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Health & Fitness

Virginia Behm-Suiste Receives North Coast Section Phil Hempler Award

Former Albany Educator receives prestigious award.

Article written by Gil Lemmon, Commissioner of Athletics, North Coast Section

Founder of MacGregor High School as well as former Albany High School and Albany Adult School Principal Virginia Behm-Suiste, recently received the 2013 North Coast Section Phil Hempler Service Award. 

This award was established in 1986 to honor those outstanding individuals who have served meritoriously as administrators of high school athletics. The individuals who receive the Phil Hempler award "exemplify the highest standards of sportsmanship, ethical conduct and moral character in their unique and distinguished service to the North Coast Section, California Interscholastic Federation."

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During her career as a teacher, coach and administrator in the Albany School District, Behm-Suiste was adamant that there should be a place for every student. She fought that fight for more than 30 years — and came out a winner.

Behm-Suiste rose through the ranks from coach to principal before she retired in 2003, and left a strong legacy of equal opportunities for all student-athletes. For her years of visionary and strong service, Behm-Suiste is the 2013 Phil Hempler Service Award recipient.

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She began her career coaching softball, track and girls basketball at Albany from 1969-1981, which were the formative years of competitive high school girls athletics. That was when she first became involved in sports beyond the playing field, acting as the Title IX director at Albany.

Her role was to ensure the school followed the letter of Title IX, which mandates equality in spending, resources and the use of facilities for men’s and women’s sports.

“Education should be an endeavor to engage youth and adults in positive, productive and personally gratifying activities,” Behm-Suiste said.

Title IX ensured that female student-athletes would have the same opportunity to experience all that interscholastic sports offers.

Behm-Suiste also championed the cause of another, smaller and often overlooked group of students. In 1981 she founded MacGregor High School, a continuation (or necessary) school in Albany.

The smaller school keeps challenged or at-risk students on the path to graduation, but until Behm-Suiste took up their cause, the one educational opportunity they were denied was the chance to participate in interscholastic athletics.

So Behm-Suiste fought. And by the time she ended her 10-year run as principal of MacGregor, she helped draft an amendment to the California Interscholastic Federation’s by-laws which gave students at necessary schools the opportunity to compete on athletic teams at a high school within the district.

Behm-Suiste served as the athletic director at Albany from 1973-81, and was the first woman to serve as AD for boys and girls sports. In 1982 she was named the state Athletic Director of the Year. One of the landmarks of her first year as AD was to hire a young man fresh out of the military, Kermit Bankson, as the school’s new wrestling coach, a spot he held for 43 years before recently announcing his retirement.

She created the Grace Dinsdale Award, given to the outstanding female athlete at Albany each year. She served two years as president of the Alameda Contra Costa Athletic League, and later became the first woman to serve as president of the North Coast Section.

She left MacGregor in 1991 and returned to Albany High as principal, stepping down in 1997 to take over as principal of the Albany Adult Education program, where she stayed until her retirement in 2003.

When she was inducted into the Albany High School Hall of Fame in 2009, her presentation said that she still was an active participant in the athletic program at the high school, attending most of the sporting events at the school and helping coaches operate tournaments and special events – she was on the operating committee of the school’s annual wrestling tournament for 25 years.

Virginia Behm-Suiste is a winner –and she fought hard to make sure others had the same chance.

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