The "Mighty Macs": Women's Basketball in Chester County

In October 2011 the feature film The Mighty Macs opened nationwide to rave reviews. The movie had already won several awards, including Best Feature and Audience Award at the John Paul II International Film Festival and Best Drama at the International Family Film Festival. The Mighty Macs is based on a true story, one recounted in Julie Byrne's O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs. The Chester County college, founded in 1920, was the smallest college to win a national championship, with only about 400 students enrolled in 1972 (and approximately 3,800 in 2012).

Byrne's monograph focuses on the relationship between basketball and Catholic women at Immaculata from the 1930s until the late 1970s. She used oral history interviews, questionnaires, correspondence, unpublished memoirs completed by and with former basketball players, the college newspaper (The Immaculatan), Philadelphia area newspapers (particularly the Evening Bulletin and Inquirer), and monographs on sports history, women's history, and religious history to tell the story of the importance of basketball to the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and Immaculata students from the 1930s to the 1970s.

According to Byrne, Immaculata's mission as an affordable college for working-class Catholic families led the college to be an attractive higher education option for girls from immigrant and post-immigrant families from the Philadelphia area. Philadelphia was a hotbed for girls' varsity sports, and Philadelphia-area Catholic high school leagues and Catholic Youth Organizations had sports for both genders. Intercollegiate competition was the first time the Mighty Macs competed against players of different faiths and races, and they considered their opponents from public universities to be "hired guns whose grades and scholarships depended on court success, while they themselves were purists who played the game merely for pleasure" (63). In addition, the sport provided players with the opportunity to travel beyond the local community, especially when the team participated in national tournaments in the 1970s.

Throughout the book, Byrne places women's basketball at Immaculata in the context of Catholic teachings and practices. Immaculata's basketball players, according to Byrne, saw themselves as Catholics first and athletes second; "making the team . . . meant making their identities as Catholic young women" (54). Although the Mighty Macs challenged established views of femininity with their athletic prowess, they did not consider themselves to be feminists, despite their success coinciding with the passage and implementation of Title IX. After all, despite their athleticism, the players in Byrne's book embodied the modesty of womanhood, particularly in their uniforms (layers with stockings, corduroy tunics, blouses, and skirts), and they never changed or showered together, traveling to and from games wearing their uniforms.

The film The Mighty Macs focuses on one season in Byrne's book—the 1972 championship season. Filmed on location in southeastern Pennsylvania, the movie incorporates buildings from present-day Immaculata University, The Hill School in Pottstown, the basement gym at St. Colman Roman Catholic Church in Ardmore (which served as the dilapidated practice gym), and Hollinger Field House at West Chester University. The 1971-72 season (which culminated in the first national championship) was the first time the Division of Girls' and Women's Sports (DGWS), forerunner of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), permitted teams to play full-court, five-player men's rules. The coaches at West Chester had full-court practices while Cathy Rush played there, so she was familiar with the necessity of players building stamina in the practices. The Mighty Macs focuses on the challenges Cathy Rush faced, from recruiting a team to finding a suitable practice facility to arranging a gym for playing home games.

The film is based on a true story, yet at the same time it takes liberties with the facts and recollections in...