MPR’s Jayne Solinger joins members of the Grand Meadow girl’s basketball team who are now beyond 80 years old. They all join together to commemorate the release of the book Daughters of the Game - The First Era of Minnesota Girls High School Basketball, 1891-1942.
JAYNE SOLINGER: It's a Saturday afternoon at the Meadows, a retirement community in downtown Grand Meadow. Women in their 80s and 90s are getting together to talk basketball.
SPEAKER: That's Gladys Ruth.
DOROTHY MCINTYRE: We realized there were hundreds of teams that played during this era. And the history had gotten put into scrapbooks, into drawers, into closets.
JAYNE SOLINGER: Dorothy McIntyre is co-author of a new book-- Daughters of the Game-- the First Era of Minnesota Girls High School Basketball, 1891 through 1942. The undefeated Grand Meadow teams are part of the story, and today they are getting their first look. The community is gathering to celebrate and honor the former players who established their place in history.
SPEAKER: And my grandsons in the cities call me their grandma.
[LAUGHTER]
DOROTHY MCINTYRE: The book was really written for the women who played because they thought they had been forgotten, and they would say to us-- we can't believe that you're interested in our history because sometimes even our family didn't want to hear our stories.
JAYNE SOLINGER: Basketball was catching on with young boys and girls across the country after it was first invented in 1891. Grand Meadows players were among thousands of girls in Minnesota that played basketball in high school programs in the first part of the century, but none of those programs were successful as the Grand meadow girls. Between the years 1929 and 1939, they played and beat teams from all over Southern Minnesota and Iowa.
MAE HARVEY GROSS: Yorkton, Rose Creek, Le Roy. And then we were challenged to some other towns.
JAYNE SOLINGER: That's Mae Harvey gross, looking years younger than her 80s in bright red. She played in 1938 and '39. She says all the Grand Meadow teams were good, but the strengths of the teams varied over the years.
MAE HARVEY GROSS: There were some teams that were very, very aggressive and really tough, tough fighters, but we depended mostly on our six foot center. And we weren't the big, tall players.
SPEAKER: This one or this one? I don't know which one.
JAYNE SOLINGER: Hazel Peterson Blanchard enthusiastically signs books for admirers. She played for the team in the mid-'30s and says players were well aware of the streak.
SPEAKER: Other teams fear you.
HAZEL PETERSON BLANCHARD: I don't know if they feared us. We didn't want to feel that we were being feared.
JAYNE SOLINGER: The game was different back in the '20s and '30s. Like other girls' teams, the Grand Meadow girls played a six-player, half-court game, competing on either offense or defense. The team averaged more than 38 points a game and held the opponents to just over 12 points. Once the Grand Meadow Team started to win, news of the girls success spread. Crowds began to show up for their games. Jim Henke remembers watching when he was growing up in Grand Meadow.
JIM HENKE: And it really was no contest most of the time because they'd be so far ahead by the time the game was over, that it would just sit there and yawn and watch the girls put on their act.
RUTH BRANDT JACOBSON: And they came to watch us practice, too, sometimes. And then they would go home and not go to the next game, which was the boys game. And they watched our practices. And we liked that.
JAYNE SOLINGER: Still vivacious in her 90s, Ruth Brandt Jacobson played with the very first team in 1929. She was coached by Lila Rearguard, who started the winning tradition and coached for the first seven years of the streak. Jacobson remembers the coach took basketball seriously.
RUTH BRANDT JACOBSON: She treated it as a business and stuck to it and had her players doing everything she wanted them to do.
MARIAN BEMIS JOHNSON: I think they just were well organized because at that time you had to play a fast passing game because you couldn't dribble more than two times.
JAYNE SOLINGER: Co-author Marion Bemis Johnson did most of the research for Daughters of the Game. She says the Grand Meadow team stood out because they actually executed plays.
MARIAN BEMIS JOHNSON: And there was must have been a height advantage. But if they passed quickly and had plays, which I believe they did, they seem to be unstoppable.
AGNES PETERSON OLSON: Maybe because we just played as a team. And I guess the fact that we practiced some, too. A lot of the teams in the little towns around didn't practice.
