GILROY
– If a Gilroy resident could be a poster boy for the feminist
movement in the 1970s, it would be James Kropff, a retired Gilroy
High School teacher. In two decidedly macho realms back then –
basketball and auto mechanics – Kropff, 67, made sure Gilroy’s
young women were the best they could be.
GILROY – If a Gilroy resident could be a poster boy for the feminist movement in the 1970s, it would be James Kropff, a retired Gilroy High School teacher. In two decidedly macho realms back then – basketball and auto mechanics – Kropff, 67, made sure Gilroy’s young women were the best they could be.
In 1961, at age 23, Kropff moved to Gilroy from Southern California with his wife and newborn son and took a job as an auto mechanics teacher at the high school.
“It was the best move I ever made in my life,” he says.
When he left the Los Angeles area, he recalls, girls’ high school basketball was virtually non-existent in the metropolis. When he joined Gilroy High School, there were no female students in auto class.
A little more than 10 years later, Kropff became the first women’s basketball coach in the Gilroy area. At one point, about a decade after that, he had an auto mechanics class with almost 50 percent female students.
Kropff was enlisted to coach the women’s basketball team at the school by Bob Hagen, “the dean of basketball coaches in California.” People in town knew Kropff had had experience coaching high school men’s teams. Hagen called him one afternoon in the early ’70s and persuaded him to serve as his assistant coach, a flattering offer from a man whom schools throughout California were trying to win over. Kropff had some reservations – women’s basketball at the time wasn’t taken as seriously as the men’s variety – but he took the offer. At 2 o’clock the next morning, Hagen died from a heart attack.
Hagen already had informed school officials of Kropff’s decision to take the position. Even though one of Kropff’s major incentives to accept it was gone, he felt compelled to stick with his decision. At Hagen’s funeral, he looked up and muttered, “You’ve got me again, Bob.”
He never regretted taking over the team, though. As a coach over the next couple of years, Kropff led his players through numerous standoffs with representatives of other high schools in the area. As a men’s basketball coach, he was used to phrases such as “man-on-man,” which were not quite appropriate under the new circumstances. He never quite picked up the “person-on-person” terminology and eventually got his players’ permission to revert to his old basketball field vocabulary.
At the same time, he saw women’s basketball teams catching up with men’s teams in competitiveness and prestige. He tried to be part of that growth in self-confidence.
“I made sure every girl got to be in the starting five on the team, even if she was the 12th best player,” he says.
In his advanced auto mechanics class, too, young women got a chance to prove themselves. Teri Obata, the first girl to take the class in the late ’70s, easily covered the recently introduced requirement to rebuild an engine and get it running. In fact, Obata, today a kindergarten teacher in Gilroy, got a better grade in the class than her boyfriend.
Still, Kropff remembers, some young women in the class tried to pull off what he calls “the girl routine,” claiming they couldn’t meet the requirements because they were not strong enough. But Kropff never subscribed to that kind of thinking.
“You have to teach both boys and girls to work smart, both in sports and in the auto shop,” says Kropff, who believes “finesse” counts for much more than brute force.
“Girls listen better,” the former teacher says. “Boys are stronger and faster, so on the basketball court it doesn’t matter that much.”
In auto class, however, he definitely found girls’ ability and patience to listen gave his female students an edge. Today, as back then, stereotypes about gender-appropriate activities don’t hold much currency for him.
“My daughter liked cars much more than my son,” he recalls.
A heart attack forced Kropff to retire early 11 years ago. He still sees familiar faces everywhere in town, and an old student introducing him to a loved one always becomes the highlight of his day. When an ex-student recently introduced him to her husband, a Stanford-educated surgeon, the man laughed incredulously, “Your auto shop teacher?”
“Much more than that,” she replied.
