College athletics.

It's a... male world.

But Ceal Barry held her own.

Because she was.

A strong, successful coach.

Coach Barry's record over 22 years just speaks to the vision that she had for her programs and for, The university.

She's in this.

Sportswomen of Colorado Hall of Fame.

She's in.

The women's basketball Hall of Fame.

At one point, she was national coach of the year.

Everything that she did, she did it with the expectation of winning and of improving and of changing lives.

As strong and enduring as the Rocky Mountains, they stood beside.

As visionary as the views of the Grand Plains, they looked across.

The women inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame are trailblazers, whose work has improved and enriched our lives.

They are teachers, scientists, ranchers, leaders in business, education, religion, and the arts.

Women who have been recognized for their many contributions to our state, our country, and the world.

I'm Reynelda Muse, and these are the stories of great Colorado women.

In the state of Colorado, if you said the name Ceal, even today, you know you're talking Ceal Barry, you know you're talking CU, you know you're talking women's basketball, but you're also talking women's sports.

Ceal created the enthusiasm for women's college sports in Colorado.

The makeup of her career has... all about.

winning.

winning off the floor on the floor.

We could talk about the academic success of her teams that she coached.

phenomenal off the charts, but she is still the winningest coach.

In CU athletic history.

Playing for Ceal.

Meant.

She believed in you as a human.

As a woman, as a person, as a student, and there wasn't a part of your life that she didn't want to go right for you.

She built... Her program from the ground up.

She understood.

What specific steps that she had to take in order to be a successful coach.

in a time where, again, you know, women's sports was not, Highly recognized across the nation.

And so her trailblazing was taking a program from... infancy stages and building it to something phenomenal.

Ce took that team... And.

Give it a national presence.

And certainly got people noticing what was going on.

And what we see now in 2026 is this.

of women's sports and support for women, not only at the collegiate level, but at the professional level.

And she was a part of that, you know, she was a part of that groundbreaking time.

I think that foundation.

Of.

Heart and defense and teamwork and camaraderie.

Those kinds of things that.

Served her well over the long period of her.

her career were established early on.

I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky.

was one of eight children, had five brothers.

Two sisters.

A lot of our activities revolved around going to St.

Pius School and playing sports.

My sisters and I. We played on the volleyball team.

We played on the softball team.

No basketball, though.

Unfortunately, St.

Pius did not have a girls' team.

However, we did have a boys team.

So that was a distinct difference in the sense that I didn't have an opportunity to play a sport that I really was fascinated with.

My dad would listen to all the Louisville basketball games on radio.

And my brothers would be in and out, but I would be the one sitting there listening with him to the radio announcer.

It's your playing a fine game.

It's 69 to 56, 44 by 13.

And him explaining to me what a turnover was.

And what an assist was.

And what was a zone defense?

And I would ask him... questions throughout the whole game.

And he loved it.

He loved it.

He loved to tell me all about it.

But I missed out on those years, fist, sixth, seventh, eighth, that other girls were playing.

So, I would go out in the street.

And shoot baskets.

I played mostly with boys.

The boys in my neighborhood were competitive.

If we played to win.

I can't remember living a time that we were not like that.

When I went to high school, I played field hockey in the fall, basketball in the winter.

was late '60s, early '70s.

Huge pre-title 9.

Disparity.

The florists in the gyms that the boys played in, they had real wooden floors.

We played on tile floors.

We didn't have uniforms.

They had uniforms.

They had nice warm ups.

We didn't have warm ups.

We didn't really care.

We were happy to play.

When I went to the University of Kentucky, I played... summer softball, but the two sports affiliated with the university, the field hockey team, and the varsity women's basketball team.

Problem was, I needed to have a job.

September of my freshman year, I started working for Sioux Feimster, who became... The first women's athletic director at the University of Kentucky.

And it turned out that experience with Sue Feemster was really, really valuable.

I had an education on.

The future of women's sports was going to look like.

Title IX was passed in 1972, but there was a three year grace period while it was battled in the courts.

It wasn't until 1975 when the courts in Congress said, no, we're going.

It's a go, start implementing Title 9.

Our budget for women's sports went from $3000.

to $100,000 in a single year.

Title 9 gave girls opportunities to compete in sports, but it also gave young women opportunities to aspire to be other things other than just players.

It opened up the world of sports so that we could see that we could be trainers, we could be... Coaches, we could be officials, we could be athletic directors.

