C. Vivian Stringer

CTL-E-6865 · Person · other · contemporary

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-07737 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-6865.

Charlaine Vivian Stringer (born March 16, 1948, in Edenborn, Pennsylvania) is a basketball coach who built three programs to the national semifinals across a fifty-year head-coaching career (1971–2022). At Cheyney State, a small historically Black college, she reached the championship game of the first NCAA women's tournament in 1982; at Iowa she reached the Final Four in 1993; and at Rutgers she reached the Final Four in 2000 and 2007. In 2000 she became the first coach to lead three different schools to the NCAA Final Four — the claim supported here by Rutgers University Athletics and by Sports Illustrated's account of the Women's Basketball Coaches Association honor. Rutgers records 1,055 career wins, four Final Four appearances, and 28 NCAA Tournament berths; she was inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 2001 and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2009, and in 2018 became the first African American coach to reach 1,000 Division I victories.

The record

• Also known as: Charlaine Vivian Stringer

Notes

Sports Encyclopedia roster CTL-SPE-0364. Firsts disposition: 'First coach to lead three different schools to the NCAA Final Four' ASSERTED — supported by Rutgers University Athletics and Sports Illustrated (WBCA honor coverage). Source defect flagged: Rutgers' own pages misprint Cheyney's Final Four year as 1992; the correct year is 1982, per Sports Illustrated and the NCAA record — the description uses 1982. Curator's Judgment (DRAFT): Stringer's first is a program-builder's record — an HBCU with paltry resources, a seven-win Iowa team, and Rutgers, each taken to the same stage. No other coach, men's or women's, had done it with three schools. Photo: CLEARED — File:C Vivian Stringer.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Relationships

• Rutgers University — affiliated with
  Rutgers University Athletics: C. Vivian Stringer served as head coach of Rutgers women's basketball from 1995 to 2022, the longest-tenured Rutgers women's basketball coach. (The schema-precise head_coach_of type targets Organization only, so the affiliation is carried with affiliated_with, Person to School.)

Sources

• Rutgers University Athletics. "Rutgers to Celebrate C. Vivian Stringer Day December 4." ScarletKnights.com, October 19, 2022. Accessed 2026-11-03. https://scarletknights.com/news/2022/10/19/Rutgers_to_Celebrate_C_Vivian_Stringer_Day_December_4 (primary source · build store)
• Sports Illustrated. "C. Vivian Stringer, Who Led Cheyney University to History, Earns WBCA Lifetime Achievement Award." SI.com. Accessed 2026-11-03. https://www.si.com/college/hbcu/basketball/c-vivian-stringer-wbca-lifetime-achievement-award (build store)

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Record CTL-E-6865 · Combined Graph record U-07737 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 2 sources · 1 mapped relationship.
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Researched and maintained by the CultureTechLens research program · CultureTechLens Combined Graph, Release 2026-11-04. Corrections are public: the corrections log.

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