Athletes in Iowa - The impact of 6 on 6 Iowa girls’ basketball
February 3, 2008 by Sandy Renshaw
Filed under Guest Writer: Lindberg, James G., History, Iowa, Sports
In any discussion of girls’ and women’s sports in Iowa I feel compelled to add just a note about Iowa high school girls’ 6 on 6 basketball. It was a wonderful game played by generations of Iowa girls from 1898 until 1993. Catch a little of the history on a site developed by Dennis Brum.
In the history link if you have Flash 5 you will see a very short clip ending with, “There goes Brinkmeyer, all the way down and under and scoops and scores.” Of course that was Lisa Brinkmeyer of Hubbard. Lisa graduated from Hubbard-Radcliffe in 1993, the last year that Iowa girls played 6 on 6 basketball. She is in the IGHSAU Basketball Hall of Fame and also in the record books of softball. Lisa went on to play at Drake on several of Drake’s finest women’s basketball teams.
Lisa is just one example of the tens of thousands of examples of how important women’s sports in Iowa are to the development of strong, capable and confident women. I could tell you about hundreds of athletes who in their earlier lives were “Iowa girls,” many of whom played 6 on 6 high school basketball. I have met them at Drake in the classroom and through Drake sports, great people and great athletes like Jan Jensen of Elkhorn-Kimballton, Jenni Fitzgerald of North Scott, Lisa Geiss now Bluder of Linn-Mar, Tammy Blackstone of Cherokee, Kristi Kinne now Hayes of Jefferson, Laura Leonard of Des Moines Roosevelt, Deha Peyton now Miller of Linn-Mar, Lorri Bauman of Des Moines East, Keisha Cox of Des Moines Lincoln, Connie Newlin of West Des Moines Valley, Nicole Hennigan of Dowling Catholic, Carole Baumgarten of Hartley, Julie Fitzpatrick of Davenport Assumption, Linda Sayavongchanh of Des Moines Lincoln, Julie Rittgers of West Des Moines Valley, Kay Riek now DeLeo of Grundy Center, Natalie Raub of Union, Jan Krieger of Winfield-Mt. Union and these are just a few of the Iowans. (I know it’s provincial, but I am omitting the out-of-staters.) The lives of these people have been molded in very positive ways by their participation in high school sports in Iowa.
Lisa Brinkmeyer VanDeventer now works at the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union. Incidently the IGHSAU does a great job for us, Iowa. As they point out on their website the IGHSAU “is the only organization in the nation solely devoted to interscholastic competition for girls. Over 70,000 students participate in IGHSAU sponsored events.” Be grateful. And don’t forget about the upcoming Iowa girls basketball games this month and in March: district and regional pairings and state tournament pairings.
At $8/session tickets for the tournament games are a bargain. The district and regional games are less, and you will see some of tomorrow’s leaders. Maybe you will see your future attorney (Newlin, Blackstone), veterinarian (Miller), physical therapist (Fitzpatrick), Habitat for Humanity director (Baumgarten), sportscaster (Leonard), or your daughter’s basketball coach (Bluder, Jensen, Fitzgerald).
Photo credit: Photo on flickr by kurros
Guest Writer: James G. Lindberg (Jim) is the Purple Wren’s sweetie and is a visiting chemistry professor at Grinnell College and retired from Drake University.
[tags] Iowa, Des Moines, Central Iowa News, Athletes, 6 on 6 Iowa Girls’ Basketball [/tags]
There is another side to keeping 6-on-6 for so long. I was entering high school when the 1972 Education Amendments to the Higher Education Act took effect. This is where the famous Title IX is located, the section that called for equality in sports. The state where I lived chose to go with 5-on-5 from the beginning, which is the game chosen for college-level play. The result was that girls graduating from high school in my state were said to have better opportunities at winning basketball scholarships than graduates from 6-on-6 states.
Information I had included in a 2006 article in Leading Voices: Iowa cites numbers from the Feminist Majority’s web site that the number of girls nationwide participating in hgih school athletics increased from 294,015 in 1972 to 2.7 million in 2006.