Two words can sum up the life of Dr. Catana Starks-determination and achievement. Now the story of one of her many accomplishments, she’s the first African-American woman in history to coach a male college sports team, is a movie! “From the Rough: It’s All About Believing”, starring Tariji P. Henson,(formerly of CBS’ Person of Interest) as the Starks character, and the late Michael Clarke Duncan(his final role on screen) had its world premiere, in early May, as part of a fundraiser for the High Falls Women’s Film Festival in Rochester, New York.
The story is about Starks, who was the golf coach at her alma mater Tennessee State University, a traditionally Black College in Nashville. Being a part of history is not the real story through, Starks’ distinctive coaching style and her achievements in the face of many challenges in her position and in life is what will leave audiences inspired. She had to drive the team bus, wash her player’s golf clothes, and had to constantly find places for her team to practice. Starks credits her strength to two women in her life-her mother and her grandmother.
A native of Mobile, Alabama, Starks was diagnosed with severe asthma, doctors told her mother she could never participate in sports. “My mother, she had an almost mystical belief of not being limited by circumstances”, says Starks, “so I grew up with a basketball goal in the backyard.” Asthma wasn’t the only challenge, she grew up in the segregated South of the 1940’s, “I learned to swim, I had to walk four miles in Mobile to get to a Black pool”. Michael J. Critelli, the producer of the movie, says Starks has always chosen tough challenges, “she not only sought out sports but swimming, which has to be the most difficult sport for somebody with asthma.” Dr. Stark’s instrument of choice, “the most physical musical instrument, or one of the most difficult which is the saxophone”, adds Critelli.
After getting the men’s golf coach job Starks, the former swim coach at Tennessee State, couldn’t find golfers, none of the males on campus would play, “initially that didn’t work out because I was female”, said Starks. She had to innovate by recruiting internationally, via telephone. The calls attracted players from Sweden to South Africa. Starks added, “I just decided that if I were to get the kind of players I needed to build my program that I was I had to look someplace else and that’s what I did”. During nearly twenty years at the helm her former players have distinguished themselves throughout the world including: Sean Foley, a Canadian, who is Tiger Wood’s swing coach; Sam Puryear, the former Michigan State University golf coach-the first African American in its history, and Robert Dinwiddie, an All-American golfer at TSU and a current member of the European Tour having achieved three consecutive Top-10 finishes in South Africa. Starks determination really paid off when the T-State Tigers won the National Minority Golf Championship in 2005. Starks proudly says, “we shot the lowest round ever played in the tournament.” And another distinction for her tenure, ninety percent of the players graduated!
Ironically it was a conversation with one of Starks’ former students, the Swedish chess of his younger son that led Michael Critelli to make a film about her. “I wanted to meet the woman who had been the influence on this other gentleman’s ability to coach chess well as he did”, Critelli said. Five years later he produced “From the Rough”. “It’s a film where the female protagonist and multi-racial cast are not focused on race,” Critelli, the retire thirty year Pitney Bowes executive turned film maker says the movie is, “ about the interesting complexity of life in which race, gender, global relations, and economics and social pressure, class issues come together, as they do I the real world.”
Critelli, who is a graduate of Rochester’s Bishop Kearney High School, wanted to bring the film and Dr. Starks to his hometown, thus the High Falls Film Fest event. He said, “I think that she’s a role model for any individual who shouldn’t either accept excuses or externally imposed limits”. Critelli is working on a book about his remarkable muse, look for the DVD release of “From the Rough” soon.
