Pamela and Susan

The week after Christmas, from 1949 to 1960, thousands of North Carolinians converged on Raleigh to watch some of the best men’s college basketball in the country.

The occasion: the Dixie Classic, the brainchild of N.C. State coach Everett Case, which pitted the men of North Carolina’s “Big Four” teams – N.C. State, UNC, Duke and Wake Forest – against the best competition available.

Men’s college basketball has become such a North Carolina institution that enthusiasm for the sport seems almost natural, prompting speculations on the quality of the state’s water or on the color of the sky, which so suspiciously resembles Carolina Blue. But it was in fact the result of inspired, systematic promotion by Case and other coaches.

During the Dixie Classic’s run, spectators crammed North Carolina State’s palatial R.J. Reynolds Coliseum to cheer on their favorite teams. The Classic quickly established itself as one of the best tournaments around, attracting the nation’s top teams and players. It pitted North Carolina against the world, and fans reveled in every victory.

A similar effort could boost the women’s game. This past November, for example, more than 15,000 fans made the trek to Charlotte for the Ally Tipoff, filling the Spectrum Center with color and partisan energy.

The top-flight experience provided by Ally Financial and the Charlotte Sports Foundation has made the Ally Tipoff an attractive invitation. With a few tweaks, the contest could become the women’s basketball version of the Dixie Classic, an annual event that pits the top Carolina teams – South Carolina, Duke, N.C. State and UNC – against the best in the country.

Such a high-profile event would attract more of the corporate sponsorship and television coverage essential to present-day sporting success. It would also help weave women’s basketball more tightly into Carolina sporting culture.

Men’s basketball in North Carolina grew from a cultural moment. Not only was college basketball on the rise, Tar Heel leaders were seeking to establish their state as an modern, energetic player in an increasingly prosperous nation. The young men who played the rapid, complex game with skill, poise and teamwork became a compelling model for individual identity and state pride.

Women’s basketball is having such a moment now, with new attention to the game and growing respect for its skilled, confident players, who embody a wide range of women’s capabilities. The dramatic successes of coaches such as South Carolina’s Dawn Staley have shown that passionate fan devotion can be sparked and nurtured.

But the sport’s history makes clear that women’s basketball support has been marked by repeated ups and downs. More work will be required to make the present-day energy last.

Photos: Everett Case and N.C. State team (Bernie Batchelor Studio, Inc.); Dixie Classic Crowd; Oscar Robertson at Dixie Classic; South Carolina and N.C. State at Ally Tipoff (Tracy Glantz, The State); Ally Tipoff banner (Charlotte Sports Foundation) South Carolina star A’ja Wilson with teammate Tiffany Mitchell and Vanderbilt’s Rebekah Dahlman (Richard Shiro, AP Photos).

A more comprehensive version of this modest proposal appeared in multiple papers in North and South Carolina on February 13 & 14, 2025, including the Charlotte Observer. 

We’ve got a great schedule of appearances and events coming up. Join us if you can!

February 15: All Good Books, Columbia, S.C., 3-5 p.m.

February 17: Charlotte Talks radio show, WFAE, 90.7FM, 9 a.m. and on website

February 17: Virtual Talk, Damecore Impact, Christian Dior Couture, New York, N.Y., 1 p.m.

February 19: Park Road Books, Charlotte, N.C., 7 p.m.

February 22: Prairie Lights Books, Iowa City, Iowa, 4 p.m.

Get ready for Shattering the Glass everyone!

Our official publication date approaches, and books have started showing up in a few stores. We’ve got a great schedule of appearances coming up.

In anticipation, we’ll be sharing some photos and quotes from the book on social media – one every day or so.

February 2: Words by Atlanta University student L.I. Mack, 1900; players at Hampton University, 1907.

