Wolters to present famous female athletes
Eight former female athletes will come to life Tuesday, courtesy of Karla Wolters.
Wolters, associate professor of kinesiology at Hope College, will bring the history of women in sports to life at 3:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. The event is part of the annual Marge Bulger Sport History Lecture Series. Both programs are free and open to the public.
“Her performance will be extremely educational and entertaining,” said Janet Helfrich, physical education and sport professor.
The two performances are completely different from each other. The first one, “Her Passion to Play,” will portray four female professional baseball players, and the second performance, “Early Bloomers,” will feature four women from different sports who helped shape their respective sport.
Wolters will change costumes to portray Mary Outerbridge, who brought tennis to America; Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the entire English Channel, Babe Zaharias, voted the greatest female athlete of the first half of the 20th century, and Senda Berenson, who adopted men’s basketball’s rules for women.
Wolters has taught for 30 years and has coached softball, volleyball, field hockey, tennis and basketball at the intercollegiate level. She is currently writing a textbook about the history of women in sports and her collection of sports memorabilia will be on display at the Grand Rapids Public Museum in February.
“She was the first person to present when the lecture series started in 1993 and she was so good, we wanted to have her back,” Helfrich said. “She does a fantastic job.”
The lecture series was set up in the memory of Marge Bulger, a former member and chairperson of the physical education and sport department, by her husband William, a retired history professor.
“Marge set up an endowment fun because she had a strong interest in sports history and she felt the series was a good way to keep the interest alive after her death,” Helfrich said.
