Girls' basketball is arguably more popular and pervasive in Iowa than anywhere else in the United States. The writer explores the roots of an 85-year-old sports phenomenon, the oldest program of its kind, and what it has meant to the identity and culture of this Midwestern farm state.

In the state of Iowa in America's heartland, girls' high school basketball is big - real big.

It's big enough that when the girls' team in a town like little Rock Valley (pop. 2,838) in extreme northwest Iowa qualifies for the state tournament, schools and businesses there close. Buses are chartered and a full half of the town's population will be sitting in Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines, the capital city, when their girls run out on the big floor.

The drive from Rock Valley to Des Moines is 4½ hours one way. If the girls keep winning and play in the championship game, their fans will make three trips to the capital city in a week. The school team has won three consecutive state championships among the small schools – competition is divided into four classes, based on school enrollment – so Rock Valley fans have done a whole lot of traveling.

"I can't believe all the money that gets spent when we're in the state tournament," said Rock Valley coach Preston Kooima. "I sometimes think we should try to impose some kind of special 'Sioux County Tax' on the money our fans are spending in Des Moines instead of back here."

Everybody Wants To "Go To State," As They Say.

Washington, a town of 7,047 located in southeast Iowa, won three consecutive championships in Class 3A from 1999-2001. The team was led by Stephanie Rich, who has now gone on to play for the University of Wisconsin.

As she was going through high school in Washington, Rich worked as a receptionist at a local retirement home in connection with the school's job-training program. She got to know everyone in the home. In her senior year, as she was warming up before a state tournament game in Des Moines, she was shocked to see among the Washington fans a mini-bus load of the home's residents wearing special T-shirts, with its "Halcyon House" name on the front and, on the back, "We Back Steph!"

The following for the teams from Iowa's largest schools is big, too. Fans in Ankeny, a suburb of 27,117 residents just north of Des Moines, have seen their high school team win four Class 4A state championships in the past seven years. Ankeny set an all-time record for most advance ticket sales by a school for a single state tournament game – 1,946 in 2002; the figure does not include a few hundred more tickets that Ankeny fans probably bought at the arena door.

Oh, What A Show!

About 80,000 people are in the stands for the championship week of play, which begins with games at mid-morning Monday and concludes late on Saturday night. There will be 10,000 fans there both Friday night and Saturday night to view the championship games in each of the four classes. In most years, the girls' state tournament draws more fans than the boys' tournament, played a week later.

Values of the Game, 1998 "Part of the beauty and mystery of basketball rests in the variety of its team requirements. Championships are not won unless a team has forged a high degree of unity, attainable only through the selflessness of each of its players. It is in the moves the uninitiated often don't see that the sport has its deepest currents: the perfect screen, the purposeful movement away from the ball, the well-executed boxout, the deflected pass. Statistics don't always measure teamwork; holding the person you're guarding scoreless doesn't show up in your stats." From former U.S. Senator and professional basketball player Bill Bradley

The girls' tournament is an Iowa festival, "a gathering of the clan," former Des Moines Register columnist Donald Kaul once wrote. Both of Iowa's U.S. Senators, Republican Charles Grassley and Democrat Tom Harkin, will almost certainly attend, as will a U.S. Congressman or two from Iowa, the state's governor, and other top state government officials.

A television network carries the championship games statewide and into six surrounding states. More than 100 radio stations will cover at least one game during state tournament week; sometimes as many as five of the stations are broadcasting the same game. Some of the stations now stream their broadcasts on the Internet, so alumni scattered around the world can listen to their alma mater's big game at the state tournament.

Incredible pageantry accompanies the girls' state tournament. There are high school stage bands for every game, choirs that sing the National Anthem, girl and boy drill teams for halftime performances, a flag-waving "Patriotism Pageant" on Saturday nights. A group of Des Moines-area high school boys in tuxedoes line up with brooms in hand and, with the arena lights doused and spotlights on them, they sweep the court during the championship games while the band plays "Satin Doll," an old kick-line favorite. The girls in the crowd scream in delight.

Most of that fun was the idea of E. Wayne Cooley, now 81, who retired in 2002 after nearly 50 years at the helm of the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union, which sanctions girls' sports in the state.

Cooley and his production chief Bob Scarpino, a former television producer, had "learned that it was just as important, maybe more important, to sell the 'sizzle' as it was to sell the steak," as Scarpino put it. If a game turned out to be not such a good one, well, the entertainment would still make fans glad they had bought tickets.

At the 2003 state tournament, involving some 480 basketball players from 32 teams, the "sizzle" included 2,178 singers, dancers, and other performers as well as fireworks. An addition this year will be a 15-foot-by-19-foot "color-replay board" carrying live photos of fans and of the game action from three cameras scattered around the arena.

A Wonderful Kind Of Glue

But what may be most unusual about girls' basketball in Iowa is that the state tournaments have been played for 85 years, beginning in 1920. And two decades before that, there were some teams pioneering the game in Dubuque, Ottumwa, Muscatine, Davenport, and other eastern Iowa cities.

In 2002, when I wrote a history of girls' high school sports in Iowa, I noted that basketball has served as "a wonderful kind of glue that bonds generations of women in the state - great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers, and daughters who've all played, won, lost, and learned from it." In no other state have games and tournaments for girls been organized on a statewide basis for four, now beginning five, generations.
Why did girls' basketball bloom so early and so fully in Iowa?

