guys.

"That's what I appreciated about him. As a competitor and an athlete, I was so glad there was somebody who was going to honor that," Ridgeway says.

"Hey, you want to be a competitor? Let's compete. Let's get after this. I think that honored us as athletes. He made it a big deal for us."

As lawsuits tend to do, Ridgeway v. MHSA dragged on and on. And while Ridgeway stood up partly for herself, she did so knowing she wouldn't see the rewards.

Indeed, she graduated in the spring of 1983 from Hellgate, an all-state basketball player. What became known as the Ridgeway Settlement wasn't put into place until the 1985-86 school year.

And while that may feel antiquated, like it hardly applies today, when things have more approached equality, the details of the agreement can still be found on the Montana High School Association website, more than three decades later, under gender equity. It still matters.

Our daughters, our granddaughters, our sisters, our nieces, those girls who love sports and have few barriers in their way? Karyn Ridgeway long ago took care of it for us by knocking them down, taking up the fight so we wouldn't have to.

"It put me at odds with some administrators and coaches at my school. I was a little naïve about how that might play out," she says. Where she had once been welcomed, she was now persona non grata.

"It wasn't easy being the name on that, but I'm proud to have been a part of it. I think it made a difference."

(Part of the lawsuit challenged the playing seasons for girls' basketball and volleyball, which went against national norms by being held in the fall and winter, respectively. It may have been the most contentious issue within the lawsuit. That wasn't decided on and changed until 2000.)

When the lawsuit was being argued, Ridgeway wasn't even in Missoula and wasn't even an athlete on a team. She was pursuing another love of hers at Northern Colorado in Greeley.

"They had a thriving music program. I think they had five jazz bands. I loved being around those people and in that environment," says Ridgeway, player of the trombone among other things.

But it was an in-the-moment thing without a clear path of where she was headed. It was fun. It was a blast. But where was it taking her?

"I didn't really have a vision for myself. I didn't want to be a band teacher or be in an orchestra," she says. "I didn't feel like that was going anywhere. And I was missing basketball."

While Ridgeway was fighting for opportunities for female prep athletes in Montana and later scratching her musical itch in Greeley for two years, something special was happening in a small section of Missoula, at the base of Mt. Sentinel.

Selvig arrived on the campus of the University of Montana when Ridgeway was an eighth grader, but she hardly took notice to what was happening just down the street from Hellgate High.

And who can blame her?

The Lady Griz were winning 22 games in 1980-81 and claiming their first conference championship, a first-place finish in the Mountain Division of the Northwest Women's Basketball League, but it still wasn't a thing, games were not yet a happening.

The team drew an average of 614 fans that season, a figure likely helped by the fact many of its games were the opening act for the men's contest that followed. You know, show up early, get a good seat.

Slowly, things started to change.

When Ridgeway was a freshman at Northern Colorado, Montana drew more than 4,000 fans for its first NCAA tournament home game, a victory over Oregon State. People were starting to take notice.

After her second year in Greeley, Ridgeway returned to Missoula, ready to get focused academically and address that longing she still had for the game of basketball.

She would show up at Schreiber Gym on campus and play with the Lady Griz. The program was entering a golden age of the six-foot forward who could do it all.

Marti Leibenguth and Dawn Silliker were on the team. Lisa McLeod and Jean McNulty were coming in as freshmen.

Word got out she was around and maybe looking for a team to join. Word made its way to Selvig. A tryout was set up.

"I didn't really realize what an amazing program the Lady Griz had. I didn't really get it until I was part of the program," Ridgeway says. "Robin let me walk on to the team. It was going to be a real challenge."

Ridgeway was six-foot, but Leibenguth, Sharla Muralt and Dawn Silliker were three of the team's top four scorers her first season, in 1985-86. The other was guard Cheryl Brandell, who was 5-foot-11.

In some programs, size will get you on the court. That wasn't the case at Montana.

"I had to change my game around to fit in," says Ridgeway, who played in 23 of 31 games that season but just 6.1 minutes per game as Montana again made the NCAA tournament.

"I spent that first year mainly on the bench kind of retooling, from being a post player to more of a guard or perimeter player."

Her second year in the program, 1986-87, Ridgeway embraced the big-guard mentality. She played in all 31 games, averaging more than 16 minutes, finishing third in assists as she got the ball in her hands more and more.

What she had going for her was Margaret Williams, the 5-foot-8 point guard who would finish the season with 209 assists, the fourth-best single-season total in program history.

