2025 Chesterton Athletics Hall of Fame: Connie Hamilton

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

Donna Krause was leaving her teaching post to go into the insurance business and on the way out the door she did Chesterton High School a monumental favor by encouraging her friend to apply for the job.
The money was better than at the Gary school where Connie Ulrich was teaching, so she decided to apply, got the job in 1973, put her head down and went to work.
Ulrich, whose last name became Hamilton after marrying her late husband Butch, coached five of the nine girls sports at Chesterton, back when the Girls Athletic Association was the governing body and the annual budget for all the sports was $250, per Connie’s recollection. Games were difficult to come by.
“The phys ed teachers did it all,” Hamilton said. “And if you weren’t coaching a game, you would referee someone else’s game. Occasionally, someone would come and help you out, but you couldn’t pay them anything. It was all gratis.”
During the GAA days, Hamilton coached field hockey, volleyball, badminton, basketball and track.
“I would take one day off between sports to put the equipment away and then get ready for the next sport,” she recalled. “It was a nightmare.”
A nightmare of her own choosing because she wanted girls to have greater opportunities to play sports the way she did.
“If you wanted something to get done you had to do it yourself,” she said. “No assistant coaches. I probably got about a nickel an hour for the time that I put in.”
Fast forward to 1981. Hamilton coached her basketball team into the Final Four of the Indiana state tournament, played at Market Square Arena, then the home of the Indiana Pacers of the NBA.
“Market Square. We were really in the big-time now! That was very exciting,” Hamilton said. “That was a big thing for Chesterton at that time. No team from Chesterton had ever gone that far, not even a boys team.”
Her starting five: Sue and Jamie Morris, Lisa Nauman, Alicia Gloyeske and Cate Lawson.
A win in the morning would have sent the Trojans to the state title game at night, but they lost to Rushville, 70-64. Sue Morris won the coveted mental attitude award.
Five years later, Hamilton had another team make it all the way to the semi-state round.
“Debbie Ricard was voted MVP of the conference,” Hamilton remembered. “We weren’t quite as balanced as the ’81 team, but Debbie won us a lot of games on last-second shots. You know, I think if we had had Debbie on that ’81 team, we might have beaten Rushville and played in the night game.”
Title IX, legislation designed to bring equal opportunity for women in sports, passed in 1972, but it took a few years for the state to retool. The girls didn’t have an IHSAA state tournament until the 1975-76 school year.
While building the basketball program, Hamilton quickly made a mark as a volleyball coach, winning the school’s first sectional in 1977. Chesterton didn’t win its second until 2024.
A look at Hamilton’s background makes it easy to understand how a farm girl from St. Joseph County was humble enough to work such long hours and coach so many different sports and equipped with enough basketball savvy and confidence to coach a team in Market Square Arena.
Her father, Robert, worked a full-time factory job and worked on his soybean and corn farm.
“He would work from 3 to 11 at the factory, come home and sleep for a while, then get up and work the farm,” Connie recalled. “Then if he had the time, he would try to take a little nap before going back to work at the factory.”
That explains the source of Connie’s work ethic. As for where she received the training to coach in big-time games, well, she was a big-time athlete in high school and college.
Part of the last graduating class (1964) of Madison High, which merged with a couple of other schools to become what now is Penn in Mishawaka, Connie was named the girls outstanding athlete at Madison both as a junior and a senior.
“The boys basketball coach told me if I had been a boy I would be in his starting five,” Connie said.
After graduating high school, she spent the next four years working in a wire factory, before enrolling at Indiana State.
“It wasn’t too bad,” she said of the factory work. “And any time I came back for vacation they let me work. That’s where I got my pizza money and my Sunday night dinner money.”
The coaches at Indiana State weren’t about to let such a talented, smart, driven athlete play just one sport, and the more the merrier as far as she was concerned. So, Connie played field hockey, basketball and softball in Terre Haute. She was honored as Indiana State’s outstanding female athlete as a senior in 1971. She went to school year-round and graduated in three years.
Since girls basketball came under the IHSAA umbrella for the first time in the 1975-76 season, Chesterton has had just three coaches. Hamilton compiled a 166-92 record in 13 seasons before the responsibilities of young motherhood led to her stepping down. Jack Campbell, inducted into the Chesterton Athletics Hall of Fame in 2024, went 455-36 in 36 seasons. Candy Wilson is the only Chesterton girls basketball coach in history not in the school’s Athletics Hall of Fame. It’s a tad premature to rib her about that though. She has only coached one season at her alma mater, going 15-9. Candy played for the freshman team when Hamilton coached her final season of varsity basketball.
Hamilton taught 41 years in the Duneland School Corporation and is retired, living in Chesterton, and looking forward to reuniting with one of her all-time great players, Debbie Gadd, a 2024 inductee who had a last-minute change of plans, couldn’t make las year’s dinner, and will receive her plaque at Saturday night’s dinner at Sand Creek Country Club.