Western Carolina Athletics Hall of Fame
Jean Dowell - Women's Basketball - (1963-66)
Jean Dowell was the first all-star basketball player in the modern era of women's basketball at Western Carolina University. Most of her college career was completed before women's basketball team and players were ranked and honored on a national level. She averaged 30 points a game for the first nationally affiliated women's team at WCU in 1965-66, the best season scoring average in the program's history. After graduation, she became an All-American softball player and later helped the University of Georgia get its women's basketball program started by coaching the first UGA teams in 1967-68 and 1968-69. She went on to have a distinguished career as an athletic director and head basketball coach at Mount St. Joseph's College of Ohio where she won 342 games with an impressive .676 winning percentage. A native of Union Grove, N.C., Dowell took her team to the semifinal round of the NAIA National Championships in 1992. When she left the College of Mount St. Joseph in 1994, they renamed the gymnasium the "Jean Dowell Building." In 2011, she was inducted into the Ohio Basketball Hall of Fame.