"We guarded each other every day in practice. She was smooth, put it between her legs, go around her back, just blow by anybody who was guarding her. She was the real thing in terms of being a point guard," says Ridgeway.

"She was a great one, a real leader. She developed an esprit de corps with people. She kept people in line or gave them a hug if they needed a hug. She was always very aware of how everybody was feeling and what was needed. She was special in ways that don't get noticed."

The daily battle between the two aided Williams as well.

"I didn't like it in practice when she was defending me," says Williams, today a lawyer living in Sandpoint, Idaho. "She was taller than I was and really strong. And pesky. It was hard to play against her, but I appreciated it.

"She earned everything she got becoming a Lady Griz. What I remember about her playing was she was so even-keeled, no big spikes up and down emotionally. You could tell she was really level-headed and knew what she needed to do. She didn't get flustered at anything."

(Paging Dr. Ridgeway, Doctor Karyn Ridgeway. Please step forward. Your true calling awaits.)

The two would live together for the 1986-87 season, both players without a class to call her own.

Williams was a fifth-year senior, having missed the 1984-85 season after suffering extensive internal injuries in a bike wreck on her way home from Lolo Pass.

Ridgeway joined the program as a sophomore in eligibility but in her third year of college. She came in with the freshmen but wasn't their age.

That season they could be found at their upstairs apartment in the Rattlesnake. Ridgeway continued with her music when time allowed. Williams tried to keep up, a musical odd couple.

"She would suffer with my attempts, because I don't have a lick of musical talent. She got me to the point where we could do a duet," says Williams. "She had so much patience.

"I would play the guitar on Talking Heads' Psycho Killer. We finally got it to where I could play the guitar and she played the cello or something. She was very talented with a high degree of patience given my lack of skill."

Ridgeway's musical bent came to Williams' rescue that year. The political science major, who spent her time on the side of campus that housed her major, history and English, rarely ventured into the science neighborhoods.

But as a senior, she was required to take a science class. She chose Biology 101. Easy stuff for Ridgeway, by then working toward a degree in microbiology.

"She was the perfect roommate to have. She saved my a--. Again, a great deal of patience," says Williams. "We had to make up a song to help me remember the parts of the cell. It was a struggle for me."

With Williams gone and Ridgeway having had more and more time in a ball-handling role, she was pegged as the team's point guard in 1987-88, or what will go down as one of the most memorable seasons in a program where that claim means something.

Of course no one knew quite how things would go, especially with Williams and her 511 assists no longer around.

"That second year, Robin put me in the game as a point guard and I turned the ball over three or four times in like two minutes," says Ridgeway.

"I'm sure he was a little nervous about having me bring the ball up the floor and being a guard that last year."

He had nothing to worry about. Ridgeway would dish out 115 assists that season, a team high, and contribute nearly seven points per game on 49.4 percent shooting.

Montana won its first 18 games to set up a matchup against 17-0 Montana State in Missoula in early February. The game drew a record crowd of 9,258. The Lady Griz won 67-59.

The Lady Griz were 26-0 when they traveled to Montana State for the final game of the regular season. At that point, Montana was 23-0 against the Bobcats under Selvig, 9-0 against MSU on its home court.

Montana State would win 58-56. A Selvig-coached team would have to make the Bozeman-to-Missoula bus trip home following a loss for the first time.

"Everybody took that loss pretty hard. That was a tough one," says Ridgeway, the only player on either team to be on the court for all 40 minutes.

The next weekend in Missoula would be anticlimactic. The game everybody wanted, Montana-Montana State, part III, in the Mountain West tournament, never happened.

Montana made the championship game easily, with a 73-54 victory over Boise State, but Montana State didn't hold up its end, losing to Eastern Washington.

The Lady Griz rolled over the Eagles in the title game 79-53. Ridgeway: 15 points on 5-of-6 shooting, five assists, two blocks, one steal. Pretty good for a former walk-on.

The reward? One of the epic games in program history. No. 4 Montana against No. 5 Stanford in the second round of the Midwest Regional in the NCAA tournament.

It was just the third year for the Cardinal under a somewhat new coach, Tara VanDerveer, who would bring a young team to Missoula, a team that would win the NCAA title two years later.

The city was buzzing.

"We had a shoot-around earlier that day and people were lined up getting tickets," said Ridgeway. "You could just feel the energy. It was pretty special. I still get a tingle thinking about showing up for the game."

The teams were tied 34-34 at the half, but Stanford would pull ahead, 69-63, with less than two minutes to go. It was 70-65 with 30 seconds left in regulation.

