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In our first appearance for the new edition of Shattering the Glass, Pamela and I had a terrific time at All Good Books in Columbia, S.C., on February 15.

In particular, we addressed how Coach Dawn Staley has built the University of South Carolina’s program into a national powerhouse, and were delighted that WOLO, the local ABC station, came by to interview us. Austin, at the bookstore, and Noah, at the station, were a great team in producing the story. Here is Noah below and a link to the story.

Much thanks to bookstore owner Ben Adams, who hosted us, and the family, friends and fans of S.C. women’s basketball who dropped by. Greenville Times reporter Lulu Kesin, who covers the S.C. team,  even found a way to visit amid her busy schedule!

I’ll be in Iowa City from January 20 through January 23, signing books, talking about Iowa’s rich women’s basketball history and taking in the Iowa-UCLA game. Looking forward to it.

I’ll be sorting through my closet to dig out my winter clothes, which I rarely need here in Charlotte. On Thursday, the day I arrive, the low is predicted to be -9!!! Friday it will rise to a balmy 15. Please send warm wishes!

Black women have long energized American women’s basketball. Marian Washington, C. Vivian Stringer, Lusia Harris, Lynette Woodard, Cheryl Miller, Cynthia Cooper, Dawn Staley, Carolyn Peck, Chamique Holdsclaw, Candace Parker, Seimone Augustus, Brittney Griner, Maya Moore, A’ja Wilson – the list of stars and coaches goes on and on.

These achievements draw on a rich, deep history.

Black women have played basketball for well over a century. Women seized on the new sport as soon as it was invented, and Black colleges became early supporters. December of 1899, for example, Atlanta University’s alumni magazine proudly announced that “Through the liberality of some friends, supplemented by the work of our own shop, a basket ball outfit has been procured for the girls.”

A month later, as a new century dawned, student L.I. Mack outlined the many ways athletic competition supported Black women’s broader ambitions.

“Educated women who seek employment must keep in mind the fact that only by the sweat of the brow is man’s bread won,” she wrote. “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.”

By the 1920s, Black high school girls had taken up the game as well, sewing uniforms, posing for pictures, and proudly announcing their achievements.

Eager players at times had to contend with conservative parents. In Siler City, North Carolina, Ruth Glover’s high school career was temporarily derailed when her father objected to the team’s uniforms – specifically their shorts. He only relented when she agreed to keep a skirt waiting on the sidelines. “I had to put on that skirt as so as that game was over!” she recalled, laughing. “We didn’t have cover-ups, but I had to have a skirt.”

The skills Glover developed took her on to Bennett College, which in the 1930s sponsored one of the top Black college teams in the country. All-female Bennett had a lofty reputation, and its students were known as the Bennett Belles. But they saw no contradiction between social graces and athletic prowess.  “We were ladies,” Glover explained. “We just played basketball like boys.”

Alice Coachman, who attended Tuskegee University, became the first Black woman in history to take home Olympic gold when she won the high jump gold medal in the 1948 London Olympics. She also loved basketball. “To get that ball off that backboard, knowing that nobody else could jump that high. That was thrilling,” she said. “If things were as they are now, I probably would be at some university going with the Olympic team in basketball.” But women’s basketball would not be an Olympic sport until 1976, and track took precedence. Coachman became known for her high jumping, not her rebounding.

Black women also played on popular semipro teams, most prominently the Philadelphia Tribunes. Led by Ora Washington, whose prowess at tennis and basketball made her the nation’s first Black female athletic star, the Tribunes’ accomplishments were touted in Black newspapers around the country.

While memories of Washington’s achievements faded for a time, the BBC recently created a multi-part podcast Untold Legends: Ora Washington, in which WNBA star Renee Montgomery explored her life and helped bring her back into the public eye.

Jim Crow segregation meant that many of Black women’s early accomplishments took place within a largely Black world.

Black women were far from welcome at the national AAU tournament – in part because the tournament was dominated by white teams from the South. On the rare occasion that a team with Black players qualified, one longtime official explained, it “was placed in the bracket against the strongest northern team available” and “the officials received strong hints from the powers that be as to how they would like the game called.”