“Educated women who seek employment must keep in mind the fact that only by the sweat of the brow is man’s bread won. They must also remember that if they descend into the arena, they cannot hope for success unless they accept the conditions under which an athlete must strive. They must be prepared for hard work, for persevering work, because the race will be the same for them as for the men. The men will go beside them, struggling for the same prize; and, since men have, in the start, the advantage of the women, they must brace up every energy, and bring into play every faculty, to avoid defeat and ensure victory. Whatsoever they undertake, they must, and will, and do go through with it to the end.”

February 4: Words from Charlotte Observer, 1907; team from State Normal College, Greensboro, N.C., 1900.

“The game throughout was clean and ladylike. There was no slugging and there was no work for the stretchers or the ambulance.  But let it not be thought that there was nothing doing. If there was a dull minute from the call of the whistle to the last biff of the ball, it would be hard to say where it was. The girls were there to win.”

February 5: Words by Mabel Craft, San Francisco Examiner, 1896; Stanford University team, victors in the first women’s intercollegiate game.

“It wasn’t invented for girls, and there isn’t anything effeminate about it. It was made for men to play indoors and it is a game that would send the physician who thinks the feminine organization ‘so delicate,’ into the hysterics he tries so hard to perpetuate.”

February 6: Words and image from the Charlotte Observer, Charlotte, N.C., April 9, 1907

“It was exactly 4:30 o’clock when the two teams ran out, greeted by a tumult of cheers and an avalanche of streamers. The players, it is understood on good authority, were attired in abbreviated skirts, that nothing might impede the celerity or the alertness with which they leaped, dived heroically and sped determinedly toward their rivals’ goal. It was a scene such as is not witnessed every day in staid old Charlotte.”

“The only regret in town was that all save women were barred. Had the gates been thrown open the coffers of the athletic clubs of the colleges would be filled with gold, for business would have been suspended and the populace would have turned out en masse.”

Coverage of Charlotte’s first women’s intercollegiate basketball contest showcased both the appeal and the controversy surrounding women’s growing interest in athletics. Male spectators were barred, but several scaled nearby buildings to see the game. They were promptly arrested.

February 7: Fort Shaw Indian School team triumphs

In October of 1904, at the St. Louis World’s Fair, the women’s basketball team from Montana’s Fort Shaw Indian School defeated a Missouri all-star team and claimed the title “World Basket Ball Champions.”

The team proudly bore their trophy home. They left behind a powerful statement about Native American abilities. “To the great surprise of several hundred spectators,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch observed, the Fort Shaw players proved “more active, more accurate and cooler than their opponents.”

You can learn more about the team and players here, and in the book Full Court Press, by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith.

February 8: The Spread of High School Basketball

Words by Lavinia Ardrey Kell, Pineville High School, Pineville N.C.; image of Winchester Avenue team, Monroe, N.C.

“I would love to be young one more time, just to get to play basketball.”

February 9: Iowa Style

Words by John Schoenfelder, Clutier High School coach, Clutier, Iowa; image of the Ida Grove high school team, Ida Grove, Iowa

“Take a tour through the country and you’ll find an old tire rim nailed to the side of a building. These are never rusty. They are kept polished by a constant rain of shots from an aspiring girl and one or two neighbor girls or boys.”

February 10: Bennett College Team

“We were ladies. We just played basketball like boys.”
– Ruth Glover, Bennett  player, 1933-37

February 11: Ora Washington and the Philadelphia Tribunes

“No one who ever saw her play could forget her, nor could anyone who met her.”

February 13: Alice Coachman, Tuskegee athlete and 1948 Olympic high jump gold medalist

February 14: Margaret Sexton (front, right) 5-time AAU champion.

“It meant an awful lot to me. We gave up meals—I mean you didn’t have time to eat. A lot of times after work you just ride the bus and go to practice or whatever and it was really wonderful.”

February 15: Hanes Hosiery

The Hanes Hosiery Girls, who worked and played for Hanes Hosiery in Winston Salem, N.C., won the AAU championship in 1951, 1952, and 1953.

Eckie Jordan (front), who stood 5’2″, was a mainstay of the team and was named AAU tournament MVP in 1951.  “Coach thought I was too short to play,” she noted, “but I proved him wrong.”