"I remember it being a really close game and not having a clear sense of what we were going to do on the next possession down the floor," says Ridgeway.

"We were running down the floor and Marti yells at me, Give me the ball! Of course that's what we're going to do."

Leibenguth hit a 3-pointer from the top of the key with 27 seconds left, then hit two free throws with five seconds ago to send the game into overtime. Montana would fall 74-72.

"What I liked about our team that year was we just had unspoken communication," Ridgeway says. "We worked really well together without having to be demonstrative. We knew our roles really well. It really worked."

Montana finished the season 28-2. Ridgeway's final game under Selvig was played in front of a crowd of 8,709, still the second highest behind the Montana State game a month and a half earlier.

"He was intense but also funny. I think those two things worked really well together," she says of Selvig. "He would yell at people but in a way so that they knew they were screwing up but always with a hint of humor."

You're killing us! You're the other team's best player right now!

"Instead of saying you were doing terribly, it was something over the top. Well, that's a little dramatic, you'd think. That almost took the edge off in a way.

"Most important was he wanted everybody to feel they were part of the family and had a role to play. You didn't get away with not doing what you were supposed to do. He got the best out of you."

Love would take Ridgeway to Bozeman, where she would finish her undergraduate degree and later add a master's degree in plant pathology.

But something kept gnawing at her. She had been a Lady Griz for three seasons, her fourth lost when her eligibility clock started with two years at Northern Colorado, even though she hadn't played basketball.

Medical school was always the end goal. But what if there could be an intermediate goal, of staying involved in the game?

Prior to the 1992-93 season, she reached out to Montana State coach Judy Spoelstra about becoming a volunteer assistant, just to see what coaching was like behind the scenes.

She picked quite a season to become a temporary Bobcat. Montana State defeated Montana 53-48 on the final day of the regular season to pull even with the Lady Griz in the standings at 13-1 in league.

MSU won a post-game coin flip and got to host the Big Sky tournament. The next weekend Montana State defeated Montana again, 64-57 in the championship game to advance to the NCAA tournament.

It was the only time in an 11-season stretch that it wasn't the Lady Griz going to the NCAAs.

"I'm not sure Rob has forgiven me for that yet," Ridgeway says, perhaps jokingly, perhaps not. "But it did give me what I needed. It got me a little bit of experience and was an eye-opener of what I was getting into."

Most college coaches want to keep it all about basketball. Academics are for the players and their advisors. Ridgeway was different. The small-college job, where she would be expected to teach on the side, appealed to her. That made her an attractive candidate.

She got her start at Western Montana, in Dillon, where she spent three seasons. Later it was off to Western State in Gunnison, Colo., a Division II program, for two years.

Selvig taught the game from the ground up, all fundamentals and technique. Ridgeway used that to her advantage as she began her coaching career.

Where she struggled was when she, an introvert, tried to channel her inner Selvig. She wasn't being true to herself, which is the quickest way to fail at coaching.

"I was trying to act like Robin, and I was totally unprepared for the off-court part of being a basketball coach," she says. "I hadn't paid much attention to that when I was a player, the team-building and recruiting. I jumped right in without having any of that kind of experience and had to learn as I went.

"One of the hardest lessons for me was to find my way of relating to people and building a team. When I tried doing what Robin did so successfully, it didn't work for me. I'm a different person. I had to learn a lot about leadership and connecting with athletes in a way that worked for me and worked for them."

After her three seasons at Western Montana and before getting the job at Western State, Ridgeway returned to Bozeman.

She studied for and took the MCATs. She knew where she was headed but still wasn't on a direct path.

"I'm the kind of person who made my early-adult-life decisions based on what was available at the time, what moved me at the time," she says. "I knew there was time for med school. That was always at the back of my mind."

After two years in Gunnison, "lightning struck," as she says, and she got the job at MSU Billings prior to the 2000-01 season.

Her three Yellowjacket teams would go 61-22. Her last two years as a coach would end in the NCAA Division II national tournament.

Three times she brought her MSUB team to Missoula to face the Lady Griz, student squaring off against mentor. The Yellowjackets lost those games by 22, 19 and 16 points.

"I remember how it was for teams coming to play at the University of Montana and what a challenge it is to play in Dahlberg Arena because of the fans and the tradition and the Lady Griz," Ridgeway says.

"But I had competitors on my team. We really loved that experience. I was proud of our showing."

She was 40 and it was finally time to put coaching to rest and head off to medical school. It took four years at Oregon Health and Science University and a three-year residency in Loma Linda, Calif., but she was finally a doctor of emergency medicine.

