Valerie Combs: Basketball Pioneer, Community Pillar

When the junior varsity coach asked her to attend and observe a game, she thought it was just that: a no-strings-attached invitation to watch a basketball game. A tall and athletic ninth grader, new to Louisville from Germany where her father was stationed in the U.S. Air Force, Valerie Combs had an immediate interest in finding out more about Butler High School’s JV team.

She didn’t stay in the stands very long. “I was sitting on the bleachers, and the coach said, ‘You're going in,’” Combs recalled in an interview with Kentucky to the World. “So she put me in the game, and evidently I did something right. Because after that I was on the varsity team.”

This first official foray into the sport would act as a launchpad into a trailblazing, record-breaking basketball career. A graduate of the University of Louisville, she became one of the first women to receive a full scholarship. 

And as she rose to the challenge, she would become the first female athlete to score 1,000 points for U of L. A hall of famer, an entrepreneur, and now the Director of Development for Diversity and Engagement at her alma mater, Valerie Combs continues to be a pioneer for underserved athletes both on and off the court.

From Observer to State Champion

After she started competing with the JV team and then the varsity team, her development as a force on the court was rapid. 

“My coach Terry Hall, I credit her with turning me into a basketball player,” she shared with Kentucky to the World. “And women's basketball tournaments had just started back after a 30 year gap because women weren't allowed to play basketball.” For more context, her entry into the team followed “a crazy era where women were not allowed to play. 1975 was the first high school girls’ state tournament,” she said. 

Valerie Combs playing for Butler High School, courtesy The News-Enterprise

After an impressive season, she remembers how “our team made it there.” And after the team cruised through the tournament, Combs managed to establish herself as a goalscorer who overwhelmed defenses. “We won it all.” 

“When we came home from Eastern Kentucky after winning the girls' first high school state basketball championship,” she and her teammates were immediately recognized as “instant celebrities,” she told us. Because of the “30 year gap where there were no tournaments or anything,” the school community recognized how important their tournament run was.

For Combs, this experience would set the stage for the next chapter of her career as an elite basketball player.

Becoming a College Basketball Legend

Scouts at major universities were catching onto how prolific a scorer and fierce a competitor Valerie Combs was becoming as her high school career winded down. Even though Butler’s team made it to its second state championship in as many years, they weren’t able to close out the finals like they were the year before.

Still, Combs was able to leverage her success on the court into a then-unprecedented opportunity for women: a full-ride athletic scholarship to the University of Louisville. She remembers this as a major turning point in her life:

“For me, being one of seven kids in my family – I’m number four – I would not have attended college had I not received that scholarship to the University of Louisville. I worked hard at playing basketball, and at that point, to get the full scholarship, it just meant that my parents didn’t have to come up with the funds for me to go to school.”

As she realized the importance of that distinction, she was able to channel that advantage into continued success on the court. Beginning her college career in 1976, she became a pioneer for Louisville’s women’s team. Always a threat on offense, she remembers how her teammates relied on her to score.

Valerie Combs, courtesy WHAS

She would meet that responsibility head on, becoming the program’s first player to score 1,000 points. Through her leadership on the court and her shooting prowess, the team would win the Metro Conference Championship in 1980.

How Valerie Combs Uplifts Future Students and Athletes

A graduate of the class of 1981, would go on to channel her success in basketball into a dynamic career in business, academia, and service to the Louisville community. Now the Director of Development for Diversity and Engagement at U of L, her experience as a pioneer for women’s basketball informs her work every day.

“I feel like my role today on the academia side of the university, I'm able to help support more students that can afford to go to college,” she told us. “My job is to find donors that want to support an athlete who doesn't come from an affluent background, to be able to find the funds to support those kids to go to school and experience and get the experiences that I had. That means a whole lot to me.”

“If it were not for basketball, I would not have had those opportunities. Who gets to come back and work for the university that gave them a full ride, and then help others to try to get that same experience?”

Combs has been recognized for her impact both on and off the court. In 1998, she was inducted into the Louisville Athletics Hall of Fame, and, more recently, she was chosen for the 2022 ACC UNITE Award. Specifically, she was selected because has proven to promote “racial equity and social justice through education, partnerships, engagement and advocacy” and has created “meaningful, lasting change by improving systems, organizational structures, policies, practices and attitudes,” according to the ACC. 

Even though she had to resist racist power structures in her own right as she excelled as an athlete and a student, she maintains that her experience was different from some of her peers. When she talks about her interactions with the Memory Lane Group, she reflects on the different challenges they all had to face.

“I get to hear their war stories and the things that they went through to play basketball at the university as Black athletes,” she told us. “It’s just amazing. It brings me to tears sometimes hearing their stories, because I didn't go through a lot of what they went through then.”

She gives this more context when she acknowledges how different it was growing up outside of the United States on military bases with her family. “Because of the military, you're surrounded by a lot of different ethnicities,” she said. “I felt that I really recognized that I'm a black athlete more when I came back to the States than ever when I was overseas.”

“I didn't feel it like they felt it,” she reflected. “And that's why when I hear their stories, it's heartwarming to me because of what they've been through and how my generation is now.” 

Join Kentucky to the World on April 12 for our program Basketball & Brotherhood: Breaking Barriers, where Wade Houston, Eddie Whitehead, Valerie Combs, and Judge Derwin Webb will discuss how they changed history through the era of desegregation.