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WOMEN'S COLLEGE BASKETBALL
Lots of barriers fell on way to big success
College women first took the court in 1896 on a long road of van rides, sack lunches and reluctant administrations.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
The Immaculata University players and their 24-year-old coach crowded around a pay phone in Horton Field House in Normal, Ill. These wool-wearing forerunners who practiced in a nunnery struggled to decide which supporter should first learn that the Mighty Macs were the women's college basketball national champions of 1972.
Time was short. The eight players and coach Cathy Rush soon would breeze 130 miles to Chicago so they could fly standby back to Philadelphia. They couldn't afford another overnight stay.
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"Can you imagine that?" Rush said. "We're fighting to find out which player can tell her mother she's a national champion."
Instead of a national television broadcast with hours of publicity surrounding it, Immaculata's Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women tournament championship was sent out on a weak radio signal to the few who even knew the game was being played. After years of Amateur Athletic Union and invitational titles, the '72 tournament was the first to officially crown a collegiate champion.
In the 35 women's basketball seasons since, the game has grown from sideshow to main event. After struggling through long van trips and sack lunches, the pioneers of women's college basketball laid a foundation on which the game's current popularity and support stand.
In the 1960s, if colleges had teams at all, they hired women's coaches more for convenience than skill. Those coaches often found low budgets, low interest and high school players eager to show campuses that their game was as skilled or entertaining as the men's. After the enactment of Title IX, players who once would have been forced onto AAU or semipro teams after high school found themselves representing some of the country's major academic institutions, with scholarships to boot.
Now, the women's NCAA tournament sells out its Final Four as the swift and dramatic upswing in women's basketball brings the game closer in off-court extras to the men.
"There's a future in it now," said Dawn Staley, the Temple University coach who was a two-time national player of the year at Virginia in the early 1990s. "We couldn't always say that."
Humble beginnings
The first intercollegiate women's basketball game, according to Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford in Shattering the Glass: The Remarkable History of Women's Basketball, took place in the San Francisco Armory between Stanford and California-Berkeley on April 4, 1896.
But largely because college administrators didn't feel women could handle the rigors of athletics, the game remained unpopular or unsupported on college campuses. It did, however, grow in some key high school areas, such as Iowa, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas.
By the 1940s, the Amateur Athletic Union girls basketball tournament gained popularity, but the teams were mostly all-star squads with sponsors, such as the successful Vultee Bomberettes (whose benefactor changed from the Vultee Aircraft Corp. to Goldblume Beer) and the Hanes Hosiery Girls.
The Harvest Queen Mill in Plainview, Texas, started its support for the Wayland Baptist College women's basketball team in the '40s. Later, a local aircraft company took up sponsorship and the Wayland Flying Queens became, in 1954, the first four-year college to win an AAU national championship, which in effect made them the first national college power. In the 1950s, the team won 151 straight games.
Opponents, though, were hard to find. Without many intercollegiate opportunities, Wayland began a rivalry with a team sponsored by the Nashville Business College, and the two teams — one full of college players, the other supported by a college — ruled women's basketball.
"Women all over the United States were watching us play and heard about our team," said Harley Redin, who coached Wayland Baptist to a 431-66 record from 1955-73. "I think we inspired a lot of young girls to play basketball."
The college game
In four years at Louisiana's Delhi High School, Mickie DeMoss helped her teams to two state championships and a runner-up finish. When she graduated in 1973, with few scholarships available, her basketball career suffocated.
It was the calm before the storm. When President Nixon signed into law the Education Amendments of 1972, the section labeled Title IX was not yet famous, but it eventually would help create innumerable opportunities for basketball players who didn't want their careers to finish with high school state titles.
"I felt at the time like I could do a lot more," said DeMoss, now the Kentucky coach.
In 1974, DeMoss joined the first Louisiana Tech team after three female students petitioned university President F. Jay Taylor to begin a program. The school hired Sonja Hogg, a recently appointed professor in the College of Education, as coach.
Other colleges founded programs to meet new nondiscrimination guidelines. Plus, with the establishment of the AIAW tournament in 1972, teams could compete for a true national championship.
Immaculata won the first three AIAW titles before Delta State won the next three. That ended the run of smaller schools as larger universities increased funding and support for women's teams.
Louisiana Tech, which began its program with a $5,000 budget, was the first NCAA champion when the association stopped fighting Title IX legislation and adopted a women's tournament in 1982.
"And darlin,' " Hogg said. "We were ready to shine."
Major differences
Early in her coaching career, Pat Summitt would take the Tennessee basketball team to a tournament at the Mississippi College for Women each season. There would be two vans, one for the team and one for the luggage and equipment.
Summitt, who drove the team van, was sure to leave her window down to stay awake for the eight-hour return trip on Sunday night.
"I don't miss that van, that's for sure," Summitt said. "I wouldn't have been doing this for 33 years if every year was like the first eight or nine."
Even for coaches such as Summitt — who has won 943 of the 1,123 games she has coached with the Volunteers — the early years involved, in retrospect, silly methods of running a team. When Tennessee traveled to Louisiana Tech, for instance, Hogg would host Summitt at her home afterward to do the teams' laundry.
The highly successful Immaculata teams of the 1970s wore one-piece wool uniforms that the school dry-cleaned just once a year. The Mighty Macs and Coach Rush couldn't even afford transportation. She had to rely on those with cars to be de facto team taxis.
But as the women's game has grown in popularity and television exposure — last year's Final Four sold out for the 14th consecutive season and was seen in an average of 1.32 million homes, a tournament record — coaches said they've gained previously unrealistic perks. In other words, women's college basketball has gone from brown bags to steak houses in a little more than three decades.
"You wonder if the men's programs had to do the same things when they first started," said Maryalyce Jeremiah, the former Cedarville University and University of Dayton coach who later served as chairperson of the NCAA Division I Women's Basketball Committee. "Me? I doubt they did what we did."
| Final Four historical comparison | |||
| Women's college basketball has undergone a revolution since the NCAA officially recognized the sport and held a national tournament in 1982. Here's a look at how the Final Four has changed: | |||
| Category | 1982 | 2006 | |
| Site | Norfolk, Va. | Boston | |
| Champion | Louisiana Tech | Maryland | |
| Average attendance | 7,766 | 18,642 | |
| Most outstanding player | Janice Lawrence, LaTech | Laura Harper, Maryland | |
| 35 pts., 8 rebs. (2 games) | 40 pts., 16 rebs. (2 games) | ||
| Seeds in Final Four | 1, 2, 2, 2 | 1, 1, 1, 2 | |
| Division I teams | 273 | 324 | |
| Automatic qualifiers | 13 | 31 | |
| Teams in tourney | 32 | 64 | |
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-7389 or
knagel@DaytonDailyNews.com.
