Katie Meier rocked it as a Hurricane, but her journey began in Wheaton

Katie Meier won’t miss the transfer portal or dealing with Name, Image and Likeness issues.

What she will miss as coach of the University of Miami women’s basketball team, maybe even more than the rush of reaching the Elite Eight in 2023, are those first meetings with freshmen — learning their favorite books, their major influences in life, their goals, what makes them tick.

She called this process “My Journey,” and as Meier mentored her players during their time with the Hurricanes she felt privileged to have had a hand in their growth.

“I wanted to build a family,” she noted during the March 21 news conference announcing her retirement as coach.

“It was the honor of a lifetime to be part of that four years in someone’s life, to be that person that they needed at that point of their life,” said Meier, who will remain at Miami as a special adviser to athletic director Dan Radakovich.

She built a life there over 19 seasons, coming from a successful run at Charlotte to win 362 games, more than any Miami basketball coach, male or female. The 2013 USA Basketball national coach of the year, Meier was inducted into the University of Miami Sports Hall of Fame in 2017.

These are among a bushel basket of honors and achievements — like being named an Atlantic Coast Conference “Legend” in 2006 for her own Blue Devils Hall of Honor playing career at Duke — in a journey that began in Wheaton.

“I was in a huge family from Wheaton, Illinois, and I loved it. I always had a large group and always felt I had an advantage over other people that I’d meet. There were 10 of us, and if eight were mad at you there was one that loved you. I always knew I had a home, had place to return to that grounded me,” Meier said.

Inducted with the inaugural class of the Wheaton Warrenville South Athletic Hall of Fame in 2009, Meier fittingly went in with former athletic director Lenore Wilcox and Christine Tomek. Wilcox’s athleticism predated Title IX; Tomek, like Meier, competed with boys as their equal, if not superior.

“In Little League she was always the only girl on the all-stars. It was always funny to see the dads and young boys when she would do extremely well against them,” remembered one of her three sisters, Mary Lutzenkirchen.

Mary’s husband, Mike Lutzenkirchen, played forward on Wheaton Central’s 1980-81 boys basketball team. That squad finished fourth in Class AA, Tigers basketball’s best finish ever — until Mary’s team placed second in 1985.

Katie Meier was a local legend even before she got into high school.

Joe Gerace, the retired softball coach at Wheaton Central and Wheaton Warrenville South, recruited her for his 18-under club softball team, the Cougars, after watching her play baseball at the long-gone Pony League field across from Wheaton Central.

He remembered a Cougars parent railing at him for putting a fourth-grader in at second base. Meier was so tiny that when her softball pants were taken in it left only one back pocket.

She was quickly tested. With a runner on first base, a batter rifled a shot right at her.

She fielded the ball cleanly, tagged the approaching runner, and threw to first base for a double play.

“She was so fluid. She was, at the time, like (Cubs shortstop) Don Kessinger,” Gerace said.

Meier shut up that parent, but her talents were hard to keep quiet.

She recalled that when teams were drafted for tee-ball, her first coach knowingly said, “I’ll take the girl.”

She credited others who supported girls sports as she climbed the ladder in school: Gerace, Jim Allured, Jane Fisher, Ralph Heatherington, Rich Jarom. High school math teachers Ed Backe and Lyle Morrow officiated her Edison Junior High basketball games “out of the goodness of their hearts,” Meier said.

An all-state selection in basketball and softball, and a volleyball star to boot with 11 varsity letters at Wheaton Central, the Chicago Tribune named Meier its 1985 high school athlete of the year as a senior.

“That wasn’t female athlete of the year, that was athlete of the year,” Gerace said. “She beat out (14-year NBA player) Corey Maggette and two other guys who played professionally.”

She honed her skills the old-fashioned way. Backyard Wiffle ball or football, shooting baskets on a lit driveway with the neighborhood kids until their parents yelled for them to come in.

Her house on Elm Street was sports central. If a larger field was needed, Edison was literally in the backyard of her buddies — the Haukes, the Shorneys, the Navigatos.

“We were outside all the time, playing, playing, playing,” Meier said.

At first she had to wait to play with the boys. It wasn’t a terribly long wait.

“I’d be, like, ‘Pick me.’ Eventually they would pick me. Then they started picking me because I was good,” Meier said.

“She’s always been very competitive, but she’s also a great teammate and sibling. It’s not an ‘I’m gonna get you’ competitiveness, it’s a self-driven competitiveness,” Mary Lutzenkirchen said.

They had a full basketball roster under their roof due to having a combined family. Her mother, Phyllis Meier, was 27 when her husband died in a plane crash. Howard Skolak had four children when his wife died suddenly.

The two met at a church support group for widowers and married in 1970. All eight children graduated from Wheaton Central, as did two of their future spouses.

Tragedy has visited the family several times.

Her nephew, Philip Lutzenkirchen, Mike and Mary’s son, was a former Auburn tight end who died at 23 in 2014. Not wearing a seat belt in a friend’s car, he was thrown from a rear passenger seat in an early morning, high-speed, one-car crash.

The Lutzenkirchens, of Marietta, Georgia, immediately started the Lutzie 43 Foundation, which works with schools, businesses and the Georgia Department of Transportation to promote safe driving.

Meier, married two years on May 28 to former television personality and fashion model Hunter Reno, has been on the foundation’s board since its inception.

Mary Lutzenkirchen said Meier’s celebrity and contacts certainly have aided the foundation, though even if she were not a hall of fame athlete and coach her leadership and outgoing personality would still be an asset.

Meier enters the next part of her journey at Miami with the satisfaction of achieving what she began on fields and courts and driveways in Wheaton.

“I had a great run,” Meier said. “I did what I wanted to do. I finished.”

Recently she attended the annual Lutzie 43 golf outing in Georgia, which drew several old Wheaton Central Tigers from out of state.

“The Wheaton folks are good folks,” Meier said.

If you mention her name there, they’ll tell you about one of the best athletes they’ve ever seen.