The best way to learn how far women’s college basketball has come is to talk to someone who was there in its early days.
The game today is at its height of popularity. More games than ever are on national TV, scalpers are making a killing – especially with games involving Iowa star Caitlin Clark – and even the mode of transportation to road games has changed. Today, the top teams take charter flights.
“We had vans,” Ann Meyers Drysdale recalled. “A van or a station wagon.”
She was there at, if not the beginning, close enough. Title IX, mandating equality for women in education, became law on June 23, 1972. Meyers had just finished her sophomore year at Sonora High in La Habra. By the spring of 1975, she was a senior and a star in not only basketball – her teams as a high school player were 80-5 – but softball, badminton, field hockey, tennis and track and field. She was good enough to make the U.S. national team for the Pan-American Games in 1975, the first high school player ever to do so.
With credentials like those today, a player would be the object of a heated recruiting battle. Then? Not so much. All UCLA had to do was ask.
Her brother, Dave, was playing for the men’s team and for John Wooden, whom Ann still affectionately refers to as “Papa.” Kenny Washington, who had been a member of Wooden’s first NCAA championship teams in 1964 and ’65, had just agreed to become UCLA’s women’s coach in 1975-76.
“I had no idea what I was going to do after my senior year in high school,” Meyers Drysdale said in a recent conversation. “I really didn’t. Billie Moore was the coach at (Cal State) Fullerton, and my sister Patty had played for Billie and they won the national (AIAW) title in 1970. So Fullerton was just around the corner. It wasn’t that expensive. And I’m from a family of 11 children, so having a college education was not always (something) that my parents could afford for all of us.
“But David and Kenny came…
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