The Olympics are a contest of the greatest athletes in the world. Every four years, each participating country sends its fastest, strongest, most determined and disciplined athletes to compete for the gold, captivating millions of viewers around the globe. One year, one of those great athletes was a local basketball star born in Albany, Oregon, but grew up in Jefferson.
Carol Menken-Schaudt’s Early Life
Carol Menken graduated from Jefferson High School in 1975, a year before women’s basketball entered the Olympics as an official event. At the time, Menken had never once dreamed of being in the Olympics, and as a recent high school graduate, her concerns were more with paying for her college tuition and choosing a career than shooting hoops. Growing up in the small town of Jefferson, Menken was not always able to play basketball on a school team. Sometimes, a volunteer was available to coach a girl’s team, and sometimes there wasn’t. Playing girl’s basketball in a small town was more like taking a PE class than participating in an organized sport.
With dreams of becoming a graphic artist, Menken worked as a clerk in an art supply store to pay for art classes at Linn-Benton Community College in Albany, a school that would play a pivotal role in Menken’s life. She chose to attend Linn-Benton based on its graphic arts program, but midway through the program’s second year, Menken realized her strengths were not in the arts, and she changed her course of study to drafting, landing her a third year at school. During that year, Linn-Benton organized its first-ever women’s basketball team, and Menken’s 6’4″ height made her an easy choice to join the team and grow as one of its first players. Her success at Linn-Benton led to a partial scholarship at Oregon State University, where she changed her course of study to broadcast communication. Menken was the second female in the school’s history to receive a sports scholarship. The first such award went to track and field star Jody Huntley.
Oregon State’s Menken and Hill are a Winning Combination
On the basketball team at Oregon State, Menken learned the fundamentals fast. The better she got, the more she liked it, and the more she liked it, the better she got. Not having spent much time playing basketball before, she had no bad habits to unlearn, and her skills improved in leaps and bounds. Her basketball coach at Oregon State was Aki Hill. It was Hill’s first year as a collegiate basketball coach, though Hill had taught high school boys basketball in Japan. In the United States, she worked as a volunteer assistant at UCLA, coaching under basketball coach John Wooden.
Under the tutelage of Aki Hill, Menken’s basketball career took off in her senior year in 1981. She became the first All-American of Oregon State women’s basketball. The Beavers had a 22/6 record, and Menken had a 75.0 percent shooting average. Even today, some of her stats are still posted. She ranks 2nd all-time for scoring at OSU (2,243) and rebounding (901) and first for field goal percentage (.692), scoring, and rebounding average. Menken was a member of the 1981 United States World University Games team, which won a silver medal and led to her joining the 1981 European Basketball League, an unexpected opportunity to play semi-pro basketball.
Menken took time off from basketball in 1982 to marry her sweetheart, Ken Schaudt. In 1983, Menken-Schaudt was again hitting the boards as a member of the gold medal-winning 1983 World University Games United States team, a position that got her invited to try out for the 1984 United States Olympic Women’s Basketball team.
The 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles
After a long, grueling series of tension-filled tryouts, Menken-Schaudt made the team as a role player. Menken-Schaudt demonstrated her team spirit and enthusiasm for women’s basketball as she helped her team win the gold medal, an experience that made her the first (and so far, only) Olympian from Marion County, Oregon.
Menken-Schaudt spent a few more years playing semi-pro basketball in Italy and Japan. The Jefferson High School graduate who’d hardly so much as bounced a ball in school enjoyed a career doing what she loved until it was time to retire her sneakers and embark on the next adventure of her life: working in broadcast communications.
Awards of Carol Menken-Schaudt
Carol Menken-Schaudt was 106/208 top-ranked female basketball player of the 1980s. She was also inducted into the Oregon State University Athletic Hall of Fame.
In 1993, Menken-Schaudt was inducted into the NWAC, the Northwest Athletic Conference, for her short basketball career on Linn-Benton Community College’s first women’s basketball team (1977-78). Also in 1993, she was inducted into the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame.
In 2018, Menken-Schaudt became the first female Oregon State University student-athlete inducted into the PAC 12 Hall of Honor.
