Shattering the Glass by Pamela Grundy

Author:Pamela Grundy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2017-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

As they laid down guidelines for programs and recruiting, AIAW members also began to shape the rules for bona fide national championships. Carol Eckman, the women’s basketball coach at West Chester State in Philadelphia, had gotten the ball rolling in 1969, when she organized the first national invitational tournament ever held in women’s college basketball. The tournament brought together fifteen teams, each of which paid $25 to cover the cost of officials and awards. Competition was only one of the goals. A health and physical education professor, Eckman saw a tournament as a place for the sport’s supporters to meet one another and trade information. “This was a time when women’s game results were printed on the society page in some newspapers,” Tara VanDerveer remembered. “Travel schedules were limited, so most teams had never seen their counterparts from across the country.” The host West Chester Ramlettes, starring a future coach named Marian Washington, took the inaugural title. Invitational competitions were held the next two years as well—the 1970 title was won by Cal State Fullerton and the 1971 crown by the Mississippi College for Women, coached by former Nashville Business College star Jill Upton. The AIAW took on tournament duties in 1972, instituting a series of regional playoffs that led to a national tournament.15

IN CONTRAST TO THE MEN’S GAME, WHICH WAS DRIVEN BY THE DEEP pockets of major universities, these early women’s events had a distinctly small-school flavor. The scholarships, facilities and recruiting budgets that would eventually allow large institutions to dominate play were not yet in place. Rather, success turned on a recruiting base in a region that had retained a tradition of competition and the choice of a coach who could groom homegrown talent into championship material.

The winners of the first AIAW-sponsored championship, the Mighty Macs from Immaculata College, were a perfect example of this combination. With nuns banging buckets in the stands during games, the Catholic women’s college was an improbable champion even for that early era. In 1972, Immaculata had no gym—its beloved fieldhouse had burned in 1967, and there had been no money to replace it. Instead, the team practiced in the basement of a convent for novice nuns where the walls came right up to the out-of-bounds lines. Part-time coach Cathy Rush had been hired for the grand sum of $450 a year. But Immaculata was located just outside of Philadelphia, where Catholic institutions had resisted national trends and nurtured a flourishing girls’ basketball culture. Immaculata had fielded teams since the 1940s, drawing most of its players from working-class Catholic neighborhoods and developing squads whose tough, aggressive play reflected the hours players had spent competing on Philadelphia’s streets and playgrounds, as well as in Catholic Youth Organization leagues.16

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