Since its girls' basketball program started in 1975, Hailey's Wood River High School's had employed one and only one female head coach—former Ketchum Recreation Director Terry Tracy for three successful seasons with a 28-23 winning record from 1978-81.
Now, you can make that two.
Former University of Oregon women's basketball captain Mendy Benson, 33, was approved last week by the Blaine County School District board of trustees as the new Wood River High School girls' varsity basketball coach, succeeding Brent Carnduff.
"Mendy will be a great addition," said Wood River athletic director John Rade. "It's great anytime you get a person with her playing and leadership skills. She's a fine role model on and off the court."
Benson, most recently the head girls' basketball coach at Crystal Lake Central High School in Crystal Lake, Ill. outside Chicago, becomes Wood River's eighth girls' cage coach in 34 seasons. She will be an ESL and Spanish teacher at the high school starting in the fall.
Mendy and her fiancée Kevin Stilling, now living in Illinois, plan to be married July 6 in Alaska and will be moving to the Wood River Valley in August after their honeymoon. Stilling, a former high school football player in Woodstock, Ill., will serve as an assistant coach on the football staff of Mike Glenn at Wood River.
She hasn't met the players yet, but Benson said she is excited about the challenge of moving the Wood River girls' program up to the next level. She knows she has key returning players and talent coming.
"I understand there are sophomore and freshman classes full of talent and excited about playing basketball," she said Monday. "I'm looking forward to working with them and also with the girls coming back from last year's team."
It's been a struggle for Wood River in recent years.
Wood River, 2-18 last winter, has lost 30 consecutive Great Basin Conference West games since Dec. 2004, the season the Wolverines moved up to the tougher 4A level from 3A. The Hailey team is 4-41 over four 4A seasons on the road and has struggled with its ball-handling and fundamentals.
Benson, in eight years of head coaching at the high school level, is used to building from the ground up and dealing with struggling programs.
After graduating from the University of Oregon in 1998 with a degree in Japanese studies and a minor in Spanish, Benson took a job as assistant women's basketball coach of the University of Tulsa Golden Hurricanes. She found that college coaching "wasn't a good fit for me," Mendy said.
In 2000, she started her first high school coaching job heading up the Chapparal Wolverine girls in Parker, Colo. Summing up that experience, she said, "It was a tough road."
"Basically, it was a brand new high school and we started the girls' program from scratch, with only a freshman team the first year," she said. Her final Chapparal team six years later was 15-6, and the girls who became seniors out of Benson's final team eventually went to Colorado's Final Four.
Benson, who earned her Masters degree in Educational Leadership from the University of Northern Colorado, met her fiancée Stilling in Colorado. The couple moved back to his hometown in suburban Chicago and Mendy took the head coaching job at Crystal Lake.
"That program had been 2-81 in the previous three seasons," she said about the Tiger girls.
Benson made incremental progress, guiding Crystal Lake to an 8-47 record the past two winters on the hardwoods. The school confirmed her resignation from that position May 16, but Benson left Crystal Lake Central on very good terms.
Crystal Lake Central athletic director Doug Blundy, quoted on the McHenry County sports.com Web site, said after Benson's resignation, "She did a really, really good job for us while she was our coach.....
"What Mendy did for our program was wonderful, and what she did for the kids while she was here was what counts. She made great strides."
Benson said, "It doesn't seem like much, winning eight games in two years. But it was quite huge for Crystal Lake. I felt we got it going back in the direction it needs to go and left a foundation for the future."
The new Wood River coach, born in Yakima, Wash., comes from a family involved in education, and hails from Alaska.
Her mother took a job as a vice principal in Kenai, Ak. south of Anchorage, which is why the family moved north from Yakima. Mendy attended Kenai Central High School from 1989-93. She excelled in swimming and basketball.
An Alaska state swimming champion in 50 freestyle in 1990 and 1991, Benson was tall as an adolescent, 6-0 in high school. Her idol back then was four-time Olympic swimmer Dara Torres, also 6-0 and a champion in the 50 freestyle event. Torres, coincidentally, is a part-time resident of the Wood River Valley who visits here often.
"I was more of a swimmer in high school. It was a good fit to swim year round," she said.
Her most memorable moment in high school basketball came in 1991 when her Kenai Central team, an underdog the whole way, won the state basketball championship in a huge upset over unbeaten Palmer High School. Palmer High had carried a 29-0 record including four season wins over Kenai into the season's final game.
The distance between schools in Alaska was remarkable, probably a good fit for Benson's new task of riding the bus to eastern Idaho and back. She said, "Our conference was about the size of the state of West Virginia. Palmer was four hours away from us."
A 6-0 post player with a decent outside shot but never the type to be the leading scorer, Benson was the kind of player who did what was necessary. After high school, she spent one year playing for Kansas State University and then transferred to Eugene—after the Kansas State coach quit.
She played four years for Oregon and was captain her senior season. Benson said, "I was a role player who could play solid defense and do little things like setting a mean screen. I didn't really have PAC 10 ability. The reason I played was because I had been very well coached in fundamentals."
Her playing career ended 10 years ago, but Benson is eager to pass along those fundamentals to a new generation.
She and her fiancée visited Sun Valley for a skiing vacation this past winter and came away knowing that Wood River's coaching job had opened up. She heard that from family friend Dr. Jim Lewis, Blaine County School District's superintendent, and also from Randy Huntington of Copper Ranch Fitness, an acquaintance of Benson's from Oregon.
"Illinois is nice—it's got great museums, but no mountains," she said. "We both ski and hike, and we're excited to be coming to Idaho."
