Half-court press: A history of girls hoops
By Joey Richards
The Daily News
Published February 27, 2005
Girls have been playing high school basketball in Texas since 1951. But girls didn’t start playing what we now think of as basketball — five-on-five, full-court basketball — until the 1978-79 season.
Before the 1978 season, girls in Texas played a six-on-six game with each team playing three girls on each half of the court. Three girls played offense on one end, while three played defense on the other end. They weren’t allowed to cross midcourt. They could only pass the ball across the midcourt stripe — a thin line on the court that also represented a gulf between what was proper for the guys and the girls.
“We were too delicate,” said Pine Drive girls basketball coach Beverly Howard, who played basketball at Tahoka in the late ’70s. “It might make us sweat. That would be a bad thing.
“That was sort of the thinking when they said, ‘OK, girls can play basketball, but they have to play half-court.’ It was in the South, and we were delicate little flowers and might break if we play full-court basketball.”
It wasn’t just the South, though. The NCAA didn’t start experimenting with five-on-five, full-court basketball for women until the 1969 season, before making it official in 1971.
Eventually, the five-on-five, full-court game caught on at the high school level throughout the country. But until then, the girls had to play half the game the boys were playing.
