March Madness with Bertha

Back when I was in junior high school, right here in Vernal, Utah, before the feminist movement and the passage of Title IX, girls played a game of basketball that was supposed to be consistent with their abilities, or lack thereof.

In case I am the only one who remembers that now-retired (thankfully) period in sports history, I am going to tell you how that game worked. The premise was that girls weren't strong or durable enough to play a game that required them to run the full length of a basketball court for 18 minutes without keeling over. At least, that is what my coach told me.

So they came up with a sort of half-court game where the players were either forwards or they were guards and neither of them could cross the half court line. The guards played defense They weren't allowed to score, not even if they had a good half-court shot. They had to pass the ball to the forwards who did all of the scoring.

It wasn't going to be very fair for there to be three forwards and only two guards (you know like “they got numbers”) all the time. Nor was it going to work for there to be three guards and only two forwards (sort of like never-ending double-teaming). So they added another player to the team so there could be three of each, which made it all warm and fuzzy for all the girls all the time.

I just about choked when my coach told me that we were going to play “girls' “ basketball. I grew up in a family of mostly boys who played the real game of basketball. Then when she told me I was going to be a guard, I had my first argument with a coach. I didn't really want to play a game of basketball and never shoot the ball.

You think I am making this up, don't you? No, I'm not; I played that game. I was a guard. I even traveled to other schools to play games against other girls. They were low-scoring affairs. But that was okay. The score of the first collegiate basketball game for girls was 5-4. True, each basket was worth one point, but still…. That game was played was in 1896. (No I didn't play in that game.)

In an effort to preserve goodwill, minimize competition and prevent any one player from taking over a game, (in other words to make it more suitable for what was the prevailing notion of girls' constitutions) the court was divided into three zones, and a team consisted of nine girls, three girls per team per zone. All of the girls had to stay in their zones and no one could dribble more than three times. (Like they would have room to dribble any more than that.)

So sixty years later when I played, the game hadn't changed much. We still played in zones, and we still had dribbling limits. Our games were low-scoring—not because we were girls and were unable to shoot, jump, run or pass the ball, but because they wouldn't let us do any of those things too much. Playing three-on-three basketball with only three dribbles before passing doesn't generate much offense. Besides, we were busy counting. And, oh yeah, also because they put all of the tall, long-armed girls on defense.

I don't know how the rest of the female world played that game, but it didn't take us too long to realize that the best strategy was to control the half-court line. We played a sort of 2-1 zone defense. One guard protected the basket, and the other two just held position on the line and didn't let the ball cross it.

We just patrolled the border, so to speak, and batted the ball back to the other end of the court whenever it came within reach. All we had to do was outreach the forwards. Any kind of a pass up and over the 2-guards could usually be controlled by a taller 1-guard. This strategy also maximized the importance of the guards which we thought was only fair.

No wonder the scores resembled those of soccer games and the play was more like keep-away. In case you haven't noticed, there is no equivalent to the NBA in keep-away. They just wouldn't have the fan-base.

I'm not sure when they began to allow women to play the same game men do. Probably some time just shortly after my illustrious career as line guard ended. And maybe they were playing that game in the rest of the world; I have never figured that out.

But, you know the game's inventors were partly right in their assessment of women and basketball. I just watched a girls' college playoff game, and you know what? Women can't jump. I think they are inclined to apologize when they foul an opponent, too.