Honduras RPCV Jean Waagbo played on the first Howard County Youth Program softball and basketball teams and was the first Mt. Hebron girl to be offered a college athletic scholarship
Hall of Fame - Jean Waagbo
02/03/05
Jean Waagbo has been a witness to history. She played on the first Howard County Youth Program softball and basketball teams and was the first Mt. Hebron girl to be offered a college athletic scholarship. She helped start an indoor soccer league for women and she watched her daughter be heavily recruited to play college athletics.
She's seen uniform changes, attitude changes and opportunity changes.
Athletic parity used to be "just a pipe dream," she said. That was until Title IX was enacted and enforced; she's witnessed that, too.
The middle child of her family, the then Jean Makowski was a standout from the moment she and her younger sister, Doris, first started playing organized ball.
"Right from the beginning, I picked both sisters. They were my first two drafts," said former HCYP softball coach Harry DeCrispino. Jeannie was a shortstop; Doris a pitcher.
"They were good ball players and good team players and we won the championship for five years in a row," DeCrispino said.
Waagbo remembers DeCrispino's teams and what they taught her.
"To this day, Doris and I still talk about him and the way he worked with us. We learned some life-long lessons from him," Waagbo said. "His philosophy was to make the weakest link stronger. That's a life-long lesson."
Waagbo was an enthusiastic athlete in high school. In addition to being a cheerleader, she played volleyball, basketball and softball for Mt. Hebron. When she realized as a freshman that there was no way she would bump a senior out of the shortstop position, she ran a year of track.
Although girls track was not offered, Waagbo and a couple others approached Mt. Hebron coach Ken Katzen and asked if they could join the team. It seemed like a fair idea to him.
"Many of the meets we were the only girls there," Waagbo said. "We kind of broke the barrier for Howard County because the following year some of the high schools had girls teams."
Bruce Smith, then the Mt. Hebron volleyball coach, remembered how easy Waagbo was to coach. "Jeannie was constantly looking for ways to improve," he said. "She was a lot of fun to have on the team and she was always trying to help the other players improve."
Waago was competitive. "Every match was like a regional championship or a county championship to Jeannie, every point counted," Smith said. "She didn't like to lose, but she wasn't sulky about it." Instead, she tried to figure out what could be done to change the outcome the next time.
Waagbo played on county championship teams in volleyball, which usually just meant winning the Howard match, and in softball.
In 1975, as a junior, she was named Mt. Hebron's Female Athlete of the Year. That was also the year that Mt. Hebron's girls basketball team upgraded its uniform from a tunic, which required a blouse and bloomers, to a shirt and shorts.
Waagbo's athletic ability earned her a full-ride college scholarship offer, but she turned it down. The school "seemed like a Southern Belle finishing school and I was more on the tomboy side. I could tell it was not going to be a good fit," she said.
Instead, she opted to attend Colorado Women's College, an NCAA Division III school in Denver where she played three sports and graduated in three years with a degree in therapeutic recreation.
A visit to a college roommate's adobe home in Taos, N.M. helped redefine Waagbo's career path. From that visit grew a desire to know more about the world and other ways of living.
After graduation, she joined the Peace Corps and worked in a village in Honduras. That sparked a further interest in helping others.
"I've worked for agencies that have a mission that I can identify with and that are about promoting social justice in the world," she said.
Waagbo recently accepted a position with Lutheran World Relief as associate director for the Latin American region.
It was while watching their children play indoor soccer in Carroll County that Waagbo and a group of other women got the idea for forming their own indoor league. "It took a month of lobbying the owner of the arena to give us some time. He thought it was a lark, but it turned out to be a nice revenue stream for him," she said.
She remembers the first night's practice: some stretching, some drills and about four minutes of play before everyone was red-faced and exhausted. From a very humble beginning, a league was formed and it has thrived.
"Put a challenge out there and I'll be the first to step to the plate," she said.
Along with Mark Green, Waagbo coached an AAU middle school girls basketball team, the SWOOPS. Applying DeCrispino's strengthen-the-weakest-link philosophy, the team won more than 100 games in three years, and most of the players made their high school varsity teams as freshmen. Two - Waagbo's daughter, Kristen, and Timisha Gomez - went on to be named Howard County Player of the Year.
Jean Waagbo taught the SWOOPS players more than basketball skills.
"They couldn't understand why I took my responsibility as a role model so seriously," she said. "But 20 to 30 years ago, if a woman was athletic it was a very narrowly defined role - you were a jock. One of the beautiful things of today is that the role of the pioneer has pushed through. (Athletic women) now are part of the homecoming court and in the student government and not just classified as a jock and marginalized."
The benefits of athletic participation are proven.
"Girls who are involved in sports lead a healthier lifestyle and they navigate the waters of high school in a much better way," Waagbo said. "There's an awareness of the great benefits that can be achieved and they won't be achieved if we ignore or rely on other people to do the coaching. I love when the women of my generation step forward to say, 'Hey, I can do this.' And then they get up out of the chair to participate."
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