Trailblazing coach Pam Wimberly retires after 55 years at Menlo-Atherton

On July 27, Wimberly will officially retire from M-A, leaving an unparalleled legacy in not just the school she’s called home since 1968, but in the Sequoia Union High School District as well as the greater San Mateo County sports landscape.

“I think [Menlo-Atherton] is still a great place to teach and a great place to coach,” Wimberly said.

Wimberly was hired out of Morgan State University in Baltimore in May 1968, one month after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. She was one of nine Black teachers hired by M-A from around the nation that year, a reflection of an M-A student population with a growing African American community, largely from East Palo Alto.

“Because the population of Black students was huge in the school district, and especially at M-A,” Wimberly said. “So, they wanted to go out and recruit Black teachers so students could see role models somewhat similar to them and to help them with their education.”

While civil rights played a role in bringing Wimberly to Menlo-Atherton, equal rights for girls’ and women’s sports soon rose to the forefront. In 1968-69, the M-A girls’ basketball team was little more than an intramural sport. Girls had “play days” where they could participate in a variety of exhibition-style sports with student-athletes from other high schools. There were restrictions, though, as girls were only allowed to play half-court basketball.

It wasn’t until 1970-71, in the wake of Title IX, that high school sports nationwide introduced five-on-five, full-court girls’ basketball.

“I thought that was great because they were trying to tell us women and girls were too fragile, we couldn’t play baseline to baseline,” Wimberly said. “And, finally, we got to play the five player and there were no problems.”

After the Central Coast Section sanctioned girls’ basketball playoffs in 1977, M-A won four CCS titles. Wimberly had already seen Darcy Boyd become the program’s first female athlete to play collegiate basketball as a walk-on at Chico State, as well as Melody Clark become the school’s first female scholarship athlete, transferring from College of San Mateo to the University of San Francisco, where Clark was teammates with Wimberly’s sister Donna Price-Green.

Wimberly went on to make her mark in the CCS arena, coaching all four of M-A’s CCS girls’ basketball championship teams to date, the first in 1984 before a three-peat in ’91, ’92 and ’93. The girls’ basketball three-peat is an unmatched feat for a CCS public school.

“I coached against her when I was at Hilldale in San Mateo … and even back then when I first got involved, Pam was someone you learned about very early on as being an icon,” Menlo-Atherton co-athletic director Steven Kryger said. “Somebody that had a great competitive spirit, but also did things the right way. Her teams played hard, she had great balance, and you knew you were in for a dogfight any time you played their team.”

Wimberly’s kinship with her players — who often referred to her as “Coach Wimbo” — quickly became the driving force of M-A basketball and permeated through generations of students. Things came full circle when one of her first players, Bernice Clewies, graduated and had a daughter — Adrian Perkins — who later went on to play basketball for Wimberly at M-A.

Now Adrian Perkins-Sledge, the second-generation Wimberly prodigy is now a professional constituent of her former coach, working at Menlo-Atherton as a data information specialist and as African American community liaison.

“I think she’s still like the same person I knew as a coach,” Perkins-Sledge said. “Still challenging me, still coming in with the words of wisdom, still expecting me to not give anything but my best.”

Perkins-Sledge’s great career in varsity athletics was a testament to Wimberly’s reach throughout M-A’s sports landscape. Perkins-Sledge has known Wimberly her entire life, first meeting her future high school coach when she was 5, when Perkins-Sledge was classmates with Wimberly’s daughter.

A native of East Palo Alto, Perkins-Sledge arrived at M-A in the 1998-99 school year and quickly found her way into Wimberly’s gym because, at 5-11, she had the height to excel in the post. That she did. But Perkins-Sledge has always taken a philosophy of aspiring to give more, to give her all, a virtue stemming from Wimberly’s insistence she also join the M-A track team.

“To think back, I think she was a no-nonsense type of coach,” Perkins-Sledge said. “It was about giving your heart and pushing your body and mind.”

When Perkins-Sledge was inducted into the Menlo-Atherton Athletic Hall of Fame in 2022, it was for both sports — a rare combination of girls’ basketball post player and track-and-field sprinter.

And Perkins-Sledge recalls fondly the way Wimberly would use one sport to motivate the other, especially the first time she didn’t hustle back down the court on defense.

Coach Wimbo’s words: “‘There’s no way the fastest runner in the 200 cannot get down [the court] to block a shot!’” Perkins-Sledge said.

Wimberly is also a Menlo-Atherton Hall of Famer. She was previously inducted into the San Mateo County Sports Hall of Fame in 1993. She retired from coaching after the 2011-12 season.

In 2018, to honor Wimberly’s golden anniversary at Menlo-Atherton, the school dedicated the basketball court in her honor, naming it Wimberly Court.

“It meant a lot,” Wimberly said. “A lot of times you don’t get recognition for what you’ve done, and just the recognition from the ADs and the school was just phenomenal. I greatly appreciated them doing that.”

As it worked out, Wimberly Court was dedicated just two months prior to the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., someone whose legacy was intertwined with the beginnings of Wimberly’s career at Menlo-Atherton. He is an icon from whom she always drew inspiration.

“To me, I just felt like he worked so hard to make the changes for us,” Wimberly said, “not being able to sit at the counter … having to sit on the back of the bus, being able to make the changes he made, and I felt like I needed to continue on with the work he had done and come to Menlo-Atherton High to actually teach all the students, but to be a role model for those African American students who were there.”

It’s an inspiration that has imbued girls’ athletics for over a half century at Menlo-Atherton, thanks to Wimberly.

“Oh boy,” she said of the gains made in women’s sports during her tenure. “Growing in leaps and bounds.”