Wash Greene pa holf
Two members of the Washington-Greene County Chapter Sports Hall of Fame have been elected to The Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame.
Mary Ellen Boylan Jutca, a resident of Washington and graduate of Immaculate Conception High School and Villanova University, and the late Joe Solomon, a graduate of Canonsburg High School and the University of Pittsburgh, are part of the 12-person Class of 2020.
Mrs. Jutca was the first female athlete selected for the Villanova University Varsity Club Hall of Fame. In her four-year basketball career with the Lady Wildcats (a 1976 graduate), she scored 974 points, and owns the Villanova sophomore record for points per game in a season at 19.1 points. She led the team in scoring all four seasons and was a member of Philadelphia’s Big Five All-Star first team and the Big Five’s Most Valuable Player.
She established school records in foul shooting, with a career 85 percent average. She was named Villanova’s Outstanding Senior Athlete.
In addition to her basketball skills and achievements, Jutca won 48 of 51 tennis matches in her collegiate career. She played number one singles and was captain of Villanova’s tennis team as a junior and senior and reached the quarterfinals of the Eastern Nationals.
The Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper once dubbed her “possibly the best college athlete in Philadelphia, regardless of sex.”
In 1976, “The Spires,” the journal of information about Villanova University for alumni, stated the she was “Cut right out of the mold of the late Babe Didrikson.
“(She) easily (was) the most outstanding female athlete ever to attend Villanova, she has mixed rare athletic talents with a fierce competitive sprit. Aesthetically, Athletically and Academically she has few equals.”
Mrs. Jutca was inducted into the Washington-Greene County Chapter HOF in 2006.
As a high school player, she forged a reputation for the Comets. She was team captain, and the greater Washington area girl’s scoring leader in the 1970-1971 and 1971-1972 seasons, averaging 28 points per game. She set a Washington area single-game scoring record, male or female, by scoring 53 points in the 1970-1971 season.
Mrs. Jutca is a recently retired teacher of honors world history and European history at Trinity High School.