When a simple board game around the dining room table becomes a contact sport, your household might be a tad competitive.
 
"Winning," Carol Frost said, "is fairly important in our family."
 
Carol, her husband, Larry, and two sons, Steve and Scott, have always equally thrived on winning, she said. It's why Scott can show you a small scar on his right knuckle, thanks to a game of Monopoly when he was 9 years old.
 
"He was just about to get beat," Carol said, "and he had a bunch of money, and he landed on Boardwalk, and that probably ensured his win."
 
So overjoyed was Scott that he skyrocketed out of his chair and hit the chandelier overhead.
 
"We had to take him to the doctor for stitches," Carol said.
 
She shared the story Friday, on the eve of her son beginning his second season as Nebraska's football coach, and minutes before Carol officially joined the fifth class of the Nebraska Athletics Hall of Fame.
 
Carol and the late Ed Weir joined as the first pioneer inductees, in recognition of the 150-year anniversary of the University of Nebraska.
 
A native of Cedar Rapids, Nebraska, Carol served as a trailblazer for women's athletes in the state of Nebraska. She attended Nebraska, along with Larry, who played football under coaches Bob Devaney and Tom Osborne, but she never competed because women's athletics didn't exist in the 1960s.
 
"It was just accepted," Carol said. "I was lucky that I had a person from Cedar Rapids, Nebraska, who started a girls track program, and for the four years I was here at Nebraska, I was on three national track teams, won two national championships, won the Pan-American Gold, and I qualified for the Olympics."
 
That, she said, is why she didn't harbor ill feelings for the lack of women's sports at her school.
 
"I guess I just counted my blessings," she said, "because there wasn't another girl in the city of Lincoln that was competing in anything. I consider myself lucky as opposed to being angry about anything."
 
Carol won a gold medal in the discus at the 1967 Pan American Games – the same year she graduated from Nebraska – and she was a four-time U.S. champion in the event from 1966 to 1970.
 
She later returned to Nebraska to serve as coach for the women's cross country and indoor and outdoor track and field teams – for an annual salary of $2,000. Unable to afford a babysitter, Carol routinely brought Steve and Scott to practices, where they ran around the track.
 
It's how they earned their nicknames, Zap and Zip, respectively.

"Mom's the best athlete in the family. She might be the best coach in the family," Scott said. "You can tell I'm a little proud of her and Dad. She deserves every accolade she gets. When she was doing the things she did, there weren't opportunities for women in sports. There were even some people that frowned upon it.

"So she really had to do everything on her own and independently, and for what she accomplished under those circumstances is amazing. So I'm proud of her."

While track became the sport that presented Carol her first competitive opportunity, the sport she would have played first, if she could, was basketball. Then, softball, specifically, shortstop. She remembers throwing thousands off softballs of the base of the family's house, and the amount of manure she wiped off basketballs as she took shots in the corncrib.
 
"There was nothing that was going to stop me from doing what I loved," she said.
 
Carol also had a brother, Jerry Moseke, older by six years, who earned a basketball scholarship to Norfolk Community College. She credits him for getting her started in athletics. Jerry, a junior American Legion pitcher, threw 80-mile-an-hour fastballs that Carol would catch as a 10-year-old.
 
"We had a few bruises out of that one," she said.
 
Carol, too, could throw about anything, which came in handy when, as an assistant high school football coach for her husband, in O'Neill, she had to prove herself to the boys before earning acceptance.
 
"I'd been throwing patterns to Larry, while he was at the University," she said, "and when they saw me throw 40-yard passes and 10-yard outs, doubts probably receded then."
 
Carol and Larry coached together at various stops, but at only one school, in Texas, did Carol feel some brushback – and not from the players.
 
"Probably the people who were the least receptive," she said, "were the 'Southern Belles,' the ladies who didn't think this was appropriate."
 
Carol named two moments that have stuck to her the most throughout her lifetime of athletics. One was participating in the opening ceremonies of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
 
"You can't top that as an athlete," she said. "It was an awesome experience."
 
The other moment came in 1997, when Carol sat in the end zone at the University of Washington's Huskie Stadium and watched her son, Scott, score two touchdowns as Nebraska's senior quarterback.
 
(Nebraska fans understand the significance).
 
"The monkey was off his back," she said.
 
Carol said she's honored to be included with Weir, who was honored posthumously by his grandchildren, as pioneer inductees into the Nebraska Athletics Hall of Fame, along with retired gymnastics coach Francis Allen, and former athletes Wes Sutter, Greichaly Cepero, Rhonda Blanford-Green and Grant Wistrom.
 
She also expressed her gratitude to the University of Nebraska.
 
"It's given me the opportunity to do all the things life that I wanted to do," Carol said. "I have my bachelor's degree, I have my master's degree, my husband graduated and played under Bob Devaney and Tom Osborne, now my son is coaching at the University of Nebraska.
 
"This is home. This is what we know."

- Brian Rosenthal