One year when the Tuskegee team was especially good, Alice Coachman overheard athletic director Cleveland Abbott remark, “This team here would go to the finals at the national basketball tournament.” But they never got the chance.

The first Black team to make a mark on the tournament – Philander Smith College – was invited in 1955, the year after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision. When the Philander Smith players arrived at the event, they were stunned to see dozens of white teams on the floor. Many had no idea that white women played the game at all.

“When we got there and we saw that all the teams were white, we just thought that for sure we’re going to win,” Missouri Arledge later recalled. “I don’t know why, but we thought we were going to win the tournament because I guess we lived a sheltered life in college. We didn’t see too many—well I don’t remember seeing any—white girls playing basketball. All you saw were Black girls playing basketball. That’s what segregation will do for you. You just live in this little shell, and you don’t know what’s going on with the rest of the world.”

Philander Smith reached the quarterfinals, and Arledge was named the first Black female All American. But as with so many civil rights endeavors, progress remained slow. The next Black player to become an All-American, Sally Smith, would not be named until 1969.

Although support for women’s basketball faded in the conservative 1950s, women kept playing when and where they could.

Legendary coach C. Vivian Stringer grew up dribbling and shooting with the boys in her Pennsylvania hometown. She did not play in high school – her school fielded no women’s teams. But she persisted, and was hired to coach at historically Black Cheyney State University in 1971, the year before Congress passed the landmark Title IX legislation. She spent countless hours driving around Philadelphia, stopping to “look on the playgrounds and see who’s playing,” and recruiting the competitors she liked.

“There was a lot of talent,” she recalled. “There were a lot of local clubs and teams, and men and women that really just committed themselves to helping train these athletes. And there was a lot of pride.”

In subsequent years, the opportunities brought by Title IX, combined with unrelenting work and sacrifice, would carry Black women to the pinnacle of their sport, known not just for their play but for their leadership in movements such as Black Lives Matter.

Everyone should know this history. Pass it on.

Images: Cheryl Miller; Hampton University students; Winchester Avenue High students (Monroe, N.C.); Bennett College team (Greensboro Historical Archives, Ruth Glover third from left); Tuskegee team (Alice Coachman second row, center); Philadelphia Tribunes (Ora Washington third from right); Missouri Arledge; Rebekkah Brunson and Natasha Howard (Timothy Nwachukwu/Star Tribune via AP)

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 hot pink billboard hovers over a shopping center on the east side of Charlotte, North Carolina. At the center, a young Black woman clad in a short skirt and cropped hoodie lounges on a gilded throne. To her left sits a glittering array of hair care products. To her right, the title proclaims: “From One Queen to Another.”

Angel Reese has come to town.

The LSU hoops star played her way to national renown at the 2023 Women’s Final Four, where her Tigers took the championship game from favored Iowa and the celebrated Caitlin Clark, 102-85. With 30 seconds left in that contest, Reese underscored the achievement by holding her hand between her face and Clark’s in a “can’t see me” gesture pioneered in the World Wrestling Federation. Her lacquered index fingernail marked the spot where her championship ring would rest.

Reese was named the tournament’s most outstanding player, and rose quickly to the top of college sports’ brave new world of Name-Image-Likeness (NIL). As of this November, she was the second-highest NIL earner among college basketball players, beaten only by LeBron James’ son Bronny.  She appeared in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. She signed contracts with firms that included Coach, Reebok and Mielle, the line of Black hair care products advertised in the Charlotte billboard.

Around the same time the Mielle billboard went up on Sugar Creek, a downtown banner advertising the Iowa-Virginia Tech Ally Tipoff presented Caitlin Clark in a far different light. Clark, whose pinpoint passing and breathtaking 3-point shooting made her college basketball’s 2023 National Player of the Year, stood in the foreground, hair pulled back, no makeup, all business.

Clark’s NCAA run also brought her plenty of NIL success, including contracts with firms such as Nike, Bose, H&R Block and State Farm Insurance. For 2023, her earnings ranked fourth among female basketball players, twelfth overall.

