LA FERIA — Jeannie Dudley remembers Tommie Wiseman.
Her name has become synonymous with Lionette basketball and has found a place in the annals of Valley basketball lore — the Tommie Wiseman Basketball Tournament.
“She was a very good coach,” Dudley recalled. “Her girl’s basketball teams were good.”
Ask most people at the Lionettes basketball annual tournament, and they don’t know who the famous tournament area teams come to play is actually named after.
Dudley, 60, helped Wiseman’s high school basketball teams as student manager.
Wiseman, who has since past away, took over girls basketball program in the 1950s and molded the Lionette basketball tradition into what it is today.
Only a handful of coaches have led Lionette teams since the girls basketball program began.
Wiseman was the longest tenured Lionette coach, coaching for a little more than two decades beginning as early as 1952.
She coached the Lionettes until the early 1970s and started the tournament in 1973.
Last night, Dudley was managing the score board and game clock at the Tommie Wiseman 43rd annual girls basketball matchups.
When Dudley thinks of the matriarch of Lionette basketball, she thinks of Coach Wiseman being in heaven teaching basketball to the angles.
“A lot of people think Tommie is a man,” said Irma Quintero, La Feria ISD paraprofessional. “She was female and she was the coach of all girls’ athletics at the time.”
Quintero has worked for the district for 40 years and she remembers being Wiseman’s student in the 1960s.
Quintero was managing ticket sales at the door for the Wiseman tournament yesterday.
Quintero said Wiseman left a great basketball legacy and the tournament is named after her in memory of her and as credit to her work as the girls basketball coach.
“She was a wonderful coach and a wonderful woman and she helped all her students,” Quintero said. “This has always been her tournament.”
Quintero said she was not on the basketball team but she remembers by the time she arrived to P.E. class on the day President Kennedy was shot, Coach Wiseman huddled up the class and talked to them about what had happened, and that the president was dead.
“She reminded us about what a great person he was, and she gave us the comfort we needed at the time,” Quintero said.
Since Coach Angel Martinez took over the program in 2010, the Lionettes have won the tournament twice.
“This tournament has been going on for a long time,” Martinez said. “It started off with eight teams and were at 16 now and it’s going strong.”
He said teams love to come to our tournament.
“As far as girl’s basketball tournaments, we’re one of the oldest,” Martinez said.
