Womenâs intercollegiate basketball debuted in 1896 with a fierce Stanford vs. Cal contest
American life was already changing when nine Stanford women strode onto the court April 4, 1896 at San Franciscoâs Page Street Armory to take on the University of California in the worldâs first womenâs intercollegiate basketball game.
That September, the stateâs male electorate would weigh a proposal to give California women the vote. (It lost, finally passing in 1911.) Automobiles were already starting to appear on the streets.
As the Armory game tipped off, many of the 700 women spectators felt themselves witnesses to similar societal change. All three big San Francisco newspapers sent women writers and artists to cover the historic contest, for men were banned for modestyâs sake. Denied admission, men climbed the roof and peered in the windows. Women inside fended them off with sticks.
âThere is not an instant of ennui in basket ball. All is motion, change, excitement,â the Chronicle reporter wrote.
Yet it wasnât, not by modern standards.
The game invented by James Naismith only four years earlier quickly became so popular among women that a Smith College instructor adapted the rules for what were thought to be womenâs physical and psychological frailties.
Each half of the Armory court was zoned in thirds according to the so-called âhalf-courtâ rules that prevailed in the womenâs game with few changes through the 1960s. Three players were consigned to each zone. Each could possess the ball for five seconds and dribble it twice. Only the âhomeâ players at the net could shoot.
And at the net, Berkeleyâs players, though said by reporters present to be taller and have better hair, were weak.
âThe girls they had depended upon to score for them missed the basket repeatedly,â the Chronicle observed.
The game was tied at 1-1 when Stanfordâs Agnes Morley, â00, executed âa long, fine, straight throw clean from the shoulderâ for the win. Morley was a rancherâs daughter from New Mexico who had already hunted bears â real ones â and once subdued a rowdy teenager at the rural school where she briefly taught by punching him in the gut.
She and her teammates returned to Palo Alto as heroes, met by cheering male crowds and a Stanford Band serenade.
But it was all too much, too soon. In December 1899, Stanford put an end to womenâs intercollegiate team sports, according to the faculty, âfor the good of the studentsâ healthâ and, according to the Daily, for âthe unpleasant publicity accompanying the contests.â
Such reactions stemmed from anxiety over the changing times, wrote Stanford player and author Mariah Burton Nelson, â78, in her book The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football: âan actual fear ⌠that womenâs growing athleticism somehow threatened not only men and menâs sports but the very nature of things: men on top.â
Stanford also muted its support for other womenâs sports. The womenâs tennis team, for example, failed to get Block S varsity letters as their male counterparts did, but instead sweaters that said âTennis,â on the grounds that their own tournament with Cal lacked recognition as an intercollegiate contest.
Even so, the basketball players sneaked across the Bay to Berkeley and played a rematch in 1900, according to Sue Macy, author of Basketball Belles, a childrenâs book on the historic 1896 game. This time, they walloped Cal 7-0 before fading into sports obscurity.
It took decades and the implementation of federal Title IX before womenâs sports at Stanford or the rest of America redeemed the promise of the Cardinalâs historic 1896 win.
But when it did, Stanford women were ready. Stanford won NCAA championships in 1990 and 1992 under great Coach Tara VanDerveer and reached the Final Four in 12 of its last 27 seasons. Meanwhile, in 1995, the university retroactively awarded Block S varsity letters to 2,200 women who had competed at Stanford in the decades before Title IX.
The 1896 game stands as a monument to the playersâ progressivism, athletic skill and pride.
âItâs always been so surprising that this first game took place on the West Coast when basketball itself started in the East,â Macy said. âThe colleges were so conscious on the health of the women that they didnât want to overtax them.
âBut the West Coast upstarts had other ideas. Thanks to them, Stanford has a legitimate claim to being the first womenâs basketball power,â Macy said. âAnd they still are.â
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