"Emergency is kind of the jack of all trades. Our specialty is the golden hour of care, the first hour somebody presents with an emergency," she says.

"Ultimately being a doctor and being in medicine plays to my strengths more. I'm kind of a nerd. I like to collaborate, but I also do some of my best work all alone.

"Believe it or not, medicine in some ways is less stressful than coaching, at least for me. I'm in my wheelhouse there, in emergency medicine."

But the emergency room still requires a team-based approach for the good of the patient. So all those years on the sideline do have some application.

"You have to have the nurses and respiratory therapists and techs all working together well and feeling good about what they're doing to be a well-functioning team," she says.

The move to Boston came with the family in mind. Her wife, Kari, took a faculty job at Boston College Law. Ridgeway began life as an ER doctor at Quincy Medical Center.

Three years later she joined the staff at MetroWest Medical Center in Framingham.

And now you might be thinking back to those words of Williams, about how Ridgeway was always so calm and collected, even in the heat of the moment.

And you might be thinking to yourself: Karyn Ridgeway is wired for emergency medicine.

"There is part of me that likes the unknown and that excitement," she says. "I like the unpredictability of it. There is never a dull moment.

"While you're trying to take care of someone who is in cardiac arrest and doing CPR, 10 more people have arrived in the emergency room. Without getting a chance to think about what just happened, you have to turn around and go see those other 10 patients, so there is this race-pace mentality."

Again, it goes back to basketball. "That calm is exactly how she played," says Williams. "You have to be that way in that type of job. You can't be freaking out."

When Selvig thinks back about Ridgeway as a player, one thing stands out. That 10, 15, 20 minutes before practice? It was never wasted time for Ridgeway.

She always had a goal in mind, something to accomplish, even in the down moments.

"You have to think on your feet (in emergency medicine)," says Ridgeway, "but behind that is a lot of practice and a lot of preparation. Like sports, that prepares you for those moments."

When the thought of writing about Ridgeway came up, the belief was that she had been in Boston this whole time, that she had been in the heat of the coronavirus battle from Day 1.

Instead, with Kari being able to teach remotely at Boston College, the family last year moved to Montana.

It messed with our game plan, but it's 2020, when game plans aren't worth much. We plan, prepare and pivot. Instead of phone interviews, we met in person last weekend on campus, just down the hill from where she, Kari and their three kids live.

She's been working in Superior, at Mineral Community Hospital, and maybe that makes her story even more compelling, that instead of remaining in the relative safe haven of Montana, she last spring headed east.

She doesn't find it very compelling or in any way heroic. That's why she was resistant to being named the GoGriz.com Person of the Year. We acquiesced to her wishes. She isn't.

It's clear those seven years in Boston rubbed off on her, whether she followed the Patriots or not. She has fully embraced the Bill Belichick-inspired Do Your Job mentality. But that doesn't mean she can't be celebrated.

"It was a scramble. The cases were going up and up and up. By the time I got there, my colleagues had figured some of it out. But just the way of doing business was different," she says.

"Everyone's care was affected by the fact the providers were so busy taking 15 minutes to put on all their protective equipment to go see somebody.

"We were sending people home who normally would have been kept around a little bit longer, but you had to weigh the risks. Everything about how we practiced medicine changed."

They used plastic from Wal-Mart and heat guns to make enough protective gowns for everyone. They had to re-tool the emergency department to make more negative-pressure rooms in which to see possible COVID patients.

"It was all new and a real scramble. People were reacting to the virus as best they could. This was not something everyone had prepared for," she says.

She knows there are doubters out there, who believe COVID-19 is a hoax or nothing more than the flu. She asks that you do one thing: listen.

Listen to the doctors. Listen to the nurses. Listen to the patients who have been hospitalized.

"What front-line workers have is the ability to kind of bear witness to this virus," she says. "Front-line workers are witnessing it all. Listen to what they have to say."

Let's be clear: Karyn Ridgeway is NOT the GoGriz.com Person of the Year, per her desire. We're good with that, because that honorific might not fit anyway.

She took on gender inequality before she had finished high school, becoming the face and name that some revered, some despised. We're better for it.

Now she's fighting again, against a new opponent, more deadly, just as insidious. In a year when Karens, in a colloquial sense, represented the worst of us, this Karyn stood apart for the right reasons.

This Karyn keeps fighting the evils among us. And she's been doing it for quite some time.

University of Montana Athletics

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