Cathy Bender, BS’82: Change Maker | Information

When she graduated from Vanderbilt, Cathy Bender vowed she would by no means once more set foot on campus. But as the present co-chairperson of the Black and Gold Membership, Vanderbilt’s alumni affiliation for former student-athletes, she walks that floor very often today.

For a 2021 inductee within the Tennessee Sports activities Corridor of Fame, 4 years of frequent frustration as a student-athlete became 4 many years of affect on a college and a neighborhood.

The primary Black lady to obtain an athletic scholarship from Vanderbilt, Bender was a member of the nascent girls’s basketball program. She was a girl competing at a time when the NCAA solely grudgingly made room for girls’s sports activities within the still-new Title IX period. She additionally was a Black lady from a working-class household on a largely white, prosperous campus.

By the tip, she was drained. She helped the basketball program put down roots. She held up her finish of the discount. In return, she needed to gather her diploma and transfer on.

No less than till a telephone name a few years later from June Stewart, then the ladies’s sports activities info director at Vanderbilt and one of many individuals whose assist helped stability the struggles Bender encountered as a student-athlete. Stewart requested her to return again to talk on the end-of-year athletics banquet. With reservations, Bender agreed.

“It wasn’t about being heat and fuzzy,” Bender remembers. “I actually needed to get some issues off my chest.”

She talked in regards to the problem of what she skilled. She talked about feeling as if she needed to actually select a path every time she encountered somebody on the sidewalk. It wasn’t that her supposed friends appeared down on her. They appeared via her.

“I used to be invisible,” Bender says. “That was the story I needed to inform. I needed to get an rebellion. As a substitute, I bought a standing ovation. I wasn’t ready for that.”

An impressive guard and member of the Vanderbilt Corridor of Fame, Bender stays amongst single-game, season and profession leaders in assists and steals. However her on-court excellence pales compared to her efforts within the years since. Along with a profession of 30-plus years with Merrill Lynch, at the moment as a vice chairman and senior monetary adviser, she is the primary Black feminine chair of the Nashville Metropolitan Sports activities Authority and co-chair of the Baron Society for the Nationwide Museum of African American Music, which opened earlier this 12 months.

Nowhere is her imprint higher than on the campus she as soon as vowed to go away behind. Along with the Black and Gold Membership, Bender was president of the Affiliation of Vanderbilt Black Alumni and co-chair of that group’s endowed scholarship fund. She additionally served on the Vanderbilt Alumni Board Government Committee.

“Vanderbilt through the years has been very type to me,” Bender says. “I believe the college understands that that wasn’t a superb time, and I’ve had the chance to look at us develop and alter. I’m glad to volunteer to be part of that change.

“I admire my schooling daily. I might do it a thousand instances over. My expertise, it wasn’t simple, however it was positively worthwhile.”