July 26, 2024
Ball movement: Using the game’s history to pay it forward
By Kiri Oler
Legends of the Ball celebrates the rich history of women’s professional basketball
“You have to see the Title IX ball.”
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Molly (Bolin) Kazmer and Adrian Mitchell-Newell, who were both among the first athletes to benefit from Title IX, wandered through WNBA Live, a fan expo hosted in the Phoenix Convention Center during All-Star weekend. They were looking for the Wilson Sporting Goods booth, hoping to see the commemorative basketball they’d helped design. The artwork for the ball started as a blank mural, a space for the first athletes who played under Title IX to animate their stories for the world. Finding the booth was tricky because it didn’t open until two hours into the event. When a Wilson rep finally pulled back the curtain, Kazmer’s voice fell.
“It’s not here.”
The booth turned out to be a modest display. The only special edition balls highlighted current WNBA players such as A’ja Wilson and Kahleah Copper. The experience was, unfortunately, nothing new for Kazmer and Mitchell-Newell who, along with Liz Galloway-McQuitter and Charlene McWhorter Jackson, were in attendance at All-Star festivities as representatives of Legends of the Ball, a nonprofit organization created to educate the current generation on the full history of women’s collegiate and professional basketball in the United States. All four women played basketball in college as Title IX took effect and went on to play professionally in the Women’s Professional Basketball League (WBL), the first professional basketball league for women in the United States.
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“We attend the events, but it always feels like we’re outside looking through the window.” Kazmer told The Next in an interview alongside the Legends of the Ball contingent at All-Star weekend.
Liz Galloway-McQuitter founded Legends of the Ball. The organization’s name honors the smaller women’s basketball, designed by Karen Logan and manufactured by Wilson, used in the WBL. Though the WBL was the first professional women’s basketball league, it’s often omitted from the game’s history books. However, the league’s 28.5” ball continues to impact the game.
“There’s no [Sheryl] Swoopes, [Diana] Taurasi [or Caitlin] Clark shooting from that range without the ball,” said Galloway-McQuitter.
The WBL’s impact spans far beyond the ball, but the ball is a tangible reminder of a league that many current players, fans and media members don’t know anything about because all too often, when the story of women’s basketball is told, it starts with the WNBA.
As the representatives from Legends of the Ball walked around WNBA Live, they did so wearing t-shirts that read, “The Original W was the WBL.”
At one point, a man in a Phoenix Suns jersey stopped to compliment Kazmer on her shirt, but he didn’t seem to realize he was talking to THE Molly Bolin, the first player to sign in the WBL after averaging 55 points per game playing 6-on-6 basketball for her high school in Iowa.
But it’s not that surprising that a basketball fan would fail to recognize a star of the WBL. On Friday of All-Star Weekend, Kazmer attended a brunch hosted by WNBA legend Sheryl Swoopes in honor of her former teammate, the late Nikki McCray-Penson, who died last year following a battle with breast cancer. Kazmer sat in the audience as Swoopes spoke about the importance of honoring the game’s history, but heard no mention of the WBL.
In another example from All-Star weekend, Las Vegas Aces guard Kelsey Plum answered a question during her media availability about the pressure associated with playing on Team USA while so many eyes are on the women’s game. Plum acknowledged the decades of work its taken to get to this point.
“As women in this league we’ve been fighting for this for our whole lives and I think you know — even talking about Diana [Taurasi] and this is her sixth Olympics, but how many things that she’s built [and] no one really gave her the credit, right? That’s just an example of somebody that comes to mind. The Sheryl Swoopes, the Cynthia Coopers that laid [a] foundation, so we could be here right now in this moment.”
The recognition of the past is present, but for too many people from players, to media, to fans — the history of women’s basketball starts with the WNBA. It’s as though the WBL never existed.
In 2022, Galloway-McQuitter and other members of Legends of the Ball attended WNBA All-Star festivities in Chicago, which included a celebration of the 50-year anniversary of Title IX. She remembers, “Listening to people on the stage, talking about Title IX, but they talk about it as an entity. They cannot tell you similar moments, they can’t name a person, or a place. It’s an ‘it.’”
