Iowa Girls 6-on-6 Basketball Emerges in Small Town Iowa

Why couldn’t a farm girl play basketball in the 1920’s? This segment from Iowa PBS’s More Than a Game: 6-on-6 Basketball in Iowa documentary features a sports reporter’s perspective on why girls 6-on-6 basketball thrived in rural Iowa.

Mitchell: Iowa had something so unique in American sports. Six-on-six basketball in Iowa was like American gothic in a portrait.

Narrator: The distinctive thing about girls' basketball was where it flourished, small-town Iowa. It was there that young women became queens of the court, where communities rallied behind their daughters, and where school leaders, mostly male, fought for girls' equality. Eventually girls from big cities would play the game. But decades before the Des Moines Easts and the Fort Dodge’s in the late 1970s and early '80s, the spotlight was on teams from rural Iowa, like Garnavillo and Wiota, Gladbrook and Wellsburg. Towns like these were the soul of six-on-six. This story is for them.
 
Mike Newell, Play-by-Play Reporter: The popularity of girls' basketball in rural Iowa almost immediately confirms that there are farm girls playing. These people were equal opportunity and equal rights before the terms were coined. A farm girl baled hay alongside of her brother. She had just as many chores as her mother had chores, alongside her dad. And when you translate that to activities, why couldn't the rural girl or the farm girl play basketball.