In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5. Girls’ Six-Player Basketball “The Essence of Small-Town Life in Iowa” JaiMe SChUltz anD Shelley lUCaS I grew up playing five-player basketball in Iowa City, attending coach C. Vivian Stringer’s basketball camp nearly every summer with misguided dreams of one day suiting up for the Hawkeyes. It was there, amid the sweat-soaked T-shirts, calloused fingertips, and the sound of rubber soles squeaking against the court, that I first encountered that strange sub-set of athletes whose game did not permit them to cross the half-court line. I felt sorry for these girls, there to develop a “total game” while their regular-season coaches insisted upon honing either their offensive or defensive skills, accentuating one set to the detriment of the other. My view of six-player basketball was from the outside; it afforded me very little understanding of the game’s deep roots, the merits of its style, and its importance to notions of community and identity. To think of six-on-six only in terms of its limitations, I have since learned, is a big mistake. —Jaime Schultz My six-player basketball career began in second grade as a member of a biddy basketball team in Long Grove, a small town in eastern Iowa, and ended when I graduated from New London High School in 1985. My senior year was the first year that high school girls in Iowa were given the option to compete under the five-player rules. Eleven years later, as a graduate student in sport history, I discovered that Iowa occupied a unique place in the history of women in sport. Until that time, I had no idea that the game I grew up playing was different than what girls in other states, even just an hour away, were playing. My position in that classroom was as an “insider” who felt the need to balance my critique of six-on-six as a game whose imposed constraints on Girls’ Six-Player Basketball 81 female physicality were based on sexist assumptions, with my lived experience as a player who very much identified as a “real” basketball player and who witnessed firsthand the culture of sixon -six that celebrated, among other things, female strength and the power of community. —Shelley Lucas Throughout the twentieth century, more than a million Iowa high school girls played the half-court, two-dribble version of basketball colloquially known as “six-on-six.” Originally conceived to accommodate girls and women ’s perceived physical limitations, six-player basketball often lent itself to fast-paced, high-scoring, crowd-rallying competitions. By the 1970s and 1980s, high schools across the nation, as well as those in larger Iowa cities, adopted five-player or “boys’ rules.” Yet the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union (IGHSAU) continued to sponsor six-player basketball in the smaller, rural communities until 1993, at which time, 275 of the state’s 409 schools with girls’ basketball programs still offered six-on-six.1 Though the six-player game may be gone from the Iowa high school program, it is anything but forgotten. Former athletes, coaches, administrators , and fans actively sustain the sport’s memory in a variety of ways. The game has inspired popular and scholarly publications, commemorative programs, and a staged production of “Six-On-Six: The Musical.” In 2008, the state’s public television network aired a documentary titled More Than a Game: Six-on-Six Basketball in Iowa, and the program’s official Web site invites viewers to “Share your Iowa story” on an online discussion board; contributors reminisce about their uniforms, coaches, teammates, and the illustrious state tournament. They remember that their communities would pack the gymnasiums, where girls’ contests often drew bigger crowds than the boys.’ Others mourn its loss: “When Iowa went to 5 on 5 basketball for girls,” one person commented, “a part of iowa [sic] history died.”2 To the contrary, we argue that the history of Iowa’s six-player basketball is alive and thriving in alternative forms. Although the ties between traditional notions of community and six-on-six have withered since the game’s discontinuation, new, transitory communities have emerged to sustain its remembrance. For the purposes of this chapter, we are particularly interested in two sites: a 2003 reunion game in which former players and supporters gathered, and a Facebook page titled “I Played 6 on 6 Basketball in Iowa,” which fosters a virtual kinship of more than seven thousand members. In...

Share