C. Vivian Stringer, the Hall of Fame women’s basketball coach at Rutgers University who first commanded a college sideline in 1971 and became one of her sport’s premier defensive minds, said Saturday that she would retire in September.
The first Black coach to win at least 1,000 Division I basketball games, Stringer, 74, has long been among the celebrated and idolized figures in college sports. In recent years, though, she has sometimes been at a remove from the Rutgers program she built into a mainstay of women’s basketball over more than a quarter-century in charge in Piscataway, N.