Women's National Basketball Association
Women's Basketball
By Robin M. Bennefield, Josh Chetwynd, David Fischer, Linda Kulman, Margaret Loftus, Kenan Pollack, Joshua Rich and Erin Strout
U.S. News & World Report. 7/15/96, Vol. 121 Issue 3, p62.
- The first world championship for women was held in 1953, but Olympic officials waited 23 years to follow.
- Women's basketball has come a long way from its humble beginnings in 1892. It may be surprising to discover that women began playing basketball less than a year after the game was invented.
- Women's National Basketball Association started April 24, 1996
- Six women's teams competed in the 1976 Olympics.
- The Soviet Union, led by 7ft 1 in center Julijana Semenova, the tallest female gold medalist ever, Won its five games to claim the title.
- The United States took silver.
- Team member Nancy Lieberman, then 18, went on to become the first women to play in a professional men's league, the now defunct United States Basketball League, in 1986
Shattering The Glass
The Remarkable History of Women's Basketball
By Pamela Grundy & Susan Shackelford
Originally published by The New Press in 2005
- in the mid- 1940's Mary Alyce Alexander's Father put up a basketball hoop in the familys bask yard. It was homemade affair, plywood backboard with an improvised rim, it hung about 10 feet high.
Soon Mary and her friends played basketball in the back yard until they dropped. Boys started to Join them, anyone would come play basketball. As soon as Mrs.Alexander turned on the porch light
they played almost all night. Nobody at on the sidelines. Sometimes it was 3 on 2 or 4 on 2. After Marys friends left she would shoot around by herself. Mary would soon play everyday with anyone
who wanted to play, Mary loved playing basketball.
*Women first took up the game in 1892, almost as soon as it was invented. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, more American Women have been playing Basketball more
than any other sport.
- in 1949 Mary Alyce Alexander graduated from West Charlotte High School, She ran straight into those assumptions. The boys who had flocked her to here backyard and joined her on clandestine
forays to the local college gym could take their shots at collage varsities. But few schools fielded female teams. Although she excelled class, her basketball career was over. Reality hit hard " i guess
it would be tantamount to saying you're forced to give up a childhood dream, or you're forced to grow up suddenly" she concluded " Because I thought i would play basketball until i couldn't move
anymore, but it didn't work like that. Didn't work out that way at all.
- Such restrictions have meant that even as female players have tested themselves, have dug deep for the courage and the will to rise to athletic challenges, they have also confronted the society
around them. Battles for women's sports have gone hand and hand with those for women's rights. Both athletes and activists have worked to highlight women's physical and mental abilities, to win
women greater roles in public life and to push views of womanhood beyond fixed definitions of distinctly "feminine" appearance and behavior. These efforts have taken place at local levels, where
advocates of women's sports have battled for the resources required to build teams and institutions.
- Physical educators prized the Victorian traits of female decorum and restraint and, when they took up basketball, fashioned distinctive women's rules that restricted movement and downplayed competition.
But hey also used the game to help to help their students prepare for new social and political roles, encouraging the development of "masculine" qualities such as teamwork and determination and physical confidence.
- In 1972 spurred by a blossoming women's liberation movement, Congress passed a landmark piece of legislation known as Title IX, which requires colleges and high schools to offer men and women equal opportunity
in all programs, including sports.
The Unlikely Founder of Women's Basketball
By Senda Berenson
- Basketball’s first professional league was founded in 1898, seven years before nets finally replaced the sport’s original peach baskets.
- The better part of a century was to pass before Senda Berenson would receive the recognition she had so obviously earned, and then only after a protracted effort of some fifteen years that included the National Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the outspoken criticism of that state governor Michael Dukakis.
- It was not until 1984 that the highly reluctant man who selected the Hall's membership would acknowledge her seminal role in the game, alongside that of James Naismith, an inductee of long standing.
- Women's Professional Basketball League held its first contest in December 1978
- Women's basketball has come a long way from its humble beginnings in 1892.