Ellen Bible Stacy remembered as player full of spirit

TUSCALOOSA | The University of Alabama volleyball team wore black ribbons at last weekend’s NCAA Tournament match in Clemson, S.C., as a tribute to the late Ellen Bible Stacy, one of the players who laid the foundation for a Crimson Tide program that has earned a bid to the national championship tournament for the last three years.

Stacy died along with four of her children on Nov. 19 when a pickup truck hit a van driven by her husband, former UA football standout Siran Stacy, at an intersection near Dothan. Siran Stacy and the couple’s 4-year-old daughter, Shelly, survived the crash. Ellen Bible Stacy, 36, died along with children Lequisa, 18, Bronson, 10, Sidney, 8, and Ellie, 2.

And while Siran Stacy, a former second-round draft choice of the Philadelphia Eagles of the NFL, was well known for his play on the football field, Ellen Bible Stacy left her own legacy with the UA athletic program. She was captain of the volleyball team in 1991 as a senior and won the team’s “Rock” Award three times in her career in recognition of her determination and hustle.

“We wanted to take her spirit on the court with us last Friday night in Clemson so we all wore black ribbons in her honor,” said Alabama volleyball coach Judy Green, “just a small way of saying you are in our prayers and we appreciate your contributions.”

A native of Lafayette, Ind., Stacy was one of nine freshmen who enrolled at Alabama in 1989 when the school started up the volleyball program again after shutting it down following the 1981 season.

“Ellen I can remember clear as the day I was recruiting her,” said former UA coach Dorothy Franco-Reed. “While we were there she was actually running a track meet. I have this visual of that long blonde hair flying in the wind and her leading the pack.”

Franco-Reed remembers Ellen Bible Stacy mostly as an overachiever.

“You couldn’t keep her off the court even if there were players better or bigger,” Franco-Reed said. “She was kind of the glue of our team. She kept them together.

“It was a very unique situation in that when those kids came in there were no upperclassmen. There were no role models for them. They immediately bonded and became this one sisterhood of players.”

Melanie Brooks Vittotow, one of Stacy’s UA teammates who now lives in Kentucky, got to know her as well off the court as on it.

“She was my roommate for two years when I was there,” Vittotow said. “She was one of the strongest people I’ve ever known. She was full of life, an incredible athlete. Of all our players, she always worked hard and she always came to play.

“I really cherish the time that I got to room with her. She was kind of like our mother hen. She took care of us and she was always there with us. Everybody loved Ellen. She was just fun to be with.”

Julie Esposito Johnson, who now resides in Connecticut, played alongside Stacy and later moved in with her after their playing careers ended. She got to see Stacy’s mothering instincts before Stacy started her own family.

“I actually happened to have a child while I was at Alabama, so it was me and Sage [the child] and Ellen in that apartment,” Johnson said. “She was instrumental in helping me raise my daughter for the first year-and-a-half of her life. She was the backbone. It was obviously a very vulnerable time for me and she was very stable and very positive.

“Us three were like family. She was a second mother to my child, so I always knew she would be a wonderful mother to her children.”

Andrea Miller Moore, who now lives in Austin, Texas, lived a life parallel to Stacy’s during the time they were together. They played on the same UA teams, majored in communications, went to work at radio stations after college and then turned to coaching.

“We just grew closer and closer in a relationship,” Moore said. “It was like family. We got along.

“She was a woman of excellence, a woman who wanted to make an impact in this world. She wanted to be the best at doing her part. She was a great example on the court and off. She was the coach’s pet. That was the biggest tease because Ellen did no wrong.”

Stacy’s coaching career was brief, but successful. Two years after Stacy graduated, Franco-Reed got a call from Steve Ridder, athletics director at Embry-Riddle University in Daytona, Fla., looking for a recommendation for a coach to start up the school’s first women’s athletics team.

“I have got the perfect person for you,” Franco-Reed said. “You need not judge her on her age or her youth. She’s mature beyond her years. She has the intangibles to take a program to the next level.”

Stacy’s first team at Embry-Riddle went 4-23. The next year the Eagles went 25-8 and earned a postseason berth.

“She was very instrumental in the success of athletics for women at Embry-Riddle as the first coach of a women’s sport,” Ridder said. “She was an outstanding coach and a great person.”

Said Franco-Reed, now athletics director at a high school in Connecticut, “That’s what she did. She would take something and run with it and turn it into magic.

“Ellen was the package. She had it all. She was as beautiful on the outside as she was on the inside.”

Stacy got out of coaching and devoted herself to raising her children. In recent years, she took an active role with a church.

“She was highly involved with ministry,” Moore said. “She had, prior to her death, spent some time with some great gals who were part of a ministry in Destin, Fla.

“You have a great sadness because you miss your friend, but I know because of the choices Ellen had made in her own life with the Lord she had purposed in this latter part of her life to be the best for God. She was doing everything she could to learn what it meant to be a woman of God. There’s a peace with the sadness of losing my friend.”

A half-dozen of Stacy’s former teammates traveled to attend the funeral in Geneva.

“We came from all over,” Vittitow said. “We came from Texas and Kentucky and Connecticut and South Carolina. That should tell you right there what kind of person Ellen was to all of us.

“It was definitely bittersweet. It was such a sad and horrible time for us, but it was great for us to be together.”

Reach Tommy Deas at tommy.deas@tuscaloosanews.com or at 205-722-0224.