Galloway-McQuitter listened to people speak about Title IX in vague, hypothetical terms, while women with firsthand experience of the immediate impact of Title IX sat with her in the audience, their voices unheard.
Getting history right
The repeated experience of hearing the game’s pre-WNBA history glossed over or inaccurately represented led Galloway-McQuitter to found Legends of the Ball. The organization strives to highlight the full history of women’s professional basketball — using the voices of the athletes who lived it — and the ways in which the WBL laid the foundation for future leagues. When asked how Legends of the Ball executes its mission, Galloway-McQuitter shares a detailed vision.
First, “You’ve got to hit the places that house history,” she says.
The WBL has already been honored by the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, plans are in the works for the league to be exhibited in the Smithsonian and conversations are ongoing with the Naismith Hall of Fame.
Next, Galloway-McQuitter continues, “You’ve got to hit the NCAA, NJCAA and WBCA,” referring to the organizing bodies of collegiate athletics and the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association.
These organizations play a role in educating young players and coaches on the history of the game. They also hold the largest influence over the game’s statistical records. When Title IX was first enacted, the NCAA was not interested in folding women’s sports into its governing body. Instead, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) governed women’s college basketball throughout the 1970s. Roughly a decade into Title IX, the NCAA saw the profit potential of women’s sports and began to compete with the AIAW, eventually winning out. The stats and records of the women who played under the AIAW go largely unacknowledged despite their role as trailblazers at the college level.
“If Major League Baseball can bring in the Negro Leagues,” Galloway-McQuitter said, in reference to MLB’s recent decision to recognize statistical records from the Negro Leagues as major-league level stats, “Then anybody can bring anybody else in. Shame on the NCAA for not bringing in the AIAW years.”
The NCAA’s failure to recognize statistics from prior eras leads to situations where players like Lynette Woodard (who scored 3,649 points in the AIAW) and Pearl Moore (who scored 4,061 points in the AIAW’s Small College division) don’t receive proper recognition. As the media covered Caitlin Clark’s career scoring milestones during her senior season at Iowa (Clark finished with 3,951 points), the names of these women were often omitted. If women’s college basketball records were all kept in the same books, they’d be overlooked less often as storytellers around the game attempt to provide historical context.
The third component of Galloway-McQuitter’s plan is to educate the current generation of players and media. Many, like Plum and Swoopes, make good faith efforts to acknowledge the past, but lack consistency and completeness.
“It stems from people not knowing,” said Kazmer on the WBL’s frequent lack of recognition, “Because when they do [learn], they find it fascinating — they’re inspired by it.”
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During a press conference on Friday of All-Star Weekend, Storm forward Nneka Ogwumike called upon the media to hold one another to a high standard when covering the sport.
“The OG media can do a really good job of leading [the] way — letting people know like, ‘Hey, this is how it used to be. This is where it is now. These are the stories that have been told, you know, over and over again, these are the stories that need to be told,’” Ogwumike said, in reference to the influx of new media entities covering the sport.
“Yeah, we wouldn’t have the games without the players, but they wouldn’t know us without you telling our stories,” Ogwumike said.
One of the stories not told enough is that of the first professional women’s basketball league in the U.S., and that’s precisely what Galloway-McQuitter aims to remedy. She doesn’t expect every media member to know every detail of the game’s history going all the way back to the 1920s, but “[they] need the seminal moments and the key people,” in order to properly trace the breadcrumbs of history and understand how the past continues to shape the present state of the game.
“We’ve got to get to all these broadcasters. I need to go to their conventions,” Galloway-McQuitter said. “[Because] they have all these people talking, and they don’t know to talk about [the WBL].”
Paying it forward
Legends of the Ball’s mantra is, “Passing it on… Paying it forward.”
