Longtime Menlo coach, referee hangs up her hat Longtime Menlo coach, referee hangs up her hat (July 31, 2002)

By Joseph Jordan

Special to the Almanac

The house on Barton Way is all but empty now. Wanda Spencer, 43, has lived here for 30 years, and has become as much a fixture in Menlo Park as Kepler's Books. But the time has come to "go back," as she puts it.

"Basically, my brothers, sisters and cousins are all in Oklahoma," she says. "After my mother passed three years back, they were like, 'Why don't you just come home?' "

Home, in this case, is a suburb of Oklahoma City. She has already sent her two children, Rebecca and Andre, to live with relatives. She and her developmentally-challenged brother, Larry -- well-known for tooling around on his bike and doing odd jobs in the neighborhood -- have stayed behind, trying to sell the house where the two of them, the two youngest of 16 siblings, grew up.

Ms. Spencer is "either known as Coach or Wanda. Most of the parents know me as 'the ref with the hat,' " she says, pushing a floppy white fishing cap back on her head and surveying her empty living room.

That's because for 25 years, that's exactly what she was: the coach. At the Burgess Gym, at Hillview School, and elsewhere, Coach Wanda taught boys and girls to play basketball, volleyball, soccer, and softball. She refereed game after game, reinforcing the need for fair play.

"She's extremely fair, always pleasant, and if she makes a call ... she'll get this big grin on her face, and then she'll go talk to the kids and explain to them what the call was and what they need to do," says neighbor Christine Freeman. "She's like a non-allied coach."

It's not necessarily what she'd planned on doing with her life. She graduated from Menlo-Atherton High School as a member of its Sports Hall of Fame; she was one of its last female athletes to earn letters in four sports -- field hockey, basketball, softball and volleyball, according to M-A Athletic Director Pam Wimberly, her basketball and softball coach.

After graduating from college in 1977, Ms. Spencer was playing semipro basketball in San Francisco when Dick Austin, then a Menlo Park Recreation Center employee, approached her.

"One of the first white guys I met was Dick Austin," says Ms. Spencer, who is black. "He asked me what I was doing."

Together, they started a youth basketball league that, in 1978, had only six or seven teams.

Now, according to Marc Nuckolls, who worked with Ms. Spencer at the Burgess Gym from 1980 until her retirement last month, that league has 170 teams and an estimated 1,700 children participating.

Since 1978, she's been employed as what she called a "utility worker" for the city, technically classified as a temporary full-time worker for more than two decades.

"It was a 25-year excursion into a part of my life that I thought ended after the pros," she says.

"Kids that played in the program have grown up and now their own kids play in the program," says Mr. Nuckolls. "She's pretty much part of the family around here."

Ms. Spencer obviously takes pride in the league she helped build and the love she earned from her players. Until her retirement in June, she often encountered people on the job, now grown up, who remembered her from their days at the Burgess Gym. But she worries that the program is losing its focus.

"I just decided it's changed so much, to where the backbone of the program is being pulled out piece by piece."

She sees parents dictating scheduling and practice hours. She feels Burgess would be better off with a separate department for children's programs, staffing at least a few more full-time employees. Ms. Spencer herself was one of very few, and she worries that children in the program don't get enough continuity out of part-time staffers, many of whom leave after just a year.

"I think the reason the kids are so in love with me is that they knew Wanda'd always be there," she says. "They'd see me around the community, at the market. They need that personal contact."

That's part of why she plans to move on to adult programs -- midnight basketball, adult summer leagues and some college games through the University of Oklahoma -- when she finally joins her children in Oklahoma City. But she's also making the move because the cost of living on the Peninsula, one of the most expensive areas in the United States, has gotten so high.

"It's time to relocate," she says. "I'm a divorced parent and it's just too expensive now in California for single parents with a regular job."

Despite all of that, there's no bitterness in Wanda Spencer, at least about the community she's leaving. The children she coached until so recently still come looking for her.

"They come by and see the house empty and ask if I can come out and play," she says.

At least for a little while longer, she can.