When Camille Deaderick came to Southwestern in the fall of 1953, co-eds, as women students were called, could not be seen on campus wearing shorts. Needless to say, there was no women’s intercollegiate athletic competition. The 1960s-and Camille-were about to change all that.
After graduating from Southwestern in 1957, Camille earned the Master in Education degree from the University of Memphis and taught for several years at the secondary school level. She returned to her alma mater in 1968 as head of the Woman’s Athletic Department, responsible for the women’s physical education and intramural programs.
By 1970 she had helped to initiate the Tennessee Woman’s Athletic Association and was coaching women’s volleyball at Southwestern, competing against such schools as UT Knoxville, Carson Newman and Austin Peay.
She was also responsible for the development and initial coaching of women’s badminton, tennis and basketball. She played a key role in the development of the first “women’s gym” on campus, the Ruth Sherman Hyde Gymnasium which opened in 1972, now home to racquetball and aerobics in Rhodes’ campus life center.
Camille left Southwestern in 1976 to pursue her love for teaching at St. Mary’s Episcopal School. When in 1990 she received that institution’s Outstanding Teacher Award it was said: “There is about her the old-fashioned virtue of dedication to duty coupled with a keen sensitivity to others and their needs.”
Rhodes is honored to name the first woman to be inducted into the Athletic Hall of Fame, the alumna who brought Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics to campus, LADY CAMILLE DEADERICK, inducted this 23rd day of October, 1998.