When asked to speak about her legacy during a press conference prior to the All-Star game, two-time NCAA national champion Cheryl Miller, who was asked to coach the WNBA All-Stars because of her extensive resume as a player and coach, highlighted her desire to pay it forward, rather than only looking back.
“Ann Meyers Drysdale taught me — and Nancy Lieberman [and] Lynette Woodard — that my responsibility … was to pay it forward. So that’s my job now — to pay it forward,” said Miller.
Miller shouted out the WBL players who blazed a trail and passed the wisdom of their experience on to her and pledged to keep the pattern going — to keep passing it on and paying it forward.
Miller proved to be a woman of her word mere hours later. During the skills challenge, Miller was recognized on the video board and immediately leaned over so that the person sitting next to her would appear in the shot. The camera panned to reveal Ann Meyers Drysdale, who smiled and waved but wasn’t officially announced over the PA.
Miller decided that a few seconds on the jumbotron didn’t do enough to honor the true impact of a WBL great. The following night, just moments before the All-Star game was set to tip off, Miller tracked down a quarter zip like the ones worn by her and her coaching staff, tossed it to Meyers Drysdale, and named her the honorary head coach of Team WNBA, forcing the PA to properly announce her as such a few seconds later. In that moment, Miller ensured that thousands of WNBA fans would learn Ann Meyers Drysdale’s name, granting them the opportunity to learn from her story.
The PA had more introductions to make that night in Phoenix. With two minutes remaining in the first quarter, Liz Galloway-McQuitter, Molly Kazmer, Adrian Mitchell-Newell and Charlene McWhorter Jackson appeared on the giant screen as the announcer’s booming voice rang out, “These pioneers played in the first women’s professional basketball league.”
The four women stood at their seats and waved as a sold-out crowd got to its feet and applauded. Before going silent and letting the cheers fill the arena, the PA declared, “In order to know how far we have come, we must know where it all began.”
Though the context and conditions of the game have evolved in the decades since that beginning, one throughline has remained constant. More than anything, women simply want an opportunity to play basketball. And when given that opportunity, they prove over and over again from one generation to the next that they will show up and play high-quality, exciting basketball — no matter where they are or who is watching.
After the WBL folded in 1981, Kazmer did her best to stay in shape for whatever other opportunities may arise. She played in men’s rec leagues and teamed up with Nancy Lieberman to play in national 3-on-3 tournaments.
“When you’re a basketball player, you just find a place to play,” said Kazmer, “That’s the key thing — this whole time women just want a chance to play. And it really is just about the basketball. But then there’s all this other crap that they have to wade through to get to it, right? But if you let them play, everything else comes together.”
More opportunities exist for women to play now, but there’s still a certain amount of crap too. Later on in her press conference, Ogwumike rattled off the varieties of crap she’s experienced.
“We grew up [with people] saying like, ‘They should lower the rim, They should do this. Y’all should wear skirts. Y’all should wear booty shorts.’ Most importantly, we can hoop. Y’know? We know hoop. We’re playing basketball out here.”
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Those who don’t know the full history of the WBL might be tempted to think that the league folded after three seasons because the quality of the basketball was substandard. But the women of the WBL could hoop too. It was the relentless barrage of crap that weakened the league’s integrity. The hoopers who endured the challenges of a new league that lacked the proper patience and investment have wisdom to impart to modern hoopers and hoop enthusiasts as they experience the modern versions of the same challenges.
Legends of the Ball has an eight-member board, but its president, Liz Galloway-McQuitter is the passion behind the project. She’s the one coordinating with historical societies, setting up podcast interviews and connecting the media to WBL players so their stories can be told.
“We have people that are actively involved,” said Kazmer, who serves as Legends of the Ball’s vice president, “But Liz does 90% of the work.”
Galloway-McQuitter’s work led to the group’s recognition at the WNBA All-Star game and their voices being heard on several national platforms. She’s certain to keep pushing the work forward, but we can accelerate the movement with more hands on the ball.
Written by Kiri Oler
Kiri Oler has been a contributor to The Next as a news and feature writer since December 2022.
