In Iowa, girls have been playing basketball for almost a century

Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa and a former Star Tribune employee.

Caitlin Clark first caught America’s attention with her dazzling treys from the beak of the tiger hawk at center court of Carver-Hawkeye Arena at the University of Iowa.

She sold out arenas from Minneapolis to State College, Pa., on her way to becoming the all-time NCAA scoring leader. She can see the floor like Magic Johnson and understands the game like John Wooden, which made her a passing genius and a rebounding machine.

This was the year the USA went nuts for women’s hoops. Sunday’s NCAA women’s basketball championship game, in which South Carolina beat Iowa, is expected to smash glass ceilings in terms of television viewing. But girls have been playing against and inside the barns out here in the cornfields of the Midwest for more than a century to popular acclaim.

We have three hobbies in Iowa: complaining about the weather and politics, grilling pork burgers and watching basketball on TV. The major cultural events of the year are the Iowa State Fair in the summer, and the girls basketball and boys “rassling” tournaments in the winter.

Long before Clark, there was Denise Long of Whitten (population 200), who scored 6,250 points in four years of high school six-girls basketball. That’s right, up until the 1970s most Iowa girls played with each team having three guards on defense and three forwards on offense — and never the twain shall cross the half-court line. Each player was limited to two dribbles per possession. It was weird but entertainingly high-scoring, and the fans loved it. Long scored 93 points in a 1968 girls state tourney game at Veterans Memorial Auditorium — the Big Barn — in Des Moines. She was drafted in the 13th round by the San Francisco Warriors of the NBA in 1969, the first woman ever, but was not allowed to play.

Only hayseeds long in the tooth would recall the classic matchup between Long and Jeanette Olson of the Everly Cattlefeederettes in the 1968 championship. Olson averaged 59 points per game that year — while wearing a uniform with a pleated skirt — and Long averaged 69 wearing shorts. Long’s Union-Whitten squad prevailed 113-107 in overtime.

And then there was “Machine Gun” Molly Bolin of Moravia, the queen of the short-lived Iowa Cornets in the Women’s Professional Basketball League. In 1979, she put up 55 points in one game and averaged 32 per game. She was featured in Sports Illustrated.

The six-girl high school sport finally gave way to five-girl teams in the smallest schools in the 1990s. But the devotion to stroking the nets remained.

Crackerbox gyms in high schools with 120 students still nearly blow up on Tuesday and Friday nights. The entire state watches the championships on public television. We had all heard about Caitlin Clark of West Des Moines Dowling, a Catholic school, years ago. Her college coach, Lisa Bluder, became a household name while leading the Drake University Bulldogs to national prominence before decamping to Iowa City. Bluder’s top assistant, Jan Jensen, was a star from Elk Horn-Kimballton (enrollment 188) and led the nation in scoring at Drake.

Midwestern attention to women’s sports has always been keen. Dr. James Naismith seeded basketball in Kansas, but it was cultivated by and for women in Iowa, we tell ourselves. Although we like to think of our game as superior, the same could be said for Kansas and Indiana — even Nebraska.

It comes as some comfort that we rural folk might not be as backward as you are led to believe. The Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union was formed in 1925 because rural schools had a girls basketball jones. The big-city snoots thought it was unladylike, but the bumpkins knew a good game when they saw one.

If women can slop hogs or milk cows or harvest corn, they sure can play basketball or wrestle. Or be governor, as Republican Kim Reynolds is, or a U.S. senator as Republican Joni Ernst is. Republican Brenna Bird is attorney general. They are all bona fide conservatives. (Reynolds and Bird favor an abortion ban at six weeks, for example.)

They all came up in a state that has been nuts for girls’ sports for at least a century, and where a woman in coveralls and three-buckle overshoes could deal in town on a pickup or a corn sheller like any man could. They’ve been running courthouses and telling the men on the county board how to do it since at least the days of the Everly Cattlefeederettes.