This year was the year America went wild for women’s hoops. The University of South Carolina defeats the University of Iowa in Sunday’s NCAA women’s basketball championship game, expected to shatter the glass ceiling in television ratings. But here in the cornfields of the Midwest, girls have enjoyed playing in and out of barns for more than a century.
We have three hobbies in Iowa. Complaining about the weather and politics, grilling pork burgers, and watching basketball on TV. The main cultural events of the year are the Iowa State Fair in the summer and the women’s basketball and men’s “russling” tournaments in the winter.
Long before Clark was Dennis Long of Witten (population 200). He scored her 6,250 points in her four years of high school six-man girls basketball. That’s right. Until the 1970s, many of the Iowa girls played with each team having three guards on defense and three forwards on offense. And those two never crossed the half-court line. Each player was limited to two dribbles per possession. Although it was strange, it was entertaining and had high scores, and fans loved it. Long scored 93 points in the 1968 girls state championship game at Veterans Memorial Auditorium (Big Barn) in Des Moines. She was the first woman ever to be drafted in the 13th round by the NBA’s San Francisco Warriors in 1969, but she was not allowed to play.
All I remember was the classic matchup between Long and Janet Olson of the Everly Cattlefeederettes in the 1968 championship with a long hayseed in my teeth. That year, Olson averaged 59 points per game in the pleated skirt uniform, while Long averaged 69 points per game in the shorts. Long’s Union Whitten team won 113-107 in overtime.
Long set the 6-6 high school scoring record with 6,736 points, surpassed only by Ventura’s Lynn Lorenzen in 1987.
And then there was Moravia’s “Machine Gun” Molly Bolin, queen of the short-lived Iowa Cornets in the women’s professional basketball league. In 1979, she scored 55 points per game and averaged 32 points. She was featured in Sports Illustrated.
Six-girl high school sports were finally replaced in the 1990s by five-girl teams at the smallest schools. But his dedication to rocking the internet remained the same.
The 120-student high school’s cracker box gym still explodes on Tuesday and Friday nights. The entire state will watch the championship on public television. We’ve all heard of Caitlin Clark from West Des Moines Dowling Catholic School many years ago. Her college coach, Lisa Bruder, made a name for herself by leading the Drake University Bulldogs to national fame before relocating to Iowa City. Bruder’s top assistant, Jan Jensen, is a star out of Elk Horn-Kimbalton College (188 enrollment) and led the nation in scoring during his time at Drake.
Attention to women’s sports in the Midwest has always been high. We tell ourselves that Dr. James Naismith planted the seed of basketball in Kansas, but it was grown by and for women in Iowa. We like to think our game is better, but the same could be said for Kansas, Indiana, and even Nebraska.
There is some comfort in knowing that we country folk may not be as backward as you believe. The Iowa Girls’ High School Athletic Federation was founded in 1925 because rural schools had girls’ basketball teams. The big city noses thought it unladylike, but the country folk saw the match and knew it was a good match.
Nowadays, girls are also rattled. It’s a big hit. It was started by farm girls attending a small school. A few of the glass breakers started out by grappling with the boys, and then started their own girls’ sport so the boys wouldn’t be embarrassed.
If a woman can herd pigs, milk cows, and harvest corn, she can also play basketball and wrestle. Or become governor, like Republican Kim Reynolds, or become a U.S. senator, like Republican Joni Ernst. Republican Brenna Byrd is attorney general. They are all true conservatives. (Reynolds and Byrd, for example, support banning abortion at six weeks of age.)
All of these are states that have been crazy about women’s sports for at least a century, and where women in jumpsuits and three-buckle overshoes can ride around town in pickup trucks and corn shellers just like men. It was born in They have been running the courts and teaching county commissioners how to do so since at least the days of the Everly Cattlefiederettes.
The girls got the game. Everyone knows it now.