February 16: Beauty Queens

The AAU women’s basketball tournament, which crowned the nation’s top team, often featured a beauty contest. Jimmie Vaughn (in crown) added the title of queen to accomplishments that included All-American honors, a free throw championship, and multiple national titles. Cornelia Lineberry (in knee pads) was named queen in 1947.

February 17: Nera White

February 18: Wayland Flying Queens

The Wayland Flying Queens from Wayland Baptist College dominated AAU play for most of the 1950s, winning six of eight titles between 1954 and 1961. They were named for their mode of transportation – local enthusiast Claude Hutcherson flew the Queens to games in his fleet of Beechcraft Bonanzas.

It was unusual for a college to sponsor a top-flight women’s team, and players leaped eagerly at the chance to go to college while playing the sport they loved.

Carla Lowry, who grew up in small-town Mississippi, would never forget the moment she picked up a copy of Parade magazine and saw the Queens on the cover. “It said that they had won their eighty-first game and their third national championship. I thought: ‘By God, I want to go play with those guys.’ So I hopped on a bus.”

It’s always great to be invited to the UNC women’s basketball alumni game. There’s nothing like chatting with players whose experience stretches across the six decades since Title IX – and even with a few who played prior to the landmark law.

The state of North Carolina has an especially deep tradition of women’s basketball success – one that started long before the Tar Heel women captured their 1994 national title.

In the mid-1930s, the teams from Greensboro’s Bennett College regularly beat all comers among the nation’s HBCU teams. They were widely acclaimed as the best Black college team in the country.

At the time, leaders at most predominantly white colleges saw competitive sports as unladylike. Black college leaders had far broader visions about women’s capabilities, and about the qualities they would need to develop to effectively serve their communities. Women’s basketball thrived.

Women’s industrial basketball also flourished. Companies that depended on female workers often sponsored women’s teams, to advertise their products and bolster employee morale. Southern textile mills, which had always employed women, developed a particularly strong basketball culture.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Winston Salem’s Hanes Hosiery hired noted men’s coach Virgil Yow to build up its women’s team. Scouring the South for top recruits, Yow created a powerhouse squad. Hanes captured the Amateur Athletic Union title, considered the women’s national championship, in 1951, 1952 and 1953.

The daughter of one of Virgil Yow’s cousins, Kay Yow, would make her own history as a pioneering coach at Elon College and N.C State.At Elon, she was the most successful women’s coach in the state when Title IX emerged. N.C. State Athletic Director Everett Case hired Yow to build a fledgling Wolfpack team into a national contender, and she did. She also coached the 1988 U.S. Olympic team to the gold medal at the Seoul Olympics.

The cheering crowd that filled Carmichael Arena at this year’s alumni game testified to the game’s enduring roots and its promising future (although the team lost a heartbreaking contest to Florida State and its dazzling star T’Naya Latson on a buzzer-beating basket).

We can’t wait to see what history gets made next.

Susan graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in 1976. A journalism major, she was the Daily Tar Heel’s first female sports editor. Pamela earned her Ph.D. from the UNC history department in 1997.

Images: Susan with Sylvia Crawley (right) and Charlotte Smith at the 2024 alumni game; Bennett College team, 1935; Hanes Hoisery team, 1953; Kay Yow at Elon College, 1960s; Alumni game, 2025; Pam and Susan, 2025.

Some of our favorite parts of Shattering the Glass involve the remarkable history of Iowa women’s basketball. It’s an inspiring story, with developments that include support for a pathbreaking girls’ high school tournament, the incisive advocacy of University of Iowa athletic director Christine Grant, the successes of coaches such as C. Vivian Stringer and Lisa Bluder, and the record-breaking accomplishments of Caitlin Clark.

At the Ally Tip-off earlier this month, coaches and players from all the participating teams called their game’s present-day successes a “historic moment.” We were able to ask Hawkeye coach Jan Jensen about the ways she and her colleagues make sure that current players know where they fit in their sport’s long history. She gave a great answer.

