Category Archives: women’s basketball

Before Caitlin Clark

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Kudos to The Athletic for its detailed origin story relative to the Caitlin Clark must-see entertainment frenzy: “Iowa’s sizzling popularity in women’s basketball was born in the state’s 6-on-6 tradition.”

As Scott Dochterman reported in the piece, “six-player basketball was more than just a sport in Iowa. It was the game of the winter, and its legacy flourishes through this Hawkeyes women’s basketball team” that features Clark’s binocular-range shooting, nifty passing and the enthralled sellout crowds celebrating her.

For long before Clark’s assault on virtually every college scoring record—by both women and men—long before Clark, 22, was born, high school girls in Iowa were starring in their unique brand of the sport that dates to the early 1920s and which, by the 1950s, was front-page news throughout Iowa. Their championship tournament was carried by radio and television stations in up to nine Midwestern states. There can be a strong argument that, for decades, nowhere else was the high school girl accepted as an athlete as she was in Iowa.

Susan Edge was a University of Missouri Journalism School colleague in the late 1960s who clued me in to the phenomenon. She had been a scoring machine for her Iowa high school’s six-on-six team, and her tales of community involvement were so compelling that I eventually convinced my editors at Newsday, 10 years later, to cover the season-ending event.

The whole business was a revelation. The six-on-six format—each team required to keep three defenders on one half of the court while three offensive teammates worked the other half—was a relic of Paleolithic times when females were thought incapable of extensive running. Yet it fit nicely into Iowa’s rural aesthetic: maximum possibilities for the few.

Six-on-six rules—a two-dribble limit before passing or shooting—rendered a crisp, fast-paced game of passing, moving without the ball, back-door cuts. That produced astounding offensive numbers, shooting percentages by the best players in the 60s and 70s, point totals such as Denise Long’s 70.5 average in the 1968 tournament. Long, whose small community high school north of Des Moines had just 120 students and a senior class of 34, once scored 111 points in a 32-minute game. She was such a headliner that she appeared on the Johnny Carson show and was drafted by the NBA’s Golden State Warriors—though the commissioner at the time, Walter Kennedy, considered that a publicity stunt and negated the pick.

That was in 1969, three years before Title IX of the Education Amendments Act decreed that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

But when Title IX administrators attempted to outlaw Iowa’s six-on-six play, arguing in the early 1980s that those girls restricted to defense-only were at a disadvantage for scholarship opportunities, Iowa officials and the Iowa public rebelled. Still the only state with separate bodies governing boys’ and girls’ sports, Iowa cited the popularity of the girls’ game—consistently outdrawing the boys’ state tournament and, even 45 years ago, generating rights fees for its own tournament in excess of six figures.

Not until 1993 did Iowa reluctantly abandon six-on-six for the standard five-per-team arrangement. And not without widespread regret among those who had reveled in the celebrity of being a six-on-six high school player. When 2019 state legislation to force the merger of Iowa boys’ and girls’ high school athletic associations failed, Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, who had played six-on-six high school basketball in the mid-1970s, told the Des Moines Register, “I’m still trying to get over the fact that we left six-on-six and went to five.”

There is a 2004 book, “The Only Dance in Iowa: A History of Six-Player Girls’ Basketball.” There was a 2008 Iowa Public Television special, “More Than a Game: Six-on-Six Basketball in Iowa.” There even was a 2009 stage show in Des Moines, “Six-on-Six: The Musical.” It had 18 original songs and a cast of 30. Iowa has a Granny Basketball League, formed in 2005, for women 50 and older who play by the 1920s rules and wear 1920s-style uniforms.

So the fuse was lit long ago for the current University of Iowa success and attendant spectator passion, with women from several generations drawn to the Caitlin Clark magic show—including Iowa head coach Lisa Bluder—fondly reminded of their six-on-six playing days.

