Miss Andy.

So simple a name, but one that served as a badge of honor, an expression of genuine affection for the woman who spent 30 years of her life teaching and coaching and . . . well, nurturing . . . the young female athletes in the town of Newtown.

Deann LeBeau, who came to Newtown in 1964, almost 20 years after Ann Anderson took over the girls’ physical education department at the high school (when it was still on the grounds where now stands the Newtown Middle School) remembers Miss Andy well.

“She used to tell me stories how she used to take the school bus and go teach phys ed at the little school house on Whisconier Road,” said Miss LeBeau. “She used to ride the school bus with the kids. She told me how the Hawley School kids had no gym and she would walk the kids up the town hall and have a P.E. class there, then march them back down to school.”

Miss Andy came to Newtown High School during the 1944-45 school year and immediately took over the girls’ P.E. department . . . which meant coaching girls’ basketball, girls’ soccer, girls’ softball and, later, field hockey, cross country and even gymnastics.

“She was the female P.E. department,” said Miss LeBeau. “She was the only one there when I came in 1964. She was a wonderful person. She loved the kids, was enthusiastic about what she was doing, and got really involved in all kinds of things.”

Joan Crick - known as Joan Glover at the time - was there in the very early stages of Miss Andy’s career in Newtown and remembers how a so-so physical education regimen really became something under Miss Andy’s guidance.

“I looked for forward to gym class,” Mrs Crick said. “She brought in lots of different field events, things we never had before, and if you had any ability she was right there to promote it.”

The girls Miss Andy found for her basketball team in the 1940s and ‘50s had a lot of ability, it seems. From the 1944-45 season, her first as coach of what was the Hawley School girls’ basketball team, right through the 1953-54 season, Miss Andy watched as her girls won 96 games, lost just three and tied three others, while captured four Housatonic Valley Schoolmen’s League championships in the six years that league players were sponsored.

In that time, the Hawley School girls put together eight undefeated seasons and winning streaks measuring 29 and 35 games. No team, in those 10 seasons, suffered more than one loss.

Wow.

“She always could bring out the best in anybody,” said Mrs Crick, who played for Miss Andy from 1946-47 through 1949-50. “She always had a twinkle in her eye and a smile. You wanted to prove yourself to her. She didn’t say an awful lot, but you knew just by looking at her that she was proud.”

Which was most of the time, considering a 96-3-3 basketball record in 10 seasons. But even when things weren’t going so well - which was infrequent - Miss Andy had a way of staying nonplused.

Mrs Crick remembered, “She’d lean her elbows on her knees and just watch and watch. She’d never yell, but you just knew when she didn’t like something. She loved to see us do well and play well. She looked at us and that’s all we needed.”

Miss Andy was prolific not only in basketball, though. When field hockey became a part of the athletic landscape at Newtown High School, Miss Andy started winning some more championships. The Western Connecticut Conference had yet to be formed, but in 1960 the Lady Indians were priming themselves by finishing 4-0-1 (two wins over Masuk and one over New Milford). Four years later, in the infancy of the WCC, Miss Andy led the Lady Indians to a 6-0 record and their first WCC title and watched as her team not only remained undefeated, but did not allow a goal until the final half of the final game of the season. After a bad season in 1968, in which Newtown stumbled to a 1-4-4 record, the Lady Indians returned to championship form in 1970 with a 6-0-2 mark.

There was no titles left after that.

Miss Andy coached softball for almost 30 years and when she retired following the 1973-74 school year, Bob Sveda assumed control and rode the program through the next 17 seasons until a guy by the name of Bob Zito, in 1992, became only the third coach the program ever had.

“The kids loved her,” said Miss LeBeau. “They responded well to her. She could get them to do things that other people might not be able to get them to do. She never yelled at anyone, but had a way she would kind of kid them into things.”

Miss Andy had a profound impact on hundreds of young female athletes . . . as well as many of the coaches she worked alongside.

“I found myself saying things she might have said in certain situations,” said Miss LeBeau. “I thought about her a lot in my teaching career, after she retired and I always said if I could be half the person she was as a P.E. teacher that I would be successful.”

When Miss Andy retired in 1974, she was sent off with a retirement party that featured the re-appearance of many of the young women she coached - as far back as the 1940s.

“She was one of my favorite, favorite people,” said Mrs Crick.