Excerpt from Dayton Daily News
By Tom Archdeacon
On Valentine’s Day, here’s the story of Side Pony and the Hall of Famer.
“I don’t know if it was on purpose or an accident when she’d be getting ready in the dark, but when she put her ponytail on, it was always on the side of her head,” former Wright State basketball star Vaughn Duggins said with a chuckle. “So we all called her was Side Pony.”
“That’s exactly what they called me,” agreed the former Maria Bennett, once a standout on the WSU women’s basketball team. “Some of those guys on the men’s team still call me that. But to this day I keep wearing my pony tail on the side of me head.”
Duggins said when he was a junior she came to WSU as a freshman: “When it came to the men’s basketball team, she couldn’t have been any more standoffish. She wouldn’t even say ‘Hi,’ to anybody.”
Maria said she and Vaughn were both dating someone else when they first met.
“I’d see her day after day after day at the Pavilion,” Duggins said of the WSU practice facility. “Finally I got the courage to ask her out.”
“He made a little comment like ‘Don’t you have to get back to your boyfriend?’” Maria said. “And I said, ‘Actually, I’m not dating anybody right now.’
“He asked me to prove it and give him my phone number.”
She did and as Vaughn now explains:
“We started hanging out and we kind of carved our own love and basketball story.”
And when it comes to sports, it’s turned out to be one to be the best tales of hoops and heart around here.