The expanded edition of Shattering the Glass is almost here!

The first edition, published by the New Press in 2005, was the most comprehensive account of American women’s basketball ever written. It became an integral part of sports history classes across the country. Readers raved.

Bust Magazine termed it “an indispensable resource.” Renowned sportswriter Robert Lipsyte described it as a “nonstop romp through hoops history” that offered “not only lively storytelling but a fascinating window on race, gender, and class on and off the court.” Historian Jacquelyn Hall called it a “sweeping, century-long story that places women’s sports at the heart of the fight for women’s rights.”

Twenty years later, the sport we’ve always loved has taken on new significance. Throughout its history, basketball has made it possible for players and coaches to challenge the limitations imposed on women by American culture and society. Our new chapters explore the factors that have contributed to the game’s recent growth, and the ways that players have used their new visibility to engage issues that include race, sexuality and opportunity. It’s such an important story.

As the sport has changed, so have we. We were so young back then!

We still live across the street from each other in Charlotte, North Carolina. We’ve pursued plenty of projects in the past 20 years, including a history of women’s basketball at Army West Point, a book about using sports to teach U.S. history and an account of segregation, desegregation and resegregation at historically Black West Charlotte High School.

As our new picture shows (see top), we’ve taken on more color, along with a few more wrinkles and a pound or two.

We’ve been so excited to watch the profile of women’s sports rise. It’s been a privilege to be able to update our manuscript, to explore the ways the history we’ve chronicled relates to an ever-changing present.

The great thing about doing history is that it never gets old. The stories we tell – of Senda Berenson and Ora Washington, of Hazel Walker and C. Vivian Stringer, of Cheryl Miller and Pat Summitt, of Dawn Staley and Caitlin Clark – not only shed light on present-day events, they will prove illuminating far into the future.

We haven’t blogged in almost a year. It’s been a challenging time – in basketball, in the world, in our lives. We’ve had to focus particular attention on our families – Susan’s father passed away in June; Pam’s mother in July.

But we’ve been lucky to be able to work with a great team. Thanks to the staff at UNC Press, our editor and chief cheerleader Mark Simpson-Vos, and to the many coaches, players, fans, archivists and sports information officers who took the time to help us tell this new story.

We can’t wait to get it out into the world.

CHARLOTTE, NC

The inaugural Ally Tipoff has reached its final minute and the crowd of 15,000 has risen to its feet. The third-ranked Iowa Hawkeyes, captained by the incandescent Caitlin Clark, have been trading three-pointers with the eighth-ranked Virginia Tech Hokies. The lead has changed hands 11 times throughout the game. With 31 seconds left and the Hawkeyes leading 76-71, the teams break for a timeout.

There hasn’t been a scene like this in Charlotte since 1996, when the city hosted the Women’s Final Four. That year, the Tennessee Lady Volunteers, featuring freshman standout Chamique Holdsclaw and Charlotte native Tiffani Johnson, claimed the national title with an overtime win over the defending champion UConn Huskies in the semis, and then with a dominating victory over the Georgia Lady Bulldogs, 86-65.

Back in 1996, fans of women’s basketball evisioned a grand future. That year, a star-studded Olympic team dazzled crowds at exhibition games throughout the country, then took the gold medal in Atlanta. Not one but two professional leagues emerged from the excitement: the independent American Basketball League and the NBA-sponsored Women’s National Basketball Association. (Charlotte got one of the original WNBA teams, the Charlotte Sting, paced by University of Virginia phenom Dawn Staley).

A fierce rivalry between Tennessee, coached by Pat Summitt, and the University of Connecticut, coached by Geno Auriemma, energized the college game. Play constantly improved, driven by stars like UConn’s Diana Taurasi, LSU’s Seimone Augustus, and Tennessee’s Candace Parker. We completed the first edition of Shattering the Glass amid that optimism, hoping the sport would continue to expand.

