Augsburg University Athletics

Patricia Piepenburg '69 was a member of the fabled Auggiettes women’s basketball teams in the pre-Title IX era, teams under Augsburg Hall of Fame coach LaVonne Johnson Peterson ’50 that dominated competition against local college teams and Minneapolis Park Board teams from the 50s to the early 70s. According to stories in the Augsburgian yearbook, the Auggiettes lost just four games in Piepenburg’s four seasons, with the team having an unbeaten season her junior year. Piepenburg was the team’s leading scorer in both her junior and senior years. In a profile of Peterson in the Augsburg Now magazine in 1979, the coach described Piepenburg as one of the outstanding players she had coached, saying that “She had a wing spread like Meadowlark.” Piepenburg graduated cum laude with a physical education degree in 1969 and began a 35-year career of teaching and coaching in Atwater, Minn., teaching physical education at a variety of grade levels, while also coaching basketball and track and field. During her eight years of coaching (1971-79), her basketball teams won five conference titles, while her track and field teams won six conference titles. After retiring from coaching, she purchased the family’s farm from her father, where she poured her time into gardening, fishing, hunting and doing conservation projects – conservation reserve projects, filter strips, shelterbelts, wetland restorations and food plots – to enhance wildlife habitat and water quality. In 2000, she was named Meeker County’s Outstanding Conservationist of the Year. Piepenburg lives in Grove City, Minn., where she is active in her church (St. Paul’s Lutheran) and involved with the Litchfield Area Mentorship Program.