VICKIE JOHNSON ~ AN AMAZING ATHLETE AND A MAJOR INSPIRATION!

She picked up a basketball as a challenge when she was 9 and used it to prove a point, first in the back yard against her brother and two cousins in Coushatta, then on her way to becoming a two-time Kodak All-American at Louisiana Tech, then through 13 seasons in the WNBA and a concurrent 15 overseas, and now through another 15 seasons as a WNBA coach.

All the while, that crimson dirt of Louisiana’s rural Red River Parish on her hands proving she’d worked for it, that she’d earned it, Vickie Johnson has remained about the most genuine and gentle, polished, unassuming off-the-court ballplayer you could ever meet, even if, like her, you’d traveled from the banks of Loggy Bottom and Grand Bayou to the Thomas Assembly Center in Ruston to Madison Square Garden to the gymnasiums of France and Hungary to Israel and Turkey.

“Polite, well-mannered, very bashful and shy,” said her long-ago summer ball AAU teammate Sarah Harrison Zeagler.

“And,” Zeagler laughs at the memory, “insanely talented.”

It’s that delightful mix of sweet, super, and stubborn that vaulted Johnson, a 5-9 guard with a pure all-around game highlighted by a sweet baseline jumper, above the field at every level of basketball and ultimately landed her a well-deserved, “it’s-about-time” spot in Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame, Class of 2025.

That home state spotlight has resulted in the once-bashful basketballer earning the prime seat in the 99th Annual Natchitoches Christmas Festival of Lights Parade on Saturday, Dec. 6.

Instead of launching jump shots, Johnson will be using her left arm to throw candy and trinkets to the thousands of festival-goers of all ages lining the two-mile parade route off the Northwestern State University campus, through historic downtown Natchitoches, and back through the Historic District to NSU again. She will be the Grand Marshal, co-starring with Santa Claus.

It’s a parade Johnson and family members attended while she grew up in Coushatta. A game that she took on as a challenge has carried her literally around the world, and back home again. The spotlight found the shy girl to a slight degree in high school, then to a much greater degree as she became one of the greatest Lady Techsters, and in arenas and TV screens all over during her pro career as a superstar player and since, as a coach.

“I didn’t start playing because, ‘Oh, I love basketball,’” Johnson said. “I started because my oldest brother said it was for guys, for the boys. ‘Girls don’t play basketball.’ So I picked up a ball and went to the back yard. I was 9. From that day on, I loved it.”

A year later, 1982, she saw Louisiana Tech and USC, titans of the women’s college game at the time, playing on television.

“I watched with my mom and it … I was thrilled, you know?” Johnson said. “I told her, ‘One day, I’m playing college basketball. I’m gonna play for the team in the blue, the team with the stars going down their jerseys.”

The ‘team in blue’ was the Lady Techsters, only about 70 miles away through the pine trees and winding state highways from her back yard court.

“Well,” said the lady everyone in Coushatta called ‘Mrs. Susie,’ the single mom with three jobs, “if you’re gonna play for them, you’d better get back outside.”

She dribbled her way out the back door and kept shooting.

Often joining her was her father’s youngest brother from Shreveport, her Uncle Johnny, a veteran of semi-pro hoops and a serious student of the game.

“He taught me how to play basketball,” Johnson said. “He just … how to dribble, to move, to guard, understanding the game. ‘What did you see? How could you have done better?’ He took care of me.”

Uncle Johnny was a good teacher. By the time Johnson was a sophomore at Coushatta High (now Red River), she’d verbally committed to play for “the team in blue.”

But it wasn’t the same program she’d watched on TV in 1982. Tech fell out of the Top 25 in 1990-91 for the first time in 13 years, then lost in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. The next season was equally mediocre.

“No question that Vickie coming to Louisiana Tech really helped put the program back on the national map,” Tech’s head coach Leon Barmore, a Louisiana Sports and Naismith Basketball Hall of Famer, said. “If we hadn’t signed that class — Vickie, Racquel Spurlock, Amy Brown — we would have disappeared from the national spotlight. Vickie wasn’t a savior by herself, but she sure was instrumental.”

As a rookie Lady Techster in 1992-93, Johnson helped take the team to the NCAA Regional Finals, a snapshot of things to come. During her four seasons with Tech, the Lady Techsters were 116-17 and finished as national runner-up in 1994 when Johnson, a sophomore, was chosen to the All-Final Four team.

“Vickie was the ultimate teammate,” Barmore said. “She did whatever it took to win, whether that meant playing defense or scoring or just being a leader.”

“She’s a winner,” said Brown, a former Parade All-American, Johnson’s Tech teammate, and now director of teacher education at Tennessee Tech after a successful, championship-filled coaching career there. “She was the type of player who wasn’t going to allow her team to lose. She practiced every day like she played every night. It was contagious with her teammates.”

Whether it was a trait developed in the backyard or through emulating Mrs. Susie, Johnson’s selflessness came early, as sweet and as necessary as her baseline jumpers.