That two such dramatically different women have drawn this kind of widespread acclamation marks a sharp departure from the restrictions faced by previous generations of female athletes. Historically, athletic women have been encouraged – and frequently required – to blunt the “masculine” associations of athletic success by donning skirts, stockings and makeup, speaking in measured tones and downplaying their competitive zeal.

Efforts to fit top athletes into conventional views of decorative femininity showed especially clearly at the AAU national tournament in the middle of the twentieth century. While no Black squad was invited until the late 1950s, the AAU tournament showcased the nation’s best white players and teams, including powerhouses such as Babe Didrikson’s Golden Cyclones, Hazel Walker’s Lewis & Norwood Flyers and the star-studded Hanes Hosiery. Still, organizers felt the need to augment the top-flight play with an annual beauty pageant (won in 1944 by Hanes Hosiery’s Jimmie Vaughn, pictured below).

Anxieties about conventionally feminine appeal persisted into the early 2000s, when promoters of the fledgling WNBA were still seeking to squeeze players into a one-size-fits-all version of feminine charm.

“There was always this question: ‘How are we going to market women’s sport?’” recalled Sue Wicks, who played for the New York Liberty in those early years. “And their answer was, ‘Well, they need dresses and makeup.’” While some players enjoyed dressing up, many did not. “I see some of the pictures, and it’s comical because the players are so awkward,” Wicks continued. “They would never wear that dress, they would never wear lipstick, and you can see they’re just miserable.”

The world of women’s sports and NILs of course remains entangled in cultural conventions and expectations.

Conventional femininity still sells. Angel Reese’s NIL career has been fueled not simply by her remarkable talent, but by her stature as “Bayou Barbie,” a nickname inspired by her willowy figure, flowing hair, and dramatically long nails and lashes. “As the Bayou Barbie, I love to look my best on and off the court!” she gushed in a Mielle press release. “Mielle has always been there for me.”

In contrast, Caitlin Clark’s State Farm debut paired her with the firm’s trademark khakis. The decidedly non-glamorous attire underscored the classic “girl-next-door” image that is part of Clark’s appeal, and which also invokes the mainstream press goodwill that so often comes with being white.

This goodwill showed when Clark threw a “can’t see me” hand after shooting her sixth 3-pointer in Iowa’s Elite Eight victory over Louisville. Reactions were largely positive, including a shoutout from the gesture’s inventor, WWF competitor John Cena.

But when Reese deployed the gesture, social media became a battleground that featured, as sports journalist Dave Zirin put it, “loathsome right-wing men, mostly white, profanely criticizing Reese” as well as “what felt like a coordinated effort from the most wretched corners of the sports commentariat,” involving “people who two weeks ago did not know who Clark was rushing to her defense and attempting to turn her into their latest fragile white martyr—a casualty of the confidence of a Black woman, a confidence that they wanted to break.”

Mainstream condemnation spread so far that even Charles Barkley called Reese’s move “unfortunate,” prompting Zirin to remark: “If Charles Barkley is reaching for the fainting couch, you know that way too many men in the basketball world have lost the plot.”

Reese stood firm, tweeting: “I’m ‘too hood.’ I’m ‘too ghetto.’ I don’t fit the narrative and I’M OK WITH THAT. I’m from Baltimore where you hoop outside & talk trash. . . . Let’s normalize women showing passion for the game instead of it being ‘embarrassing.’”

Clark refused to play the victim, defending Reese and stating: “I’m just lucky enough that I get to play this game and have emotion and wear it on my sleeve. . . . That should never be torn down. That should never be criticized because I believe that’s what makes this game so fun. That’s what draws people to this game. That’s how I’m going to continue to play. That’s how every girl should continue to play.”

In the end, the sagas of these two remarkable competitors say a great deal about present-day American society and culture. They speak to the expanding media landscape that allows athletes to reach out to multiple audiences, to fans of Southern charm, Midwestern chutzpah, urban panache. They show that women can speak out and be heard, a shift underscored by the jump in popularity the WNBA enjoyed after players took leading roles in promoting Black Lives Matter. There’s a long and likely rocky road ahead for these players and their sport, as the spotlight on the women’s game intensifies. But this holiday season we all have much to celebrate.

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.