In the summer after I graduated.

I was a graduate assistant.

at the University of Cincinnati, I went to work every morning and worked all day.

Until practice at 6 o'clock.

I put together the basketball schedule for the team.

I hired the officials.

I hired the scores table.

I made calls for recruits.

I did everything that the head coach would do, except run the practice and coach the team in the games.

So I was getting such a great education on how to run a program.

Well, the coach, who was the point guard for the Olympic team, decided to leave.

So here I was.

turned 24.

And the athletic director... Decided.

She can do it.

And I was a little nervous.

I remember talking with my dad.

What if I lose?

What if we get beat?

You know, that's it for me.

It ruins your reputation.

She's a loser.

And my dad said, You can do it.

Take it.

Everyone I coached against.

had more experience teaching the game at basketball.

I was the youngest coach in the nation, I believe, at that time.

We won our first year.

First year, we won 18 games, second year.

We won 27 games.

We went on a roll.

I mean, we beat Ohio State.

We beat everybody in the state of Ohio.

At that time, Women's force was changing very quickly.

And Cincinnati was struggling to find a home.

in a conference.

So I was scheduling.

I was on the phone scheduling with someone and the coach from Florida State.

Recommended.

Colorado.

Colorado plays in the big 8 conference.

They play against Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas.

She said, that job is open.

You would do great out there.

So I called to Eddie Crowder, then his secretary at the time, JoJo Christensen, picked up the phone.

She said, Oh, honey, that job closed yesterday.

So I said, dash, I really would like to apply for that job.

And she said, well, I'll tell you what, if you can FedEx your resume out here today.

Eddie is out of town on a trip.

I'll just stick it in the pile, and he'll never know it was late.

And they pulled it out and somehow I got interviewed.

That would have been a hard transition for her to make.

not only to a bigger coaching job than Cincinnati, But also in a new place that she had not been before, in a new conference, in a new part of the country.

When I came in, I was in awe of these older women, coaches that were 10, 12 years older than me.

I was intimidated.

I was the youngest, and we were in 8th place out of 8 teams.

We were not very good.

In a way, I function better when my back's against the wall.

I liked having that pressure.

But.

I knew I was entering a profession that If you don't win, you get to go find another job, something else to do.

The one thing.

Did I... Resolved not to do was to cheat.

I was not gonna cut corners.

I wasn't going to break NCAA rules.

I wasn't going to compromise my integrity to win.

I was like, I'm going to do this the hard way.

She built her program from the ground up and with integrity.

It would.

recruiting to change the culture.

And some people weren't going to fit.

She would never settle for a great player with no character, for a great player that she had heard skip class, for a great player that had gotten in trouble in the community.

So you've got to scratch them right off your list.

She was just really intentional about who she wanted on her team.

And so it starts with the recruiting process.

She knew the kind of student athlete that she wanted to bring into a program to fit into.

The discipline.

The the culture that she was trying to build.

She really believed when she recruited that she was taking an 18 year old and giving you back an adult.

I met Coach Barry when I was a sophomore at Barton County Community College in Great Bend, Kansas.

and had a conversation just about the potential of me coming back to Colorado and playing for the buffaloes.

I think my initial feeling about Coach Barry was that she wanted to win, um, that she just kind of had a no nonsense personality where She understood where she wanted to take this team.

She had this vision of how she wanted her teams to play.

I wanted to play for a coach who had that vision of, you know, creating a winning program that had discipline and really wanted to get to a final four and raised a national championship banner.

And that really excited me.

I came up in over 36, coming down into Boulder, and I knew that Friday morning on my visit right away that I was gonna attend the University of Colorado.

Coochberry was... about developing the entire whole person.

The basketball side was one thing, but being successful in the classroom was another, and that was just as important to her.

C took great pride, obviously, in graduating her players, and the figure I hear is that 95%, or more, of Ceal's four year basketball players graduated.

I believe that to be the best student you could be was, Something that you could carry in your hip packet the rest of your life and it would be an asset.

I believed in that.

She was setting up her team, her players to win at the game of life.

She always recruited... Kids that I think.

would play defense.

That was always something about Ceal.

The defense was something she believed in.

She studied it.

She learned about it, but it was in her gut.

It was in her heart.

We had reversible practice jerseys.

It says defense wins.

And so that if you didn't play... Defense, you weren't going to be getting a lot of minutes on the court.

