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Catana Rhoda Johnson Starks (December 30, 1944 – September 6, 2020) was an American athletics coach. She was the first African-American woman to coach a men's team at the collegiate level, when she coached the men's golf team at Tennessee State University from 1986 to 2005.
Catana Starks | |
|---|---|
 Catana Starks, from a 1998 newspaper | |
| Born | Catana Rhoda Johnson December 30, 1944 Mobile, Alabama, USA |
| Died | September 6, 2020 (aged 75) Nashville, Tennessee, USA |
| Occupation | Athletics coach |
| Years active | 1980-2000s |
| Known for | Golf coach, Tennessee State University |
| Notable work | First African-American woman to coach an all-men’s team at the collegiate level |
Catana Johnson was born in Mobile, Alabama. She graduated from Tennessee State University, where one of her classmates was Olympian Wilma Rudolph.[1] She earned a doctorate from Tennessee State in 1989,[2] with a dissertation titled "An analysis of three methods of teaching physical fitness and their effect on strength, flexibility, and cardiovascular endurance" (1989).[3]
Starks coached high school swimming and basketball in Saginaw, Michigan in the 1970s.[4][5] She became a swimming and diving coach at Tennessee State in 1980.[6] She became head coach of the school's new golf program in 1986,[7][8] the first African-American woman to coach a men's golf team at the highest collegiate level.[9] She coached the men's golf team at Tennessee State from 1986 to 2005; her efforts to boost the team's profile included recruiting international students, which caused some controversy,[10] especially in the 1998 season, when the team had only one African-American player.[11] In her last year as coach, the team won the National Minority Golf Championship.[12] Her former players included Canadian golfer Sean Foley, who in turn coached Tiger Woods, and Scottish golfer Robert Dinwiddie.[1] She was also head of the Human Performance and Sports Sciences department at Tennessee State.[9]
Starks' life story was dramatized in a film, From the Rough (2011), starring Taraji P. Henson as Starks.[13][14][15] In 2014, Starks was inducted into the National Black College Alumni Hall of Fame.[12]
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Catana Rhoda Johnson married Alfred Donnie Starks in 1964 and had a son. She later remarried. Starks died in 2020, aged 75 years, in Nashville, Tennessee.[16]
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