Spend just a few minutes with Debbie Lewis, and you'll have a smile on your face. And that's exactly what she's wanted out of life.
Lewis, a women's basketball player at the University of Pittsburgh from 1977 to 1981, was an instrumental figure in the program's early days. But to get there, her journey and skills were crafted with the help of some people she still holds near and dear.
Growing up in Philadelphia, Lewis would tag along with her brothers to the playground and jump in on pickup basketball games, typically as the only girl. But the boys were accepting and treated her as an equal, and Lewis began to learn how to play the game against those who were bigger and stronger than she was.
"My one brother played some football, and he said, 'I'm going to use you. You run with the ball, and I'll work on my tackling,'" she says.
"I just fell in love with basketball."
By the time she was in eighth grade, Lewis started to hear people talk about how good she was at the game. Shortly after that, she began to observe some of her high school teammates making it to college and excelling on the court. She knew that she wanted to follow in their footsteps.
"All I wanted to do was play basketball," she says. "So, my mindset was, you tell me what I need to do to play basketball, and I'll do it. First, I needed decent grades, so I did what I needed to do."
Sam Johnson, a family friend who played football at Pitt, recommended Pitt to Lewis. Once Pitt's basketball coaches began to show up at her high school games and recruit her, the choice to head west was an easy decision.
She made her way to Pitt in 1977, joining the team just five years after the introduction of Title IX, a groundbreaking ruling that provided equality for female athletes and programs.
"The first time I ever got on an airplane was here in Pittsburgh," Lewis says. "My family didn't have the finances to fly; we didn't even have vacations growing up. Because of Title IX, wherever the men flew to, they had to start flying the women, too. So one of the most exciting things I did was get on an airplane."
While Lewis excelled on the court and was strong in the classroom, she did ruffle a few feathers early on. She loved the game and looked for competition anywhere she could find it.
That included pickup games against male athletes at Pitt, including Dan Marino, Mark May, Rickey Jackson, Hugh Green and Sam Clancy, to whom Lewis affectionately refers as her "big brother."
"No one could believe it until they actually saw it," Lewis says of the games featuring some of Pitt's legends. "I just gravitated to them. That first weekend I was on campus, they played pickup, and they just let me play. I'd come to play, even with the football players, and they'd be like, 'Alright, we've got Debbie.'"
The acceptance that she felt as a child was now happening at Pitt. And even though Pitt coach Jean Balthaser didn't love the idea of her risking injury against the rough-andtumble football players, Lewis' desires eventually won out.
"That's all I'd ever known," she says. "After a while, they just let me go with it. It was helping everybody and was an absolute blast."
But Lewis and her teammates still had a battle to fight off the court. While Title IX was in place when she arrived and certain policies had been implemented, the public attitude toward women's athletics took much longer to change.
"We practiced and played so hard, and people don't get it," she says. "They think the commitment and work is less than the male counterpart, and it's so wrong.
"Once Title IX hit, we had to make even more of an effort to prove ourselves worthy. We had been working hard, but now we had to work even harder."
Lewis did just that. She dished out a program-record 638 assists, scored 1,941 points—the fourth-most in Pitt history—and set records that still stand.
When she graduated with degrees in sociology and African American studies, she knew she wasn't done learning.
Johnson, who had convinced her to come to Pitt in the first place, began to sell her on following him into a career in dentistry.
"It was amazing how doors started to open. I went down and spent time with Dr. Johnson, and he started to tell me that I should think about dentistry. And I was like, 'Oh, goodness, that's the last thing I want to do, work in somebody's mouth.'"
But Lewis finished Pitt dental school in 1988. She worked at a couple of inner-city locations, including a women's prison, helping those in need.
"I always made a commitment to God that I wanted to give back," she says. "The good Lord led me to all of this, and those places gave me a chance to do that."
She then began to work at a dental practice and eventually purchased it years later, taking a risk and betting on herself—a move that has paid off nicely. She works at and operates the office, located on Penn Avenue in Wilkinsburg, to this day.
In fall 2022, Lewis got news she never expected: She was going to be inducted into the Pitt Athletics Hall of Fame. The honor, which she describes as "unbelievable," was the culmination of a remarkable career that took Lewis from the playgrounds of Philadelphia to the blacktop courts of Oakland to cities all over the country and, finally, to a successful career in which she has been able to own her own business and provide a valuable service to the city she came to nearly five decades ago.
And she thanks Pitt for so much of the good that's happened in her life.
"Pitt taught me a whole lot," she says. "I have nothing bad to ever say about Pitt because it's been so good to me. I couldn't ask for a better education, a better introduction to the world.
"Through Pitt, I got to experience so much, see so much and make lifelong friends. I'm just grateful that Pitt is where I landed. It will always be at the forefront of my heart."
