From one-room school to athletic field

By Anne Bromley

When Stephanie Lynch walks down the Lawn May 18 to receive her U.Va. degree, her 90-year-old grandmother, Nancy Liady, who graduated from U.Va. with a teaching degree in 1933, will be there to watch. But Lynch is not exactly following in her grandmother’s footsteps.

Family photo

Nancy Liady (left), a 1933 U.Va. alumna, saw her granddaughter, Stephanie Lynch, graduate from high school. Now, three years later, Liady, who is 90, will watch Lynch walk down the University’s Lawn.

In her first job, Liady, née Apperson, taught 54 children ranging from first- to seventh-graders in a one-room schoolhouse near the Albemarle County hamlet of Batesville. Her granddaughter concentrated on athletic training in what is now the Curry School of Education.

“I’m just glad I’ll be able to watch her graduate,” said Liady of Lynch, who is one of her six grandchildren.

Despite their different paths in life, Lynch says her grandmother influenced her by example, as did her mother, Anne Liady Lynch, who attended Mary Washington College because U.Va. didn’t admit women undergraduates to all schools then. They helped her believe in herself, she said, and that she could do whatever she set out to do.

That confidence has served her well in a field dominated by men. Stephanie will be a graduate student and teaching assistant at UNC-Chapel Hill this fall in exercise and sports science. She recently was awarded the Max Crowder Atlantic Coast Conference Scholarship, given to an outstanding student athletic trainer.

Liady grew up in Yancey Mills west of Charlottesville and first went to the College of William and Mary. When her younger sister decided to go to U.Va., Liady transferred so the two could commute together.

It wasn’t only the Curry School’s reputation that brought Stephanie Lynch across country from Arizona where she grew up; it was partly her memories. She regularly visited her grandmother in the summer, and she loved it here, she said. Compared with Phoenix in July, Central Virginia was delightful.

“They’re some of my favorite childhood memories, catching fireflies in a jar, and all that,” she said.

Stephanie’s interest in athletic training began when she was in high school in Phoenix. Because there was only one certified athletic trainer for all the teams, Lynch was often on her own aiding track and field athletes or the soccer team.

As a part-time job and as part of her major in sports medicine in the Curry School’s kinesiology program, Lynch has worked with lacrosse players and swimmers, and even the football team.

She doesn’t know yet which teams she’ll be assigned to at UNC, where she will also teach physical education classes to undergraduates.

Stephanie’s mother said, in her unbiased view, she thinks her daughter will be “an excellent teacher, just like her grandmother.”