This is part of a series on the Class of 2021 of the Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame. The induction ceremony is Wednesday at the Buffalo Niagara Convention Center. For tickets, visit gbshof.com.
As Julie Gentner Murphy has coached the Williamsville South softball team, she’s taken what she learned from her father and applied it to keeping her team on course.
“My dad’s motto, and it’s coined through his legacy, is, ‘Just show up,’ ” Murphy said. “Every season we talk about what that means, to our program and to the individuals we coach. It’s being accountable to each other and being good teammates.”
It’s a philosophy that helped drive Murphy to become one of the area’s top female athletes at the high school and college levels at Williamsville South and at SUNY Cortland, respectively, and it’s a philosophy that helped her father, Gerry Gentner, become one of the top softball coaches in Western New York.
The Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame will honor Murphy and Gentner, who died in 2012 from cancer, among its 13 inductees at its banquet Wednesday at the Buffalo Niagara Convention Center.
“It was very humbling, for me to receive the award, and going in with my father, I can’t even put it into words how special it is,” Murphy said. “It’s something that’s forever and something that he and I will always have, together.
“I think it’s fitting that I worked alongside him and coached alongside him. He taught me everything I know.”
Gentner coached the Williamsville South softball team from 1997 to 2011, leading the Billies to 259 wins, 12 league championships, eight Section VI championships and New York state championships in 2000, 2004 and 2006.
But he also coached his daughters, Julie and Laura. Julie’s father coached her since she began playing baseball as a 4-year-old, and then switched to playing softball. When Murphy went to college, she went to Cortland State, where her father went to college. When she became a coach, she joined her father as a softball coach at Williamsville South. A financial planner, she works at L&M Financial Services in Amherst – where her father worked.
Murphy’s list of athletic accomplishments is as impressive as those of her father. A three-sport athlete for the Billies, she was an All-State and All-Western New York field hockey selection in 1997 and 1998, scored more than 1,000 points in basketball and was a two-time first-team All-Western New York selection in softball.
At Cortland State, she was a three-time Division III All-American in field hockey who helped the Red Dragons win the 2001 national championship, and she was the NCAA Division III player of the year in 2001. In softball, she was a three-time All-American as a shortstop, and a four-time All-SUNYAC selection who finished with a career batting average of .402, 58 doubles and 139 runs batted in.
She coached Williamsville South's softball team to the 2014 Class A state championship. She’s an assistant coach with the Billies’ field hockey program and she’s an accomplished golfer who is a five-time Buffalo District Golf Association Player of the Year, an eight-time Brookfield Country Club champion and a seven-time top-ten finisher in the New York State Mid-Am Golf Championship.
“I think that ‘just show up’ motto is something that I take into my professional life, too, and, really, the drive to excel,” said Murphy, who graduated from Cortland State in 2003 with a degree in sport management and a minor in economics.
Gentner died at age 67 in January 2012, more than four years after he was diagnosed with peritoneal cancer, which is a form of cancer that spreads in the tissues that are located inside the abdomen, known as peritoneal surfaces.
In those four-plus years, he continued to coach. He continued to golf. He remained devoted to his family.
"It's so crazy because I feel so good," Gerry Gentner told The News in 2008. "I haven't missed a practice, I haven't missed a day of work, we've been on vacation with the grandkids. Right now they say it's not curable, but they can arrest the advancement."
To quote his own words, he continued the practice he constantly preached: “Just show up.”
The women whom Gentner coached did more than just show up, too. They were among some of the top players in Western New York. Gentner coached 14 All-Western New York selections in softball, as well as Caitlin Lever, a 2003 Williamsville South graduate who played for the Canadian Olympic softball team in 2008; and Chelsea Plimpton, who was the Gatorade New York State Player of the Year in 2007, and who pitched at Fordham University.
The Gentner family also kept a list of more than 70 athletes their father had coached who played college sports.
“He gave them the confidence that they needed to move forward and know that they could accomplish anything that they put their mind to,” Murphy said. “It didn’t matter who you were, but my dad always treated everyone with the greatest respect, whether you were the most important person to him, or someone he just met.”
Her father, Murphy said, had a selfless nature as a coach. He devoted his time and energy to coaching and to sports, and asked for nothing in return.
“He always had a huge heart for women’s sports, especially, and I think he was very compassionate, in that sense of empowering women,” Murphy said. “Now, it’s interesting to see the movement of empowering women, and he was ahead of his time with that.
“He did so much for so many, not just me, and I think he treated everyone as his own, and treated them as family, and set the tone for me to provide like that, to coach like that and treat everyone like family.”
