Story by Ron Cobb
Special to the St. Louis Tennis Hall of Fame

In anticipation of the 2024 opening of the new St. Louis Tennis Hall of Fame at the Armory, 2016 inductee Ron Cobb has written a “What’s Up With” feature on every living Hall of Fame member. Ongoing, he is also writing regular features about the Hall of Fame and the Armory. And you can expect stories and other media about all our inductees, living and in memoriam. 

Fourteen years after she suffered a stroke, Lyn Gerber is doing fine. Not perfectly fine – she has some memory gaps and struggles with a few words – but all in all she’s doing OK with her husband, Jim Dugan, on their 40 acres of land in Grafton. 

With both being disabled, they help each other out, although, according to Lyn, Jim does most of the helping since her stroke. Jim has been in a wheelchair since he was wounded while serving in Vietnam. 

They’re only 20 minutes away from Principia College, the school where Lyn made a large impact as tennis coach for some 30 years. One of those years produced an NCAA Division III championship; she also had two thirds and a seventh. 

She made as much or more of an impact when she co-founded the Gateway Confluence Wheelchair Sports Foundation. In 2000 and 2001, she coached the U.S. women’s wheelchair tennis team and the Paralympic women’s wheelchair tennis team. 

Her involvement in wheelchair tennis ended with her stroke. It happened suddenly at home, and she had to be rushed by ambulance to the hospital. 

“I don’t remember a lot about being in the hospital, which is good,” she said. “I was totally destroyed there for a bit.” 

From a young age, growing up in Alton, there was little doubt that Lyn would be a Prin girl. Her mother, Lee, was a math teacher at Principia. Her father, Larry, was athletic director there for 20 years. He had played tennis, basketball and football as a student at Prin, and he thrived in senior tennis, with 10 No. 1 Muny rankings and two No. 1 Missouri Valley rankings. He and Lyn were No. 1 in the Muny parent/child rankings in 1981. 

Lyn went to Principia’s Upper School before starting at the college, and she never lost a tennis match in the year and a half in which she competed, before dropping out to get married. For a time she competed with the last name of DeLaney until the marriage ended. She was ranked No. 1 in Muny women’s singles three years in a row. 

She met Jim Dugan in 1995 and started to give him tennis lessons, and he got her interested in not just wheelchair tennis but also other wheelchair sports. Jim became a competitive wheelchair player. 

Lyn even began to play wheelchair tennis herself, and “I became very good at it,” she said. “I had my own wheelchair.” 

Was it as much fun as regular tennis? “Almost,” she said. 

They began organizing wheelchair tennis, and it eventually evolved into local tournaments and then a national tournament. Lyn served as tournament director when the U.S. Open for wheelchair tennis was played in St. Louis. 

But that’s behind them now. Jim, who worked as a counselor for veterans and did counseling in drug and rehab, is retired. 

At age 68, Lyn starts her mornings with breakfast and her Christian Science lesson, which she reads aloud from her computer. She hasn’t played tennis since her stroke, but she says she watches it. 

“I have it on my TV where I sleep, so I have it on all the time,” she said. 

Lyn is walking with a walker these days because of a new challenge. 

“Two months ago I fell down at my house and just totally busted my ankle,” she said, “so for two months now I’ve been working on getting back together.” 

Nobody said life would be easy. Lyn can testify to that. 

Lyn was inducted into the St. Louis Tennis Hall of Fame in 2022. She was coach of the year four times in the St. Louis Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, won nine league titles and eight conference tournament titles. She and her father are both in the SLIAC Hall of Fame. 

Toby Clark, Larry Gerber, Lyn Gerber and Courtney Allen