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settlement of the lawsuit, she stepped down as head coach. Portland served as the president of the Women's Basketball Coaches Association during the 1989-90 season and made three tours with USA Basketball. She earned the USA Basketball Developmen- tal Coach of the Year award after leading the Junior National Team to its first gold medal at the 1997 World Championships, helped the 1996 Junior National Team to a silver medal at the World Championship Qualifying Tournament in Chetumal, Mexico, and was on the staff that guided the 1999 World University Games squad to a silver medal in Spain. Portland coached four first-team WBCA All-Americans. In addition, five of her players won conference Player of the Year honors, four were named conference Freshman of the Year and three were named conference Defensive Player of the Year. She coached an Olympian (Suzie Mc- Connell-Serio) and a Wade Trophy winner (Susan Robinson). Twenty of her players earned All-Big Ten accolades on 44 occa- sions, while 10 more players totaled 19 All- Atlantic 10 Conference honors. As a player, Portland helped Immacu- lata College win three consecutive na- tional championships, beginning with her freshman season in 1972. During her four seasons, the Mighty Macs compiled an 85-5 overall record. She gained three Outstanding College Athlete of America awards and one New York Press All- America citation as a forward/center. The Mighty Macs were inducted into the Nai- smith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2014. Portland was inducted into the Philadel- phia Sports Hall of Fame in 2017 and the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame in 2001. After graduating from Immaculata in 1975, Portland was named head coach at St. Joseph's for the 1976-77 season and coached the Hawks to marks of 23-5 and 24-4. She then served as head coach at Colorado for two seasons before moving to State College in 1980. Portland is survived by her husband, John, four children – John Jr., Christine, Stephen and Delisa – and seven grand- children. ■ A P P R E C I A T I O N B Y M A T T H E R B Portland was a strong advocate for women's sports Many years ago, while covering women's basketball for The Daily Col- legian, I found myself in Rene Port- land's office for an interview that turned into an extended complaint about how the paper hadn't bothered to send a single reporter to cover her team's appearance in the Orange Bowl Holiday Tournament. Ordinarily, no basketball coach would expect the stu- dent newspaper to cover an event held hundreds of miles from campus during the semester break. But the football team happened to be playing in the Or- ange Bowl that year, and there were three Collegian reporters and a couple of photographers in Miami at the time, none of whom had showed up to watch any of the Lady Lions' three games. Weeks later, Portland was still fuming, and not without some justification. "You make a good point," I said meekly, vowing to take her complaint to my editors. "I've been thinking about it for a while," she replied. Indeed she had. In her 31 years as a head coach, Portland did a lot of think- ing about how to advance the cause of women's sports – how to generate more media coverage and fan support, how to build on the foundation that Title IX had established, how to ensure that fe- male athletes received the respect that they deserved. When you're the coach of a nonrevenue team, part of your job is to be an evangelist. Portland em- braced that part. She knew she had a megaphone as coach of the university's highest-profile women's program, and she wasn't afraid to use it. Boy, was she not afraid to use it. In 1990, for example, the Lady Lions were shipped to Florida State for the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament to make way for a men's NIT game at Rec Hall. Portland's team was seeded higher than the Seminoles and had earned the right to host the games but was still sent packing. Before boarding a plane for Tal- lahassee, she blasted her own adminis- tration. "I've always valued the four-letter tournament more than the three-letter," she said. Moments like that should have made Portland a hero to the women's basket- ball community. But because of her views on lesbian athletes, she was a con- troversial figure. A 1986 story in The Chicago Sun-Times stated that she would routinely discuss "lesbian activ- ity" with recruits and their parents, as- suring them that "I will not have it in my program." In 2007, an internal investiga- tion determined that she had failed to abide by Penn State's antidiscrimination policy. Portland disputed the findings, but she was fined $10,000 and resigned a few weeks later, never to coach again. In recent decades, public opinion has shifted dramatically on LGBT rights. According to polling by Gallup, from 1996 to 2015, the percentage of Ameri- cans who believe that same-sex mar- riage should be legal went from 27 to 60. That change was rippling through the culture in the early 2000s, and it contributed to the belief among some that Portland's views were out of step with the more inclusive ideals of a younger generation. One other way in which we've changed as a society is that we've become more strident. Because the internet amplifies the most passionate voices in any crowd, we tend to think in absolutes anymore, categorizing public figures as heroes or villains rather than grappling with the complexity of their real lives. Portland's career shows how inade- quate such black-or-white thinking can be. Her Penn State tenure ended in a blaze of controversy, and it's that part of her legacy that many people will re- call most vividly. But there are other parts, too, and they include her fierce advocacy for women's sports. She took up a mission that a number of far- sighted PSU administrators had under- taken years earlier and continued to push for more. She was not perfect – none of us are – but she deserves to be celebrated for the good that she did. Because she did her share. ■

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