Susan Crownover — A Home Run for GPS

When she started at GPS, Susan Crownover thought she would spend a few years teaching and coaching at a girls’ school and then leave for a public school like the one she’d attended in Ringgold, Georgia. “I thought this was a stepping-off place,” she laughs. After a few years, she realized that GPS was “too good a thing to leave.” She became even more of a fan of the school when she saw what it offered her daughter, Kelby, a three-sport athlete. “It was the best place for her and taught her how to balance academics with athletics.”

The long-time softball coach remembers the early years when the team didn’t have a home field. “Before we had the T.A. Lupton Field, we borrowed fields from Rivermont and Warner Park,” she says. “The first pitchers we had pitched the ball over the backstop!” Today’s field and dugouts are among the nicest in the state, thanks in part to the generosity of current and former players’ families.

Eventually GPS softball players and their coaches won eight state softball titles and were runners-up an additional seven times, and while all are special, Susan points to the first in 1998 as perhaps the most meaningful but the 2014 championship in her daughter’s senior year as the biggest.

As a matter of fact, she’s found success in two sports, coaching both softball and basketball in 2004-05 through 2012-13. Her softball teams won four consecutive state titles during that time (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010), and in 2012 and 2013, her basketball teams claimed two state championships. Between softball and basketball, she has had over 25 students earn NCAA Division I scholarships.

Among her memories is the one of two seniors (Holly Presley and Kelley Fox Holland) at the 1999 graduation accepting their diplomas, taking off their gowns to reveal softball uniforms underneath, and running off the stage, and experiencing a police escort to Warner Park for Spring Fling.

Another more poignant memory is of the late Headmaster Randy Tucker and his daughter Taylor ’02, along with French teacher Sean Caulfield, arriving at Susan’s parents’ home after the devastating tornados of 2011. “He cut and moved trees and debris for five hours!” she recalls.

Remembering her first years as a member of the P.E. department, she says, “I came here green, but I had Peggy Michaels, Kim Leffew, and Gina Wells as ‘teammates.’ The relationships I formed with those women and others are the glue that allowed me to grow and depend on my colleagues.”

No surprise then that in 2015 Susan Crownover was inducted into the Greater Chattanooga Sports Hall of Fame, has been honored three times as softball coach of the year by the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and is a recipient of the TSSAA’s A.F. Bridges Award for representing “what’s best in high school athletics.”

GPS is fortunate to have that “best” in the P.E. classrooms and on the softball field.