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Abstract
Women's professional basketball in the United States has a relatively short history. Although girls started playing basketball soon after Dr. James Naismith invented the game in 1891, at the professional level involvement lagged far behind men. This paper notes benchmarks in the development of women's basketball in general and specifically deals with the development of women's professional basketball in the U.S. The emphasis is on the old Women's Basketball League (WBL) and the current American Basketball League (ABL) and Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) through the completion of their first seasons in 1997. In the U.S. women's basketball at the high school and college level has never been more popular, with basketball now the number one youth participation sport for girls in this country. The paper describes some of the struggles that women had to endure and some obstacles they had to overcome to get where girls' basketball in general and women's professional basketball in particular are today.
Whereas most people know that Dr. James Naismith invented the game of basketball in 1891, few people realize that women started playing basketball almost from the onset. In 1892 Senda Berenson Abbott, a gymnastics teacher, adopted Naismith's rules and taught the sport to her students at Smith College.
On November 18, 1892 the first interinstitutional contest among women took place between the University of California-Berkeley and Miss Head's School (Park,1976). By 1895 hundreds of women's teams all across the country were playing the new game (Evans, 1971). In 1896, the first women's intercollegiate basketball game was played, with Stanford defeating Berkeley 2-1 (A Century Later, 1997).
Compared to men's professional basketball, women's professional basketball in the United States has a much shorter and checkered history. Therefore an awareness of a few benchmarks in the historical timeline of women's basketball in general (Table 1) will enhance appreciation of the development of women's professional basketball in this country.
Several years after women began playing basketball, a number of women's semiprofessional and professional teams participated in local or regional contests (Hult and Trekell, 1991). The All American Red Heads, formed in 1936, may have been the first women's professional team. The Red Heads played against men's teams using men's rules. If not the first women's pro...