Tampa Prep athletics mourns loss of its greatest utility player

In a sense, Donna Fowler was a paradox with a pen. A scorekeeper for every season and the perpetual smiling face of Tampa Prep athletics shunned selfies like the stomach flu.

“She refused to ever be in pictures,” longtime Terrapins boys basketball coach and school administrator Joe Fenlon said. “Her yearbook photo was always, like, the Tampa Prep mascot.”

Yet this indefatigable math teacher with the gray curls and thick New England accent remains one of her school’s endearing images, and an embodiment of its motto which in part reads “higher purpose than self.”

“She was an absolute trooper,” Fenlon said.

“She was special,” longtime Terrapins baseball coach AJ Hendrix said. “Not only did she work her time there in school every day teaching the kids and helping them as she did, but tutoring them on the bus rides (to sporting events) and being their biggest No. 1 fan.”

Fowler, who spent roughly a quarter-century at Tampa Prep as a math teacher as well as the scorekeeper for Terrapins basketball, baseball and volleyball, died Monday morning in Sarasota after roughly three years of declining health. The oldest of four children raised in Vermont and New Hampshire, she was unmarried with no kids, and remained guarded about her age, which she never revealed.

Yet during her tenure at Tampa Prep, she often seemed ageless.

After logging a full school day teaching calculus or compound fractions, Fowler voluntarily kept the scorebooks for whichever sport was in season, logging most everything — service aces and strikeouts, rebounds and runs batted in — in her trademark red calligraphy. It was a skill she had honed in previous stops at Shorecrest Prep and Canterbury School in St. Petersburg.

“She was the most supportive colleague I ever had,” said former Shorecrest and Tampa Prep principal Bob Bradshaw, who taught Fowler how to keep the basketball scorebook while coach at Canterbury in the late 1970s. “She just loved to help in any way she could.”

“She had excellent penmanship too,” added former Terrapins basketball standout Keith Bailey, now boys coach at Hillsborough High. “She would have these nice pens that she would write with, kept our books really, really detailed with all the stats.”

Her service transcended mere bookkeeping. Fowler made a point to greet game officials and see that the opposing team’s scorekeeper was accommodated. She kept scorers’ tables stashed with gum and candy for student-athletes, and even performed the national anthem whenever a singer couldn’t be found.

During the citywide holiday boys basketball tournament annually hosted by Tampa Prep, Fowler and her mom, Patricia, prepared chilis and chowders in the hospitality room.

And though she resided in a St. Petersburg townhome, she regularly took the team bus to and from Pinellas County away games — often with her mom accompanying her — just to help student-athletes struggling with their math.

“She didn’t have any kids of her own,” said Fenlon, who presented Fowler with a necklace when the Terrapins won their lone boys basketball state title in 2015. “So it was like (the Tampa Prep) kids were her kids,” Fenlon said.

Hendrix said that benevolence extended to kids on the other bench.

“I remember my very first senior night with her, she was like, ‘Well, we have to recognize the other team’s seniors, so we need to get their names and get something about them and introduce them on our senior night as well,’ ” he recalled. “She was fair, and while she was rooting for the Terrapins, she was also very, very fair.”

Yet peers and coaches say her spirit was punctured when Patricia Fowler died at age 90 in 2015. At her memorial service a few months later, Fowler sang “Amazing Grace.” Shortly thereafter, she developed physical problems, including some heart issues, and departed Tampa Prep roughly two years ago.

“She had so much joy and so much love in taking care and being the provider of her mother,” Bailey said. “Once her mother (died), her health started to decline, and she didn’t have that joy and that spirit that she used to have, because she really, really sorely missed her mom.”

Today, Tampa Prep misses one of its most selfless ambassadors.

“Tampa Prep’s motto was a higher purpose than self, and the things she would do, and not just talk about, were amazing,” former Terrapins athletic director and volleyball coach Mike Flynn said. “We were very fortunate, all of us, to have crossed her path.”

Contact Joey Knight at jknight@tampabay.com. Follow @TBTimes_Bulls.