But then momentum slowed. The ABL had lasted only two years. While the NBA’s deep pockets kept the WNBA afloat, many teams struggled. The league averaged nearly 11,000 spectators per game in 1998, but only 8,500 in 2004. The Cleveland Rockers folded in 2003, the Charlotte Sting in 2007 and the Houston Comets, which had won the first four WNBA championships, in 2008.

The mismatch between improving play and stagnant audiences made it clear that the main challenges lay beyond the game itself. In 2008 the Seattle Storm was purchased by Force 10 Hoops LLC, a group of Seattle women led by Dawn Trudeau and including Lisa Brummel, Ginny Gilder and Anne Levinson. Gilder started attending league meetings, where then-NBA-commissioner David Stern focused on ticket sales. “At that point, he would just rail on everybody,” she explained in a recent interview. “‘You’ve got to sell, you’ve got to sell, you’ve got to sell.’ “I don’t think he ever really understood how much bias there was against women.”

Those biases ran deep. Men’s sports drew on many lines of support, including media exposure and corporate sponsorship. These key arenas were largely run by men, and each presented its own challenges.

Although Seattle was considered a progressive city, it was tough to build corporate support for a women’s team – even a high-performing squad such as the Storm, which had won the WNBA championship in 2004 and would win again in 2010. When Force 10 Hoops bought the team, longtime fan Peggy Haslach, whose financial firm often worked with NCAA teams, approached Gilder about taking on the Storm’s financial planning. Gilder made it clear that the Storm would give priority to firms that were willing to become team sponsors.

“I came back and I went to my boss and I said, ‘The Storm is willing to work with us, but here’s the deal, it’s pay to play,'” Haslach recently recalled. “‘So you have to sponsor the team.’ And he looked at me and he goes, ‘You know, Peggy, I have to do this only for those sports that I feel the whole firm can get into.'”

“And the thing was, the games were accessible,” Haslach noted. “They were inexpensive. And not only that, women were much better behaved on the basketball court than the guys. It was a family situation. So I learned quickly that they really didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”

But now, 15 years later, circumstances seem more promising. For one, women have more corporate decision-making power. Many of today’s female executives played sports in high school and college, and some have reached the point where they can direct company resources towards the games that meant so much to them.

Ally Financial, the main sponsor of the Tipoff game, has become one of the leaders of this effort. Andrea Brimmer, a standout soccer player who became a top-performing advertising executive, put together a team of “badass” women that included former Yale basketball player Stephanie Marciano (seen with us below), former Michigan State softballer Bridget Sponsky and former UNC Chapel Hill track athlete Jackie Hartzell, who attended Hopewell High right here in Mecklenburg County. In 2022, the 50^th anniversary of Title IX, Ally pledged to start splitting the company’s sports promotion dollars 50-50 between men’s and women’s sports.

The bank also put its clout to use in broadcast negotiations.

Ally became a top sponsor of the National Women’s Soccer League in 2021 and a year later drove the effort to move the league’s championship game into a primetime TV spot, putting up extra money to make it happen. In 2023, NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman negotiated a rights deal for an impressive $240 million and was resolute in what the rights required.  “Jessica, in the NWSL broadcast negotiations was, ‘It’s got to be a game of the week,” Brimmer explained. “’It’s got to be prime time. We’ve got to have a prime time championship. It’s requisite as part of the deal.’”

The Tipoff was dreamed up by Charlotte Sports Foundation executive director Danny Morrison, who was dazzled by Caitlin Clark’s performance at the 2023 Final Four and wanted her to play in Charlotte. Ally, which had a major presence in the banking-focused city, was an obvious partner. Morrison asked, and got a yes almost immediately.

The Tipoff’s promotion team resolved to shine the brightest possible spotlight on the game. Morrison, whose career included a stint as president of the Carolina Panthers, knew what it would mean to orchestrate a top-level event – one as far removed as possible from the sad situation at the 2021 NCAA tournament, which exposed the glaring inequities between men and women’s college ball.

