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Photo by Rich Schmitt |
Life's a ball for this woman for all seasons
BY Wendy Soderburg
Today Staff Writer
Maybe you’ve seen the tall, striking woman walking through the halls of the School of Public Health and thought, “Gee, I wonder if she plays basketball?”
If so, you’d be absolutely right. Antronette (Toni) Yancey, associate professor of health services, is a member of “Love and Basketball,” a traveling group of women athletes that plays college teams in the preseason. At 48, Yancey says she’s by far the oldest team member.
“I can’t say that I entirely keep up with the younger girls,” said the 6-foot-2-inch Yancey. “I don’t run the whole game. But I’ve always been a defensive player and I think they’re surprised when I block their shots.”
Yancey’s love of basketball goes back to her playing days at Northwestern University, where she was the starting center for a team that went to the Elite 8 in the AIAW (Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women) Tournament in 1976. Following up on her childhood love of science, however, she eventually eschewed basketball to attend medical school at Duke University, graduating in 1983, and completed one-and-a-half years of a psychiatry residency.
Medicine then took a backseat to modeling, which Yancey did for about five years. Modeling mostly in Paris and Munich, Yancey found that she got more work in Germany because she was so tall. In Paris, “I used to have to lie and say I was 5 feet 11 inches tall and they’d still look at me and say, ‘très grande’ (very tall),” Yancey recalled.
The model/doctor/basketball player ultimately came to Los Angeles, where she renewed her interest in medicine and entered UCLA’s preventive medicine residency and the master’s program in public health in 1990. Yancey joined the faculty at UCLA but left in 1996 to work for the city of Richmond, Va., as director of public health, and later as director of chronic disease prevention and health promotion for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.
In 2001 she returned to UCLA’s School of Public Health, where she is an expert on chronic disease prevention intervention, particularly cancer prevention. Yancey advocates what she calls “minimal intensity environmental intervention,” which includes such things as promoting walking meetings, having exercise breaks during the workday and replacing nonnutritious food items with healthier choices in the vending machines. She’s also director of the school’s DrPH program, a professional degree program for those interested in senior management positions with managed-care or large nonprofit organizations.
On top of all this, Yancey has gained fame as a poet/spoken-word artist, with a CD and a book of poetry and art called “An Old Soul With a Young Spirit: Poetry in the Era of Desegregation Recovery” (1997). Both were produced by her own company, Imhotep Publishing. She has plans for a second book, titled “The Stalking Tigress,” due out next year.
“Let’s just say that I’m bored easily, so I have to keep a lot of balls in the air,” she said, laughing. |