She coached a gritty, selfless team style of basketball.

Our defense was hard nosed.

It was difficult to understand.

It was hard to play.

You had to have everybody doing the right thing at the right time to do it.

to be able to execute the type of system that Ceal taught us.

foundation that she laid.

was a winning foundation 1st and foremost, but it was a challenge.

She had to make us believe that the system that she was teaching us was going to help us beat.

that were better than we were.

And when we just stuck with those attitudes and those beliefs in that same system, then we became incredibly difficult to beat.

The Big A conference was one of the top conferences back then, and I want to say top 4 in the nation, you had some pretty competitive teams.

1989, the turning point, we had a veteran team.

We had 4 seniors and 3 juniors that made up the core of the team.

We had played Louisiana Tech on the road, and Leon Barmore was probably the premier coach in the nation at that time.

We played them in early January.

Well, here they came.

And my team was ready.

And we were all over it.

This was the number 2 team in the nation.

From that point on, we had a fan base.

So the 1st time, Beat any of these team was a major step forward in my confidence level.

The first time you do it, you go, OK, you do it once.

You do it a second time.

Once they started to win, The community got behind her and they showed up.

There were Lady Buff fans all of the sudden all over the place.

And that's sports.

You start winning, and you start getting attention.

We went on to win 22 games.

That year, we won the big eight title, regular season.

No one had ever gone through undefeated.

We went 14 and 0 conference, and we went undefeated in the conference tournament.

We won the championship in overtime.

And we had our very first sellout in the program.

The Buffs were hosting their first NCAA tournament game.

Suddenly, everyone decided they had to be at that game.

We would go free shoot an hour before the game before our official warm up started, and there were already 5000 people in the stands.

I think it was just difficult to imagine looking up at the sea of, you know, black and gold and people cheering you on.

It was just... a magnificent and an electrifying atmosphere.

It's exciting to sell out, and I think what it proved was that women's sports... is appealing to fans.

A women's team.

At CU Boulder.

the first team to sell out that arena.

Remarkable.

In 1993, we went to the regional.

We actually went to the elite eight.

We were a step away from the final four.

We won the big 8 championship.

Then we went on to the regional.

We beat the number one seat, Stanford.

And UCLA offered me a job.

Three year contract.

I thought about it.

Even though she had a successful program, her salary didn't match the men's salary.

She was making about what a first year public high school teacher was making to coach this top 25 basketball program.

I do think that, you know, Colorado was always a place that she wanted to be.

She had built something there, and she wanted to see it through.

I thought Colorado was the best job in the country.

I had that job.

And I wanted to be there.

She found some great support.

I think her athletic directors that she worked for, believed in her and supported her.

You know, Bill Marolt was the athletic director, who was a phenomenal athletic director at the University of Colorado.

And him and Coach Barry had a great relationship and, and Bill saw what, what she was building in.

And Bill saw that, you know, Coach Barry was having this incredible run.

The president of the university called me.

And then said, Ceal, we will offer you a multi-year contract.

So I was the first women's coach to have a multi-year contract.

Ceal Barry received equal pay.

Ceal Barry was paid the same base salary.

as the men's.

CU basketball coach.

And I think that's really, really speaks to who she was, what she did, and also the value that the university put on her, and females in sports.

So Ceal did a lot in the state of Colorado to mentor not only her own players.

her own coaches.

But the whole kind of community within the state.

She held basketball camps in the summertime.

We had great fan support during the basketball season.

A lot of families, a lot of young kids came to our games, and then, in turn, they came to summary basketball camps.

Some of these kids would go to camp 7 consecutive years.

Love going to camp and see you.

They love my team, and they love the lady buffs.

They were long camps in, and they were long hours, and we put a lot of work into them, but they were really good camps.

We built a lot of young kids that wanted to play basketball, and they learned the skills, and they wanted to play at CU.

It would be 19 that I went to this camp as a 15 year old.

And C had been at the university for a couple years by then.

She was charismatic and lovable and energetic, and she would just get right in there with us.

These camps were not typical for girls at the time, which made it even more special for me when Ceal and I could run these camps later together for Colorado women's basketball.

People knew who Ceal Berry was.

They knew.

about the CU women's basketball team.

They connected with it.

They identified with it.

There hadn't been a team like that on the women's college level, getting that kind of exposure, that publicity.

I think in the 9495 season, which was my senior year, That was the most successful Season and CU history.

