The Basic Rules of Iowa Girls 6-on-6 Basketball

The game of basketball has been around since 1892. In the early 1900s young girls in rural Iowa began playing the game. Rules evolved and in 1934 girls started playing a two-court, six-on-six game that put three forwards and three guards on each side of a center line they weren't allowed to cross. This segment from Iowa PBS’s More Than a Game: 6-on-6 Basketball in Iowa documentary features an overview the rules for this unique game.

Narrator: The game of basketball has been around since 1892. Invented for boys, it was quickly adapted for girls and young women were playing the game in Iowa by the early 1900s. Rules evolved and in 1934 girls started playing a two-court, six-on-six game that put three forwards and three guards on each side of a center line they weren't allowed to cross. All players were limited to two dribbles, and only forwards could shoot the ball. Why not the full-court, five-player game boys played? Early on the boys' game was considered just too strenuous for the so-called weaker sex. But as girls played their game for the next sixty years, each generation proved over and over again that girls were anything but weak.