Most who have dug into the early history of the game conclude that the immigrants who came from Europe to settle Iowa really valued physical fitness. The girls knew hard work on the farms and in jobs related to the early coal mining in Iowa. And it was relatively inexpensive to nail the ring of a bushel basket on a tree or barn and start-up a basketball game. Such games became one of the leading forms of local entertainment in remote little communities where there wasn't much else.

A girls' basketball superstar in Iowa is sometimes better-known than the best football players at the University of Iowa and Iowa State University. Two superstars who scored more than 60 points per game on average, Lynne Lorenzen of Ventura in the late 1980s and Denise Long of Whitten in the late 1960s, had parks named after them in their tiny hometowns.

"In Iowa, suiting up in the colors of your hometown confers glory that lasts a lifetime," wrote Sports Illustrated correspondent Kevin Cook in a 1989 story on the state basketball tournament. "In Iowa, middle-aged husbands sit around the fireplace reminiscing about their wives' high school hoops exploits."

Years ago, all schools played in one class, and only 16 qualified for the "Sweet Sixteen," the state finals. Now, with the tournament divided into the four classes, more girls get to have the state tournament experience.

But the biggest change of all began in the middle 1980s, when the "five-girl game" started up in Iowa. It is the game most of the world knows today, with full-court play and rules very similar to those in boys' basketball.

No More Six-Girl Teams

The game on which Iowa had built its reputation and its huge fan following in girls' basketball was the "six-girl game." Three girls were "guards" who played defense only, and they stayed on one half of the court. Their three teammates were the "forwards," who did all the shooting and scoring at the other end of the court. The passing was crisp, the pace could be frenetic, and the scoring could be wild. In what is generally regarded as the greatest girls' game ever played in Iowa, Long's team from Union-Whitten beat the team from Everly 113-107 in overtime in the 1968 state championship.

The name of the game in Iowa is high school girls' basketball. (Al Barcheski/Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union)

But the clock was ticking for the dear old six-girl game. It had grown up in the small schools and small towns in Iowa, where it fit well. Meanwhile, the larger schools in Iowa had abandoned girls' basketball in the 1920s, when there was some contention that it was "inappropriate" for girls to compete in sports in front of live audiences that included males.

Those large schools started adding girls' sports, including basketball, after the 1973 U.S. government's Title IX law, which mandated equal opportunity for athletes of both sexes. Most opted for the five-girl game. In 1985, the state tournament was played in two divisions - one for the five-girl teams and one for the traditional six-girl teams. But more schools, even the small ones, began opting for the five-girl game, and so the last six-girl championship was played in 1993.

Troy Dannen, 37, who succeeded E. Wayne Cooley as administrator of the Girls Union, said regardless of the subtle differences between the six-player and five-player game, the important factor to remember is that the girls have always been "playing for their schools, their communities, and for pride." The success of any high school sports team in state-level competition "is still the window into those communities for a whole state," Dannen added. "When you say 'Rock Valley' to somebody in Iowa right now, people feel like they know the town from girls' basketball."

Indeed, said Sonia Remmerde, 47, "I think the championships put Rock Valley on the map, which is fun." Sonia and her husband Lyle, 46, are the parents of Deb Remmerde, who led the Rock Valley to a record of 107 victories and only four losses in her four years of play. She is now a freshman playing at the University of Iowa. Deb's younger sister, Karin, is a high school junior who is expected to be in the Rock Valley starting line-up again this year.

When the Remmerdes' son Paul, now 21, started playing high school ball, and with Deb, Karin, and little Annie, who is now 13, all coming along, they decided to build a first-rate basketball court in the west half of the farm machine shop that they operate. The steel building sits smack in the middle of a sprawling farm operation that includes about 3,000 cattle, 2,000 hogs, and 500 acres of corn and soybeans.

The 50-foot-by-50-foot court features two baskets with fiberglass backboards, a real scoreboard on one wall, fluorescent lighting, and an infrared heating system. It's a rare evening now when some Rock Valley kids - girls and boys - aren't shooting or playing pick-up games in "The Shop," as everybody calls it, at Remmerdes' farm.

City administrator Tom Van Maanen, 35, says basketball "brings everybody together in a small community like this. It adds a lot of excitement and a ton of community pride. And it's probably even a little more special for us because for a lot of years, our girls really weren't very good."

Coach Preston Kooima, 34, in his eighth year directing Rock Valley, said the team's success seems to have a positive impact on nearly everything at school.

"Maybe it shouldn't be this way, but it is - when you're winning, the success seems to run all through these hallways," he said. "There's more excitement for everything. There's more pride. Everybody seems to work harder."

Friends And Lessons For Life

Gert Jonker, 69, a cousin to Coach Kooima, said, "I played basketball for Rock Valley from 1948 to 1951, and in my senior year, we got beat in overtime or we would've made it to the state tournament."

"I've told Preston that those girls he's coaching today will be good friends the rest of their lives. To this day, those girls I played with are still good friends of mine."

Jonker says basketball "definitely builds confidence in the girls, and a lot of them need that. It teaches them how to get along with a group of people and how to have fun in a group. And it teaches you how to set high standards for yourself, and about sportsmanship. Those are all things that will help you no matter what you go on to do."

Chuck Offenburger is a former Des Moines Register columnist now living in Storm Lake, Iowa, and writing for the Internet site www.Offenburger.com In 2002, he wrote E. Wayne Cooley and the Iowa Girl: A Celebration of the Nation's Best High School Girls Sports Program, a book that chronicles the history of a girls' sports program in Iowa and the life of the executive who ran the program for 48 years. It is available from the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union at www.ighsau.org