Clark, for all her unprecedented feats, undeniably is being carried by the tides. “I’ve had so many people come up to me, like, ‘I played six-on-six basketball, and I just can’t believe the crowd you draw and how much fun you guys have playing,’” Clark told The Athletic. “These women who played 30, 40 years ago are just so mesmerized by our team and what we’re doing for women’s basketball. That never gets old. That’s super cool. A lot of those people are some of our biggest fans.”

Does the Mark Twain line from “The Gilded Age” fit here? “History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”

Too few good women in basketball?

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Muffet McGraw

This month’s NCAA women’s basketball championship final had a decided past-is-prologue feel when Notre Dame head coach Muffet McGraw lamented her sport’s dearth of “women in power.” For only the eighth time in the last 20 years, both coaches in the title game—McGraw and her Baylor counterpart, Kim Mulkey—were female.

And the context for current gender-equity issues certainly includes the personal histories of McGraw and Mulkey.

In the late 1970s, when McGraw, upon graduation from St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, competed in the WBL, the first women’s pro league, 32 of the 42 people who held head coaching positions—several for as few as one game over the WBL’s brief and troubled three-year existence—were male.

A couple of years later, when Mulkey was an all-American guard at Louisiana Tech, the team’s preparation and in-game coaching were handled by a man, Leon Barmore, though his title was “assistant.” The titular head coach, Sonja Hogg, sat on the bench for games but stuck to the second banana’s job of recruiter and luncheon speaker.

In 1982, that Louisiana Tech team won the first women’s national tournament sponsored by the NCAA. The previous 10 women’s versions of the Big Dance had been run on a shoestring by the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, while then-NCAA executive director Walter Byers insisted that facilitating women’s teams would “destroy the NCAA and college sports as we know them.”

But as Title IX, the 1971 law banning sex discrimination in education, slowly took effect, Byers wound up in the stands for that initial NCAA-backed title game in Norfolk, Va. He was there to witness Louisiana Tech’s 14-point victory over Cheney State, and to see the shortest player on the court—5-foot-4 Kim Mulkey—seize control in the second half.

During Tech’s decisive 20-2 run, Mulkey drove the lane for a layup, drove again and dished to senior Pam Kelly for a layup, lobbed a pass to leading scorer Janice Lawrence for another gimmee, sank a 20-foot set shot and looped another assist to Lawrence.

“Hey, gang,” Hogg said then, “this is what it’s all about. The NCAA will give us credibility. Exposure.” Also money, with the women’s tournament teams receiving travel expenses for the first time.

But something else happened under NCAA control. The proportion of female head coaches in women’s college basketball programs, at more than 90 percent in the early 1970s, has steadily dropped to under 60 percent.

As one way to reverse that trend, McGraw declared during Final Four weekend that it is her intention to never again hire a man as assistant. Predictably, there was the rejoinder that the most successful college women’s basketball coach in history—a guy, UConn’s Geno Auriemma—has done plenty to advance females in the sport by showcasing a record 11 national championships and by employing all women on his staff.

Mulkey, furthermore, wouldn’t go beyond saying she “understands” McGraw’s position. “I want the best person for the job,” said Mulkey, whose top assistant at Baylor is male. In 2008, in fact, Mulkey hired Barmore, the former Louisiana Tech championship architect, who served as her Baylor assistant for three seasons.

It could be that Mulkey’s experience, in terms of female-male balance, always was closer to cosmic justice than McGraw’s. During Mulkey’s playing days at Tech, that school’s women’s athletic budget equaled the men’s, even though there were 12 men’s teams and only three women’s.

But McGraw’s promise of women-only on her staff, in the face of the sport’s big-picture numbers, forces the contemplation that the past isn’t entirely past.

UConn basketball and credit where it’s due

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Allow yourself a rubbernecking moment. It’s a rare thing for any team to go 100 games without losing, so this is a good time to tap the brakes and eyeball various aspects at play in the extraordinary UConn women’s basketball streak.

There is, of course, the victory total itself, something no other college or professional team—men or women—has compiled. The numbers nuts out there recognize how forcefully UConn’s record—up to 101 games by Feb. 18—blows away the 88 straight won by UCLA’s men from 1970 to ’74, the 33 in-a-row by the NBA’s Lakers in 1972, the 47 consecutive college football victories by Oklahoma from 1953 to ’57; the 35-game unbeaten run (with 10 ties) by the NHL’s 1979-’80 Philadelphia Flyers.

