With the NCAA Women's Basketball Tournament now underway, it seems an appropriate time to remember the Immaculata Mighty Macs, who won the first three women national titles.
Hailing from a tiny Catholic women's school in Malvern, Pa. (about 30 miles outside of Philadelphia), the Macs won their first championship -- the first national collegiate tournament for women ever played -- in 1972, when the game was still emerging from the age of "separate spheres." AAU teams had played full-court for years, but college ball had just graduated from archaic "women's rules," which restricted players to half of the court and three dribbles. Most teams still played in skirts. The national tournament was such a novel idea that few reporters knew it was happening. One Philadelphia sportswriter who heard Immaculata had won the first championship told his colleagues, "I didn't even know they had gone full-court."
But in 1974, after two more national trophies, the whole country could follow the Mighty Macs, as reporters flocked to their games.
The team had stars, such as Rene Muth Portland, now head coach of the Penn State Lady Lions. The Mighty Macs also had 1974 Player of the Year Theresa Shank and All-American Marianne Crawford, whom one sportswriter called the best point guard in Philly, male or female. They had a young, visionary coach, Cathy Rush, who imported men's game strategies like picks and presses to beat bigger schools with scholarship players and well-funded programs.
The team also had a following. At Mighty Mac games, reporters couldn't get enough of the Immaculate Heart nuns, the team's biggest fans. Dressed in identical blue habits and veils, the sisters weren't above cheering or ref-baiting. One reporter was amazed to watch as a sister stood and 'in her shrillest falsetto yelled, "Watch the pick and roll!'"
Observers said the most compelling thing about the Mighty Macs, though, was that they seemed to love to play. Team members agreed. As far back as the 1940s, former players said that while winning was fun, the key joy of the game was physical -- running, jumping and shooting the ball. "I needed to liberate my body at 3:30 in the afternoon," said a player from the late '50s. "I wanted to go."
Before widespread sports participation, American girls simply didn't have much room to run, move, sweat and compete. Raised in traditional Catholic families, the Immaculata players weren't feminists. But if, as some feminists have argued, the body is the last terrain of liberation, the Mighty Macs were way ahead of their time.
Three-time champions in 1974, the Macs quickly lost ground with the 1975 passage of Title IX. The 800-student school didn't have the desire or the funds to compete in the new environment.
But at Immaculata -- now a co-ed university -- no one wishes to turn back the clock. Yes, Title IX meant the end of the Mighty Macs era. But it also meant, according to players and sisters, that more and more girls across the U.S. got a chance to play.
It's wonderful that Title IX has led to full national television coverage of the Women's NCAAs. It's wonderful that hundreds of young women can get the basketball scholarships they deserve. But the more important gains of women's basketball in the U.S. might lie in the story of the Mighty Macs, who just "wanted to go." Their fame didn't last, but their commitment to basketball did.
In addition to Portland, two other Immaculata champions now coach at the highest levels of the game. Theresa Shank Grentz ('74) heads the University of Illinois women and, until recently, Marianne Crawford Stanley ('76) coached the WNBA Washington Mystics. Dozens of other former Immaculata players fanned out to coach hundreds of girls on grade school, high school, city recreation league and Catholic Youth Organization teams. Coach Cathy Rush -- inexplicably overlooked for induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame -- heads an enormous summer basketball camp for Philadelphia youth.
The real gains of women's sports can be seen on courts, fields, tracks and trails across the country, where we now take for granted that girls can play. That is, they are allowed to play -- and they sure enough can play. As studies continue to confirm that girls in sports have strength and confidence rooted in their very bodies, fans of the Women's NCAAs can honor its first stars, the Mighty Macs, by enjoying the competition -- and by making sure their daughters sign up for teams.