“Vickie could have played all five positions by herself,” her AAU teammate Zeagler said. “She could see the floor, everything, everywhere, like she had eyes in the back of her head.

“But the thing that always stood out about her was I felt like I belonged on the court with her, and that was because she made us feel that way,” Zeagler said. “She made us feel like we belonged on the court as much as she did.”

Although as a freshman and sophomore she helped Tech claw back onto the national stage, turns out Johnson was just getting started when it came to giving the folks around Cut-Off Road and Lone Star Feed down in Coushatta plenty to talk about. She earned spots on both the Kodak and Street & Smith All-America teams the next two seasons, Sun Belt Conference MVP in 1995 and 1996, and 1996 Louisiana Player of the Year.

She did it with a silky grace and salty presence.

“She was as smooth a basketball player as I can remember coaching,” Barmore said. “The baseline was her home. She would roam the baseline and make that little jump shot all night. It was a beautiful thing to watch. She was one of the players that our fans enjoyed watching the most.”

Thomas Assembly Center proved to be only a launching pad. There was more where that came from.

In the 1997 WNBA Elite Draft, Johnson was the 12 th player chosen and instantly became one of the pioneers, among the first 32 WNBA players ever. When the WNBA seasons were done, she became an international star, playing 15 seasons overseas in Europe and the Middle East.

A quick look at only a few high points from her WNBA stat sheet, which despite her still youthful appearance, is almost 30 years old — and counting…

• Nine seasons with the New York Liberty and four with the San Antonio Silver Stars;
• Twice an All-Star;
• First person in the league to collect 4,000 points, 1,000 rebounds, and 1,000 assists in a career;
• Dependable-plus, a starter in 408 of 410 games played and the first person in WNBA history to play 11,000 minutes;
• Won the league’s Kim Perrot Sportsmanship Award in 2008, her last as a player, and has been a coach in the league since.

“As good a player as she was on the court, she’s a better person,” Brown said. “She deserves every honor she’s received for what she did as a player, but it’s even sweeter because of who she is off the court.”

“Quiet off the court, but once it was time to play, all that went away,” Zeagler said. “Never mean, but always purposeful. She was very sportsmanlike-minded: you got knocked down, she’d help you back up. Just an incredible all-around person.”

All that, the total package, game after game and year after year, in a sport that “girls don’t play.” And all that with an attitude grounded in her backyard and in the house with Mrs. Susie.

A turning point of sorts goes back to a phone call made to her home after three days of practice at Tech. She told her mom of Barmore, “This man is crazy; I can’t satisfy this guy.”

She was thinking of transferring to LSU, a program that had recruited her hard, even though she had committed to Tech.

But on that call, Mrs. Susie asked her three questions:

“You wanted to go to Tech, right?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“You’re at Louisiana Tech right now, right?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“You signed a scholarship, a contract, right?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Then stay your ass right there.”

That’s the conversation Johnson recalls. “Then she hung up on me,” Johnson said. “At the time, a freshman, three days in … I was devastated.”

The next day, Barmore told his freshman star before practice that he’d received a phone call overnight. It was from Mrs. Susie.

“She told Coach Barmore, ‘Don’t mistreat her, but stay on her. Don’t cut her any slack. Let her know that this is about more than basketball; this is about life,’” Johnson said. “And that’s what he did.

“I can truly tell you that the discipline and consistency Coach Barmore instilled in me during my years at Tech is what I carried with me as a player and is what I carry with me as a coach,” she said. “College was very hard, mentally. Even as a sophomore, Coach Barmore expected me to know everything he was thinking, on offense and on defense. And I’m grateful every day, because when I got to the pros, it was easy. Every system. I could watch a team and know when to fill in and where to fill in. That’s from Coach and from breaking down lots of film, day after day, with (assistant coach) Kim Mulkey. I came out loaded.”

Quietly but staggeringly efficient, gym after gym, night after night, year after year. And still in the game. All for the joy.

Her old childhood friend Layne Huckaby, a hoops coach himself, was on the line when she got the phone call welcoming her to the Class of 2025 and the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame.

“You know what she said? ‘Thank you.’ That was it,” Huckaby said. “So humble. She was never in it for the recognition. She never needed to be in front of the camera. She just wanted to play.”

“A lot of people told me I wasn’t good enough,” Johnson said. “That was my fire. And that’s how I played. I wanted to guard the best players. When I chose to play overseas, I chose countries with the best players. That’s where I got my joy, from playing against the best.

“I played because I enjoyed it,” she said. “The accolades that come with it?, they come with it. But my goal was to be the best I could be and get in Louisiana Tech, and I did that.”

Teddy Allen is a Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame inductee as a 2023 recipient of the Distinguished Service Award in Sports Journalism. He writes for ShreveportBossierJournal.com, is the color analyst on the Louisiana Tech Radio Network football broadcasts, and does work for ESPN+ coverage of Tech sports.