Still, there somehow have been so-what reactions. Even, in the case of a Boston sportscaster named Tony Massarotti, a sneering, total dismissal of UConn’s feat, based—counterintuitively—on the argument that too many of the UConn victories were too lopsided. “It doesn’t count,” Massarotti blustered. “Please. What a crock.”

Wait. Might such a take have anything to do with gender?

In 1994, I was dispatched by Newsday to Chapel Hill, N.C., to seek metaphysical and cultural explanations for a situation similar to the current UConn basketball reign. The University of North Carolina women’s soccer team had just lost for the first time in 102 games (with one tie). And lost for only the second time in 204 games over eight years (with another seven ties mixed in).

My clear impression was that Carolina’s players approached their sport in the same way that Hall of Famer Bill Russell tackled his in a 13-year pro career during which he played for 11 NBA champions. Because there is a scoreboard, Russell once said, every athlete obviously plays to win.

The star of that ’94 Carolina soccer team was Tisha Venturini, and what she noticed about her teammates’ reactions, when their 102-game unbeaten streak was ended, didn’t reflect the individuals’ competitive will so much as their distinct personalities. “The ones who usually are emotional were crying hysterically,” Venturini said, “and the ones who never get emotional were just stone-faced.”

The team’s coach then—and now, going into his 39th season—was Anson Dorrance, and it was he who wondered at both the meaning of victory and what he called “the guy thing.”

“In our society,” Dorrance said, “we put too much stock in athletic success and failure. That’s men. Men lose sight of what’s critically important, your reason in life and the quality of your relationships. I think men measure their lives in these kinds of successes and failures. Numbers. Streaks. I think that’s why you see movies of the old high school quarterback pumping gas somewhere, to say: He just had a great arm; it didn’t make him a great man.”

That’s like the Bruce Springsteen lyric about ephemeral eminence…

    I had a friend was a big baseball player back in high school.

    He could throw that speedball by you

    Make you look like a fool, boy.

    Saw him the other night at this roadside bar

    I was walking in, he was walking out.

    We went back inside sat down had a few drinks

    But all he kept talking about was

    Glory days, well they’ll pass you by

    Glory days, in the wink of a young girl’s eye…

Dorrance believed that he was “not a bad loser. One of the things I’ve never been able to accept about sports is that one team has to lose. And yet, I’m best at arranging for other teams to lose. I mean, there’s something wrong with that, philosophically, don’t you think?”

He admitted to being “teed off” by the losses, as astoundingly infrequent as they were, “yet, why does this irritate me that’s I’m teed off? And if it irritates me that I’m teed off, why don’t I sever that part of my personality? Because I don’t want to? Is it just winning that I’m after?”

And is that really just a male trait?

Dorrance claimed that his female players “have taught me their ability to relate…they’ve taught me to be more human.” Yet that didn’t stop them from maintaining an athletic dominance. Since the team materialized in 1979, Carolina has won 22 national championships. “It’s not world peace or cancer research,” Dorrance readily conceded. But there was no getting around the fact that his players’ accomplishments were “impressive. Heck, I’m impressed,” he said.

Just as Carolina occasionally lost in soccer, UConn, at some point, will lose a basketball game. Because there are scoreboards and two teams trying to win. But when a team—any team—wins more than 100 consecutive games, it counts.

 

 

Women’s basketball doesn’t need (unimaginative) dunking

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With all due respect, a recent proposal to enhance fan interest in women’s basketball by lowering the rim is deadly on arrival. The argument, put forth in a New York Times essay by decorated energy and environment reporter Asher Price of Austin, Tex., is that a lower rim would “lead to more of what is arguably the single most exciting maneuver in all sports: the dunk.”

cartoon

Ah, the dunk. That numbingly defiant routine in men’s basketball which runs the gamut of athletic creativity from A to B. Just what the women need, a belligerent power move on steroids—all testosterone, no nuance—at a time when the game could use more passing, teamwork and pinpoint shooting.