The players were treated with style, from the state-of-the-art court to the top-quality locker rooms to the banners that greeted them as they headed to the court. Off-court attention was so enthusiastic that Clark reportedly had to hide beneath a hoodie when she ventured out onto the Charlotte streets.

The teams responded with a terrific game. They showed some early-season rust – neither team shot well in the first half. But as the halftime buzzer sounded, Virginia Tech’s Georgia Amoore hit a swisher from half court to pull the Hokies within one point – 33-32. After a slow shooting start, Clark drove repeatedly to the basket, drew 16 fouls and ended with 44 points to Amoore’s 31. The final score was Iowa 80, Virginia Tech 76.

At the postgame press conference, coaches and players raved about their experience. We asked Clark how she saw this moment in women’s sports history, and her response took social media by storm, as well as being featured prominently in the national press.

“Crowds like this should become normal for women’s basketball,” she said. “Iowa has a great history in Title IX, and making it important. I grew up a fan of women’s basketball, and I’ve always understood there’s really great players in this game who are really fun to watch. At the same time, they’re some of my biggest role models, and to see myself on this stage now, it’s very hard to wrap my hands around the environments we get to play in.”

It was a joy to experience such a standout event.

Our work on Shattering has taught us not to take such moments for granted. American women’s sports has a history of ups and downs. At the end of the 19^th century, student excitement over intercollegiate competition was diverted into intramurals and physical education. The vibrant competition that took shape in high schools during the 1930s and 1940s was largely squelched in the conservative Cold War era. Then came the post-1996 stagnation.

But at the moment, from where we sit, things look pretty good.

Note: The photo of the 1996 Olympic team is courtesy of USA Basketball and the photo of the Ally banner is courtesy of the Charlotte Sports Foundation. We took all the others.

Like the rest of the sports world, we were saddened to hear of the passing of the extraordinary Lusia Harris. We thought we’d share this excerpt from Shattering the Glass, which touches on Harris’s championship play for coach Margaret Wade at Delta State in Cleveland, Mississippi. Photo courtesy of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.

One of the state’s top high school players, center Lusia Harris, competed for Amanda Elzy High, just down the road from Cleveland in Greenwood, Mississippi. Like so many great Mississippi players, Harris had grown up on a family farm, building her muscles with her chores and honing her skills in backyard contests with brothers and sisters. Amanda Elzy always fielded top teams and Harris, who stood 6’3″, was hard to miss. In the spring of 1973, she recalled, Delta State recruiter Melvin Hemphill made the drive over to Greenwood “and asked me did I want to play basketball in college.”

A decade earlier, such a question would have been unthinkable. Lusia Harris was Black, and Delta State was a white school. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Mississippi had mounted some of the country’s fiercest resistance to the civil rights movement. Both Cleveland and Greenwood had been the scene of demonstrations, arrests and violence, as local African Americans began to stand up for their rights. As late as 1963, when the all-white Mississippi State men’s basketball team qualified for the NCAA tournament, the staunchly segregationist governor, Ross Barnett, forbade the team to go, because participation would mean taking the court against teams that fielded black players.

By the 1970s, however, Blacks and whites across the South were cautiously testing a new racial order, and even Mississippians proved ready for some change. Although Lusia Harris had planned to attend historically Black Alcorn State, the school fielded no women’s team. Delta State’s largely white campus required “a big adjustment,” Harris noted, and the school offered no scholarships. But the lure of the game was enough. She “went on over and played a little ball at Delta State.”

The Delta State team proved a formidable mix of restraint and resolve. Like many teams of the era, they carried on the old tradition of offsetting on-court prowess with off-court charm. According to forward Wanda Hairston “we tried to go out and prove you could be an athlete and a lady at the same time.”

