Three weeks ago, I sat on my bed and cried into my palms, shutting my laptop in defeat. The University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball team was crushed in the Final Four of the NCAA Women’s March Madness tournament, and, for the first time, I shed tears over a sports game. I used to keep a healthy distance from sports fandom as a whole, but since women’s basketball has gained traction, players like Sarah Strong and Napheesa Collier have had me hooked.
Women’s basketball has experienced rapid growth in recent years, and fans like me have grown alongside it. The WNBA, in the last two years alone, announced several new teams, reached record viewership and established a collective bargaining agreement with the players’ union just last month that will yield historically high salaries. This progress is a product of persistent, player-led efforts to make room for themselves in spaces that have historically excluded them. It is a disservice to the generations of female athletes — and grossly inaccurate — to categorize these recent efforts as isolated anomalies. The fight for equitable expansion in women’s basketball has withstood the test of time, with one of its earliest battles taking place right here in Claremont.
In 1903, women at Pomona College assembled Southern California’s first women’s college basketball team – one of the first in the United States – three years before the men’s team formed.
The team, which would eventually become Pomona-Pitzer women’s basketball, navigated uncharted waters — most college women’s basketball teams didn’t form until a few decades later — and leveraged the few resources available to them. Since there weren’t any other college teams in the area to compete against, they played high schools, according to the Pomona College Timeline. Pomona would play its first intercollegiate game in 1909 against the University of Southern California, setting the stage for college-level women’s basketball in the region.
Many critiques of recent progress in women’s basketball are rooted in the idea that the last few years have existed in a vacuum, as if demands for better resources and higher earnings are unprecedented. It’s easy to paint current WNBA players’ goals as unreasonable and abrupt if you discount the centuries-old power structures they have to combat and their predecessors who did so too. Resistance has always been there; it may just be that some people are only now recognizing it through sensationalized headlines.
Pomona’s original women’s basketball players challenged chauvinism in more ways than one; nothing about playing basketball matched women’s circumscribed roles. Participating in higher education as a woman was far less common at the time, and playing a sport while doing so was even more progressive. Women playing team sports in particular was inherently matriarchal because it excluded what women were conditioned to depend on: men. The court was the one place where they could unfasten the tight grip of patriarchy.
Athletes like those on the Pomona team defied traditional notions of femininity that deemed women physically and mentally unsuited for sports. Wearing something other than dresses and skirts, for one, didn’t reflect conventional aesthetics. Additionally, doctors would often tell women and girls that intense exercise would threaten their reproductive health. As women were traditionally defined by their roles as mothers, they were imposed the narrative that competition would make them more masculine and undesirable. They played anyway.
Prior to the USC game before other colleges in the region were ready, Pomona women played against one another in an eight-team intracollegiate league, as the Pomona College Timeline highlights. Unless each had very few players, the eight teams must have required some serious support and solidarity from women across the college.
The all-Pomona league might signal that women’s basketball wasn’t a rarity at the college, but instead a thriving movement. This isn’t to say that Pomona was uniquely full of radical feminists, but more so to underscore that countering hegemony sits at the core of women’s basketball. Disrupting the status quo is sewn into the fabric of the sport and cannot be teased out.
Just one set of trailblazers among many, Pomona’s original team fit into the broader push for advancement in women’s sports. Modern triumphs in the WNBA are nothing short of the legacy of these efforts, a culmination of resistance in the face of grave power imbalances. To fully understand and appreciate recent strides players have made, we must make sense of the incremental steps that have allowed them to do so.
Conversations like better pay, improved facilities and league expansion are not merely contemporary but enduring; to frame them as anything but would erase over a century’s worth of headway that laid the foundation for the changes we see today.
Ava Fleisher SC ’28 hopes that one day she won’t have to watch live women’s basketball games on sketchy websites.
Facebook Comments