Natasha Fife is part of the 2018 Pizza Hut Shocker Sports Hall of Fame induction class. The class will be inducted at a banquet on Sat., Jan. 27.

When women's athletics started at Wichita State, the coaches came from the Physical Education department, filled out their rosters from the student body and drove teams to games in cars.
 
"No overnight stays," said Natasha Fife, Wichita State's first women's athletic director. "Coaches would drive their own cars and pay for their own gas."
 
Fife, who taught in the P.E. department beginning in 1959, helped start Wichita State's women's athletic program – separate from the men's department – in 1969 with an announcement to form teams.
 
"The students wanted it," Fife said. "If they wanted it, we would coach it."
 
Wichita State joined the Association for Kansas Women's Intercollegiate Sports in 1970. In 1974, Fife was named the first women's director of intercollegiate athletics and Wichita State joined the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, starting what is considered the varsity era of women's athletics.
 
The women's teams played and practiced in Henrion Gymnasium or at off-campus locations such as Heights High for softball. No scholarships. The first women's basketball schedule featured 13 games played in Kansas and three in Oklahoma with a season-ending tournament in Hays.
 
"In the early days, the coaches were also teaching," Fife said. "We rarely went out of state. We paid for our own food."
 
Title IX, enacted in 1972, helped women's athletics and Fife remembers the state of Kansas helping with funding. Most of the budget, however, came from fund-raising. Fife did the budgeting and organizing.
 
"She was one brave individual to jump into that," said Bonnie Bing Honeyman, who worked as assistant women's athletic director and raised money. "I learned very quickly that most people in Wichita didn't even know that women athletes were out there. The first thing we needed to do, before trying to raise money, was educate the public."
 
They brought in Olympic gymnast Cathy Rigby for a fund-raiser. Pizza Hut helped fund a basketball tournament and Honeyman remembers Wichita State offering traveling money before that practice became common.
 
"She and I would go to the mailbox," Honeyman said. "Any time we got checks, we would dance around. She was determined. She would get mad, but wouldn't hardly show it. She was a person who kept on keeping on."
 
In 1981, the men's and women's athletic departments merged and Fife stayed on as associate athletic director until 1984. Fife, who retired from Wichita State in 1998, said joining the two departments was necessary and provided some stable funding for the women.
 
"That opened the door for everything we have now," she said.
 
Fife and Honeyman attend Wichita State women's athletic events now. They are excited and gratified to see crowds of 7,000 for volleyball and NCAA banners in Koch Arena representing basketball and volleyball.
 
"I knew it would happen, it would go," Fife said. "It's satisfying to know that the interest is out there."
 
Fife, from Winfield, owns an equally impressive resume as a golfer. She is a five-time Kansas Women's Golf Association Amateur champion and a seven-time KWGA Senior Amateur champion. She was inducted into the Kansas Golf Hall of Fame in 1993 and the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame in 2006.