One day back in 2004, Kirsten Cummings just happened to be walking through the Mission Valley YMCA gym where she works out and saw a team of older women playing basketball. Or, to put it a little more accurately, they saw her .

“As soon as I walked in, the first question they asked me was, ‘How old are you?’ I kind of laughed….I told them I was 42 and they were so disappointed (that she wasn’t old enough to play with them.) I’m 6-4, so that’s why,” Kirsten recalls.

The San Diego senior women were not deterred, though. They asked Kirsten to coach them, without knowing what her background in basketball even was. “They just saw a tall person,” Kirsten recalls. “They didn’t know I’d played professionally for 14 years. So I thought I’d help them out.”

Kirsten had a lot to offer the ladies. She not only played professionally in Europe, Japan, and Israel for 14 years, but she starred at Long Beach State back in the 1980s. She was coaching at a local community college at the time, but after a season of coaching the senior women, she decided to devote herself  to the cause of senior women’s basketball fulltime.

“I got such a kick out of them,” she says. “It was so rewarding.”

Almost 10 years later, Kirsten is still ineligible to play senior basketball herself. She is over 50 now, but the rules say that you must wait 20 years to play in the Nationals if you played professionally. Nonetheless, when the National Senior Games commence in Cleveland in two weeks, Kirsten or Coach K as her players call her, will be plenty busy. She’ll be on the sidelines coaching that same team that solicited her help almost 10 years ago. (The San Diego Splash, which now competes rather successfully in the 80+ division even though all but one of their team members is over 85.

What attracted Kirsten to the senior group – and keeps her committed to them — is the fact that the senior crowd isn’t just out there for some recreation. They’re either reliving the golden days of youth, or making up for lost time because their opportunities were so limited in the 1950s and 60s.

“I overslept one practice,” she says. “I was going to grad school at the time and had stayed up late the night before…. one of them called me and said, ‘You are not to miss practice.’  I thought, OMG you’re not serious. I was very impressed.  This isn’t just some old ladies playing….these were athletes. So they’re 75….so what? They just wanted to learn more. They never had an outlet for playing when they were young.“

Kirsten is so devoted to senior women’s basketball that she started a nonprofit clearinghouse, the National Senior Women’s Basketball Association, in 2008. The organization is strong in the San Diego area, but slowly growing beyond it to other regions of the country. That’s Kirsten on the left in the photo, with a member of the NSWBA board, Linda Cord. Check out their website to learn more about the group.

The first time my sister and I decided to go to the NCAA women’s Final Four in 1997 it was a tough ticket. I was working for a newspaper and was able to get a press pass to cover the event. My sister joined the WBCA and paid $200 to sign up for their convention in order to earn the right to buy a ticket. Otherwise, tickets for the common fan were sold out and being scalped for top dollar.
Contrast that with the Final Four in New Orleans this past April, where you could hardly give away tickets to the championship game (and I know because I had an extra one). Maybe it was because Baylor, the defending champion, hadn’t made it to the Final Four (having lost to Louisville in the regional semifinal). Maybe it was because a relatively unknown team (the University of California, Berkely had defeated Georgia in double overtime to earn a berth) was among the foursome. But maybe it also had something to do with the timing of the event. In 1997, the women’s Final Four championship game in Cincinnati was on Sunday instead of its current Tuesday placement, which was instituted in 2003 to avoid competing for media attention with the men’s championship on Monday night. Better to have the women’s championship game once the men’s games were over, was the thinking at the time.
But Friday-Sunday games made it possible for many working people to make a long weekend out of the trip. For many people, Sunday-Tuesday games cut too deeply into the work week.
This is why I cheered when I read Val Ackerman’s white paper on changes that need to be made to reverse sagging attendance stats in women’s college basketball. Her suggestions are wide-ranging and run the gamut from offering fewer scholarships at individual schools (to create more parity) to lowering the baskets (a controversial idea at best). She posits several proposals for changes to the timing of the Final Four — primary among them is reverting to the Friday-Sunday format as early as next year in Nashville.
“…a shift would create a better championship feel,” Ackerman writes in the 52-page report, adding, (“as a point of fact, even most coaches routinely leave the Womem’s Final Four after the semifinal games on Sunday).”
Ackerman also suggests moving the Final Four to the weekend after the men’s tournament — when there would be no competition for TV viewers (except from the Masters golf tournament, which for most people I know is like watching paint dry until the 18th hole of the final day).
This change couldn’t occur until 2017 because the next three Final Fours have already been awarded to cities that presumably cleared the decks of other convention conflicts before making their bids. In any event, these two changes would go a long way to putting more people in the seats at the Final Four. Even though it might make the games a tough ticket again.