JAYNE SOLINGER: That was Agnes Peterson Olson, full of energy, and also wearing red. She played for the teams in 1931, '32, and '33. The winds kept adding up. And by the 10th year of the program, Grand Meadow teams had compiled a record of 94 and 0. But as accomplished as the program became, it ended suddenly and without fanfare.
Throughout the 1930s, there was a movement to end interscholastic basketball for girls across the state and nation. In 1933, the president of the American Physical Education Association wrote that the stimulation of a cheering crowd and band, when added to the emotional and physical strain of sports, could upset the endocrine balance in young females.
In 1938, Grand Meadow, like all schools that still had girls' basketball programs, received a letter from the State Education Department. Schools were to replace competitive athletics with intramural sports. Mae Harvey Gross played on the last Grand Meadow team.
MAE HARVEY GROSS: We were just told it was done, and that in those times, you just took the-- you respected the one that told you that. Now, it would be a different story, but maybe. And then we got to be cheerleaders the next year, which wasn't-- it was kind of a letdown.
SPEAKER: As other teams dropped their teams, then Grand Meadow ended up dropping theirs, too. So 1939 was the end of the teams, and that 94-game winning streak was frozen in time.
MARIAN BEMIS JOHNSON: They remained undefeated because the only reason they didn't get beaten was they called off girls basketball.
JAYNE SOLINGER: Marian Bemis Johnson, like other girls who attended high school in the '40s, '50s, and '60s, had no option to play sports. And that lack of opportunity was what compelled her to start research for the book. She found that as many as 300 teams were playing girls' basketball at various times all over Minnesota. But by 1942, all the teams in the state were gone.
MARIAN BEMIS JOHNSON: I just couldn't shed the feeling that I needed to know why I didn't get to play along with a couple generations.
JAYNE SOLINGER: For the next 40 years, high school girls in Minnesota learned how to play sports in gym class but didn't get a taste of competition with other organized teams. And stories of the girls who had played years before gradually faded from. It wasn't until the 1960s and '70s that girls' basketball was resurrected. Dorothy McIntyre worked for the Minnesota State High School League beginning in 1970, and was among those who led the fight to allow girls to play again.
DOROTHY MCINTYRE: We broke down a lot of barriers and a lot of myths about whether women and girls should participate, whether something would get shook out of shape if they jumped over a hurdle. And we just assured them it would all settle back down again, and they'd be just fine. But the myths and stereotypes that had plagued these women back in the '20s and '30s lived on into the '60s and '70s.
JAYNE SOLINGER: This year, more than 400 high schools in the state have girls' basketball programs involving 13,000 girls. Marian Bemis Johnson knows from her experience they shouldn't take the opportunity for granted.
MARIAN BEMIS JOHNSON: The young women of today do not appreciate this smorgasbord of activities they have to choose from. And so I think that if they know this history and how it died and how quickly it got shut down, that maybe they'll appreciate what they have a little bit more.
JAYNE SOLINGER: Katy Simpkins plays for the current Grand Meadow High School Team.
KATIE SIMPKINS: If I didn't play, I don't know. I love the sport so much. I can't wait for basketball season to start. I don't know. I can't imagine not getting the chance.
JAYNE SOLINGER: But she can imagine and relate to a winning tradition. And her teammates like Laura Blomgren appreciate the example set by those teams of an earlier era.
LAURA BLOMGREN: I think it's really cool how they went 10 years undefeated. I think that's really cool how they did that.
JAYNE SOLINGER: Last month in Grand Meadow, a handful of former players were celebrities for the day, signing books and posing for photos with members of their families and the Grand Meadow community. It was an unforgettable day, all about an experience that won't be forgotten again.
SPEAKER: I don't think people even thought about it.
SPEAKER: It's a pretty big deal.
SPEAKER: Yeah, I think so too.
RUTH BRANDT JACOBSON: It was a lot of fun to have a team. We just eat it up. What I like about it? I don't really know. I guess I just enjoyed playing. We were happy. We had a lot of fun. My goodness. I wish I could do something that good now.
JAYNE SOLINGER: Reporting from Grand Meadow, from Minnesota Public Radio News, I'm Jayne Solinger.
[SIDE CONVERSATION]
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