That, I think, really put Coach Barry... to the national scene.

The following year, she was... An assistant coach on the 96 Olympic gold medal team.

Tara VanDerveer is one of her... best friends.

Tara was the coach.

We had lost to Brazil in the world championships in '94.

We lost to them, and they scored 110 points.

And Tara had asked me to be the defensive coach.

And I said, well, we're going to have spent a lot more time on defense, if we're going to win the gold medal.

And we did.

We spent a little more time on defense and we shaped that team.

to be ready to defend Brazil.

What I love about Ceal being chosen, It was for her defense.

It was for something that other coaches simply were incapable of teaching.

We won that gold medal, and... That team is still, I think, highlighted as one of the all time greatest Olympic women's basketball teams in history.

When Ceal was invited to be an assistant for the 1996 Olympic team, And what it meant was a huge sacrifice on her part.

In June, you run your camps, in July, you're on the road, recruiting.

And so when you're taking these teams out of the country, it may conflict with the recruiting.

And when I came home, Late 90s, we were not very competitive.

So we were losing games and... It was very frustrating to have been to the mountaintop, and then all of a sudden, we were... Being beaten.

I think we had gone away from recruiting players that would.

have the commitment to the team play and commitment to the discipline style and commitment to accountability, and we went back to that.

And... We recommitted to recruiting the type of players that fit the culture.

So in 2001, we went back to the NCAA.

AA tournament, 02.

We went back to the sweet 16 and the elite 8, and we were able to get it.

Back on track.

That took a heavy lift.

But, I pretty much was running out of gas, and there was a big part of me that was curious about being an athletic administrator.

becoming what is known as a senior woman's athletic director.

I think she saw that she could continue to make an imprint on young women.

And obviously, when she went into administration, how she could impact coaches, also still be connected with the student athletes.

In 04/05.

You know, the university was going through a rough time with a recruiting scandal.

The athletic director had resigned.

There were.

A lot of holes to fill in the athletics department.

When it was the toughest, they asked her to take the helm.

I think that speaks volumes about.

what she meant to that university and the trust that the university had back in her.

She was a terrific champion.

women, coaches, women, athletes, and for opportunities that women needed to have at CU that needed to continue to grow and be acknowledged and supported.

And I was fortunate enough to have 26 years of basketball coaching.

to use that for programs like volleyball, soccer.

women's cross country and track, women's lacrosse, and speak to the athletic director in the Speak to the Athletic Administration about how those sports should have the same opportunity to play... championship level.

that we did as women's basketball.

She was adamant that every women's program team had their own locker room.

That they received the same funding as men's sports did.

Treating all your women's sports at the same level that you treat your men's sports is an aspiration.

She ended up being The deputy assistant athletic director, the second in charge of all the athletics at C.U.

Boulder.

I spent 43 years.

In division I athletics.

Being a female, who started in a rec center.

and fought for the opportunity for so many years to have a little bit more and do a little bit better.

I think I came to the Time.

When I'm not sure I could make a difference anymore.

So I thought... It's time.

I don't think she left anything on the shelf.

I think she gave it everything she had.

She.

Retired on our own terms.

People recognize the impact that she had.

Not just here in Colorado, but nationwide and worldwide.

She was somebody that was very well respected in the basketball world and.

people really Admired the work.

that she was doing and wanted to support it.

When 2018, when I got the call, That you're being inducted into the women's basketball hall of fame.

I was excited about that.

I was honored and humbled to be included in that club.

I didn't realize how much she achieved until they kind of started going down all of her accolades.

And so it was just a really, Proud moment.

And it just shows that, you know, if you lead with integrity, if you lead with character, That you can achieve anything in life.

I've been on the CU Boulder campus a couple times recently.

You walk into the event center now, and you walk through Sealberry Plaza.

They named the... outdoor gathering space in front of the event center after their winningest basketball coach.

in school history.

Is she still connected?

with the University of Colorado and our women's basketball program, we just celebrated our 50th season last year, which was pretty remarkable to have all those alums come back.

My players.

They remember that we did laugh a lot in the hotels.

the buses, at the meals.

We had some really, really good times.

There is a light in those players.

They are unbelievable women.

I do think that It comes from.

who they believe they are and what they're worthy of from the time that we were together, under Ceal.

She mentored so many of us to be successful in the next stage of our lives.

A lot of people owe a lot to her.