Wade was renowned for how much she cared about her players, and for her refined demeanor. “She was the type that never raised her voice,” Lusia Harris noted. But like many genteel southern women, Wade was tough as nails underneath. She knew what she wanted her players to do, and how to get them to do it. During games, Wade always wore a special pin under her suit jacket. “Whenever we played, she would just open that coat up, and it said, ‘Give them hell.’” Harris explained. “So, you know, she would never say that, but she would just open her coat up . . . and the pin had on it, ‘Give them hell.’ I always remember that.”

Harris brought her own contrasting traits to the team. She was a shy person, a loner who channeled her energy into playing and study. “I wanted to be able to make a living after basketball was over,” she explained. “The only thing that I concentrated on was my schoolwork and playing basketball.” On the court, however, she was an imposing figure: her 6’3″ stature was heightened by a sizeable Afro, and she had the strength to “clean folks out from under that board,” as a longtime fan noted.

“She could overpower people,” a teammate echoed, recalling that despite defenders “hanging on her arms,” Harris routinely powered up and hit her shots. Her concentration also helped her to brush off the racist comments encountered by most Black athletic pioneers. “Sometimes the fans would say, you know, things in the stands,” she recalled, “but my focus was to score that basket. . . . And sometimes it got to be pretty rough in the games, you know. . . Everybody always said that I did a lot of smiling, but I had a few to say that I was pretty physical under the boards.”

Mississippi had a top-notch high school girls’ program, and Wade surrounded Harris with a stellar cast. In the 1976 tournament, when Harris came down with the flu, and became sluggish on the court, point guard Debbie Brock stepped up. Brock stood 4’11” and weighed 80 pounds. “I carry her around in her pocket,” Margaret Wade joked. But she was a deft ballhandler as well as a crack shot. Backed by teammates Wanda Hairston, Cornelia Ward and Ramona Von Boeckman, she sparked the team to its second title, defeating Immaculata once again in the title contest.

As usual for Delta State, the five starters played the entire game. The same starting lineup would take the court for Delta State in the 1977 championship, defeating Louisiana State University for a third straight title.

Mississipians responded with enthusiasm. In 1976, a local radio station broadcast the national tournament games to three states. The night that Delta State played a cliff-hanging semifinal, one college official reported, “they took five people to the hospital with heart attacks.” After the team returned to Cleveland, students elected Lusia Harris homecoming queen. In 1977, the Lady Statesmen sold out half of their home games and made more money than the men’s basketball or football teams.

“Wherever we played, we had people from Cleveland and surrounding areas to travel to support the team,” Harris recalled. “And that meant so much. . . . A lot of other places, we had more people than the home team.” That same year, the Lady Statesmen received a police escort from northern Mississippi all the way to Minneapolis, where the national championship was held.

We were glad our work was helpful for the writer of Harris’s Washington Post obituary. To be clear, though, we did not talk to her directly. Rather, we used an oral history interview conducted with her by Georgine Clark for the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at the University of Southern Mississippi. We’re grateful to the Center for Oral History and for all the other archives that capture and preserve voices for the future.

Since we wrote this, a short documentary on Harris, titled The Queen of Basketball, won an Academy Award, bringing further attention to her career and her subsequent accomplishments. It’s a beautiful piece.

Had a swell time talking women’s basketball with the great Dave Zirin for his latest Edge of Sports podcast. WNBA, NCAA, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+, ever-improving play – so much great stuff to discuss. Dave’s questions always get to the heart of the matter. It’s worth a listen.

So hard to fathom that Shattering the Glass has been out for 16 years. So much has happened since then. Definitely time for an updated edition!

Aari McDonald stares out of her WNBA draft photo, arms folded, biceps sculpted, looking ahead. On April 15, when the draft kicks off the WNBA’s silver anniversary season, McDonald will go high. She has just come off a stellar NCAA tournament, where she led third-seeded Arizona to the championship game – a heartstopping contest with Stanford that was watched by more than 4 million viewers and decided by a single point.

Women’s basketball has come a long way from the days when players donned long skirts and long-sleeved blouses, when men were barred from watching, and when observers waxed enthusiastic over the thrills of a “snappy” game that ended with a score of 2 to 1.