When I am driving around rural North Dakota doing stories on agriculture, I often pass through small towns where I played high school basketball in the 1970s.
Many of the high schools have formed cooperatives and some of them no longer exist, but the memories of riding the bus to those towns to play in their gyms still are pretty clear. Those memories are more humbling than good, which means that even though they don’t make me smile, they remind me of what I learned about myself during my basketball playing games.
I started playing basketball in 1974 when I was a sophomore in high school. By started playing I mean that’s the first time I dribbled a basketball. My three older brothers were wrestlers so I didn’t even play pickup games of basketball before I joined the high school basketball team.
In 1974, when the North Dakota High School Activities Association added basketball to girls sports, Larimore (N.D.) High School created its first girls basketball team. The activities association established girls basketball in North Dakota two years after Title IX, which banned discrimination on the basis of sex, was passed.
Before Larimore High School had a girls basketball team, the only sport in which I competed was girls track in the spring where I ran the 440- and 220-yard dashes and was a relay team member.
The 1974 Larimore (North Dakota) High School girls basketball team, which was made up of seventh graders through seniors, played in the District 8 tournament in October. In that era girls basketball was in the fall.
Contributed / Ann Bailey
I went into my inaugural basketball season with high hopes for an impressive career. My speed and endurance had garnered me a respectable number of wins on the track, so I figured they would carry over to the court, guaranteeing my success.
What I didn’t take into account was that shooting and dribbling were key skills that I didn’t possess.
I don’t know if learning to play a sport, like learning a language, is more difficult when we are older than when we are children or if basketball simply was not my sport, but no matter how hard I tried, I remained awkward at dribbling and I couldn’t consistently make a basket.
Another part of basketball that was difficult for me was to learn the plays. In track all I had to do was run around an oval, something I could do with respectable speed. In basketball I was expected not only to remember plays but also to do different weaves. I was a self-conscious, shy teenager, which I’ll blame for my mind “freezing” when the coach watched us performing the plays and weaves in practice. The more frustrated the coach got with me, the more flustered I got.
The 1974 Larimore (North Dakota) High School girls basketball team lost in the second round of the District 8 playoffs. In 2002-2003 and 2003-2004 the Larimore High School girls basketball team won back-to-back Class B state championships and set a national record with a 57-game winning streak.
Contributed / Ann Bailey
It was a hard pill for me to swallow to not be a starter on the “A” squad my sophomore year and to be on the “B” basketball squad during my junior year. I was used to success in track, and it was a blow to my ego to be average at best in basketball.
However, the humbling experience of not excelling in basketball probably was the best lesson that came out of my two years playing the sport. (I didn’t play my senior year of high school because I decided that I wanted to spend my last fall before college
after school, not inside on a basketball court.) I learned that there were some things that I was not as good at doing and there were other things that I was good at.
When I was
this past spring, I came across a picture of the LHS 1974 girls basketball team. While many of my teammates are smiling, I’m not. I don’t know if that was because I thought the braces on my teeth would blind the photographer or if it was a reflection of my mood that day.
I smiled for many reasons, though, as I looked at the picture. Fifty-one years after it was taken, I am still driving around the countryside, interviewing farm families who reside in the small towns where I played basketball and writing stories, a skill that brings me much more satisfaction and joy than basketball ever did.
The thing that makes me happiest, though, is that if my
decides to play basketball, she will have an opportunity to learn the skills in elementary school, and, if she continues to play the sport, by the time she’s a sophomore in high school she will have had hundreds of hours of practice and play time shooting, dribbling and guarding.
Watching her on the court definitely will bring a smile to my face.
Ann is a journalism veteran with nearly 40 years of reporting and editing experiences on a variety of topics including agriculture and business. Story ideas or questions can be sent to Ann by email at: abailey@agweek.com or phone at: 218-779-8093.