I just found this new app called Plinky, which suggests topics to write about (a new prompt shows up in email every day). This particular one seemed tailor-made for me: It asks: Do you feel comfortable as a 21st Century citizen? Or would you have preferred to have lived in another time? Here’s my answer:

I would like to have come of age at the turn of the 20th Century. I would like to have been a part of the Women's Rights movement, and I hope I would have had the courage to challenge boundaries, fight for the right to vote, and for the opportunity for girls to play basketball. I’m sure it wouldn’t have been easy. Opponents of the Suffragist movement were as vitriolic in their opposition as those who feel threatened by today’s women’s rights issues are. Still, this was an energized and an energizing time for women in our country — at the dawn of an incredible new era — and it would have been fun to be a part of that. The photo at left, by the way, is Senda Berenson in front of the Smith College gymnasium at the turn of the century. She’s the woman who taught girls basketball to her students in 1892. The rest, as they say, is history!

The New England Basketball Hall of Fame induction is a semi-annual gala that showcases the contributions of men and women who have either played, coached, administered, or written about the game of basketball in one of the six northeastern-most states. Greats of the women’s game, such as Cindy Blodgett, Joanne Palombo McCallie, and Rebecca Lobo, have been enshrined in past years. So, to say I was honored to be nominated simply for writing a book about the history of women’s basketball was an understatement. But when I found out one of my favorite people in senior women’s basketball, Celeste Chartier, was also being inducted, I was really pumped. That’s Celeste, second from the left, in the photo above, along with June Walton, far left, and Hilda Reedom, right, who also were inducted.

I first met Celeste when I started playing senior women’s basketball back in 2002. She and her sister Michele were on our arch rivals, the Connecticut Sisters. Celeste’s team was truly one of the New England pioneers of senior women’s 3-on-3 basketball. They’ve been perennial contenders in their age group — winning medals in at least two national tournaments between 2003 and 2011. They came in third in the 60+ age group in Houston two years ago. Tall, lean, with a pretty jump shot and the ability to finish at the rim, Celeste is a formidable opponent. It seemed that she and Michele must have learned the pick and roll from Moses Malone and John Stockton themselves. It was an accomplishment for the first couple of years simply to give them a good game. Needless to say, when we finally did beat them a few years into our rivalry, it was a cause for celebration.
This article, written in the Hartford Courant back in 2008, provides background on her life in basketball — from her college days, when she started her own college team because the school didn’t have one — to her stint with the All American Red Heads. Celeste is a true pioneer in women’s basketball, the kind of person that deserves to be in this hall of fame. Even though her opportunities to play as a kid were limited and she had no WNBA to aspire to, she helped grow the game and inspired others to play.

My sister and I traveled to Uncasville, CT last Saturday to watch the WNBA’s newest star, Britney Griner, play. We’d missed out on seeing Griner in the Final Four last April, as the upstart Louisville Lady Cardinals shocked Baylor — and the rest of the basketball world — with its gritty, one-point win in the regional semifinals. Griner is the 7-foot wonder woman who can dunk with ease and, in college anyway, forced opponents to change the arc of their shots for fear of rejection.
Against the Connecticut Sun, though, who were led by UConn grad Tina Charles in the post, Griner’s game was effectively neutralized. In foul trouble early on, she sat for long stretches, watching another UConn grad, teammate Diana Taurasi, lead Phoenix to a decisive win.
After the game, Phoenix’ coach acknowledged that he had tried early on in the season to have the offense run through Griner in the post — without much success. So Phoenix has reverted to a successful run and gun style that is exciting to watch but leaves Griner on the periphery at times.

Before the game, we got an up close look at Griner’s star power. Parents handed their babies to her and she posed with them for photos. Little boys and girls pushed paper and pen toward her for autographs, and she seemed not just accepting, but happy to be the face of the WNBA, (which is counting on her to reverse attendance trends.)
If Saturday night is any indication, Griner is succeeding on that front. The Mohegan Sun arena was mostly full and the partisan crowd gave her a rousing cheer when introductions were made. Perhaps we’ll look back and say we were there when the rookie Griner seemed, well, like a rookie in training.

I am looking forward to seeing what looks to be an inspiring documentary about an over-70s senior women’s basketball team from North Carolina.
I’ve seen over-70 and over-75 women’s teams play at the Senior National Games in Houston and Palo Alto and it is quite a sight to behold. Unlike in the Iowa Granny Basketball League, which uses the original rules of the game and doesn’t allow any contact, these women play the faster-moving 3-on-3 game, the same game that the over-50 men and women play at Nationals. There’s plenty of bumping and bruising and boxing out. Growing old gracefully is not the idea. For a very good story on ESPN-W about the women in the documentary, as well as the making of the film, follow this link.

Here’s a great video from the Smith College archives about the beginning of women’s basketball.<” >
I love the way it weaves personal dialog from some of the letters of women who were Smith College students at the time into the photo montage.
Much of the factual information you’ll hear in this video can also be found in my first book, A History of Basketball for Girls and Women. I expect to add some of this dialog (with attribution of course) to an updated edition of my book, which I am hoping to self-publish in early 2014.