A case against the promotion of more dunking, by men or women, can start with Stephen Curry in the current NBA championship finals. To witness the efficiency and theatrical style of Curry, the Golden State Warriors’ spindly guard, is to appreciate enthralling skills under substantial duress—not based on mere size and strength.

Cleveland’s self-proclaimed “best player in the world” LeBron James (6-foot-8) is far bigger, more forceful and frightening than the 6-3 Curry, but it is Curry who has displayed all of hoopdom’s brilliant colors. Deft passing, whirligig circumnavigation of defenders, soft floating layups, darting crossover dribbles that produce defenders’ whiplash. And, with the accuracy of his trigger-quick three-point shots, there is a lesson in the physics of the perfect parabola: Flawless arches, launched from his hands through considerable space, directly to the bottom of the net.

James deals in angry thunderbolts. Curry gives us lovely rainbows. And, as Kermit The Frog noted, there are good reasons we have so many songs about rainbows. Those binocular-range Curry jumpers provide a fizz that the bullying monster slam just can’t equal.

Price’s contention is that the 10-foot basket is unfairly high for women because they are, on average, roughly seven inches shorter than their male counterparts. Therefore women “are deprived of the opportunity to fully express their raw athleticism,” he reasons.

That’s a weird conclusion, since being able to shoot down into the basket does not require a particularly wide range of physical skills. For a combination of keen passing, back-door scheming and deft shooting, what I witnessed more than 30 years ago at the girls’ Iowa state high school basketball tournament was far more entertaining than some slam-dunk highlight reel. More to the point, those games drew a decidedly larger following than most male players enjoy.

At that time, and as recently at 1993, Iowa used a set of rules that were out-of-date and, to many, sexist: Girls still were restricted to playing an old six-a-side game, wherein three forwards remained on the offensive half of the court and three defenders in the defensive half, on the troglodyte theory that females couldn’t handle full-court runs.

Yet nowhere else had high school girls been as accepted as athletes as those playing basketball in Iowa, with a state tournament dating to 1919. I saw overflow crowds in excess of 14,000 at the finals in Des Moines, front-page coverage in the local papers that was three times that afforded the University of Iowa men’s team simultaneously playing in the NCAA tournament, live television coverage that spread to neighboring states, six-figure TV-rights money paid to tournament organizers.

Denise Long

Denise Long

The restrictive rules hardly kept those Iowa kids from rendering a crisp, fast-paced style with precise, telepathic teamwork and dead-eye jump-shooting. In 1969, it was an Iowa state high school girls’ senior, 60-plus-points-a-game Denise Long, who became the first female drafted by an NBA team (the Warriors of Stephen Curry’s future). There were elements of a publicity stunt to that pick, which quickly was negated by then-NBA commissioner Walter Kennedy, but at least Long was not being sought for the single ability to dunk, what Price gushingly calls a “swaggering, swooping move.”

Really, the dunk is mostly just the tallest guys showing off, and there is nothing intrinsically admirable about being 7-feet tall. Watch perennial NCAA women’s powers UConn, Notre Dame, Tennessee or Stanford and there will be aggressive defense, seeing-eye passing and dead-eye shooting. There will be neon offensive skills akin to some brilliant jazz quartet, the individual players meshing their applause-inducing solo abilities together as one ensemble.

So why predicate the women’s potential appeal on the need for dunking, just because the men emphasize (overemphasize?) it? Hall of Fame coach Pete Carril, who spent 29 years at Princeton before working as an NBA assistant after “retirement,” long ago lamented the “obviousness of the attack” that evolved in the men’s game—“Here I come! Try and stop me!”—while the “finesse part is dwindling.” Carril preferred that a player learn to “probe, look around, set up, use your head a little bit.”

So, careful what you wish for. This is not such much espousing a vive la difference approach as simply advocating that we not take basketball—women’s or men’s—to a new low.

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