Top 50 Cal Sports Moments — No. 2: Female First, 1896

As the Pac-12 Conference era comes to a close after more than a century, we count down the Top 50 moments involving Cal athletics.

THE MOMENT: On Saturday, April 4, 1896 – 24 years before women could vote in the United States — Cal and Stanford played a women’s basketball game at San Francisco’s Page Street Armory attended only by women. It was not only the first intercollegiate women’s basketball game ever played, it was also the first intercollegiate women’s competition in any sport in the United States. Cal’s men would play their first intercollegiate basketball game 11 years later, in 1907.

THE STORY: In the fall of 1892, a year after James Naismith invented basketball in Springfield, Mass., and a few months after Smith College’s Sendra Berenson introduced it as a sport applicable for women, Cal formed a women’s basketball team. On November 18, 1892, the Cal women’s team played a game on campus against Miss Head’s School, a nearby prep school.

Cal then played intramural games until Stanford established a women’s basketball team in 1895 and issued a challenge to Cal in February 1896. The game was set to be played at San Francisco’s Page Street Armory on April 4, 1896, two months before Henry Ford would first put his motorized vehicle on the road.

The game created quite a buzz in the Bay Area, not only because the sport was new to the West Coast, but because only women were competing in basketball at an organized college level the time.

Men were banned from attending the April 4 Cal-Stanford game, because it was considered unseemly to see women running around perspiring while wearing clothing that allowed movement.  Even Cal’s coach, Walter Magee, could not attend.  However, all the major newspapers of that time – the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Call, the San Francisco Examiner and the Okland Tribune — sent female reporters to cover the game, which attracted a sellout crown of 700 at 50 cents a pop.

The game was significantly different from today’s basketball.  In the Cal-Stanford game in 1896, nine players from each team were on the court together, and the court was divided into three quadrants with three players from each team limited to each zone.  The game consisted of two 20-minute halves. There was no dribbling and players could run no farther than five feet before they had to pass or shoot. There was no backboard on the basket and players had to use just one hand to shoot. Made baskets counted one point.

The starting nine players for Cal were Elizabeth Griswold, Mary McCleave, Blanche Terrill, Helen Grace, Clara Williams, Mabel Palmer, Katherine Jones, Edith Brownsill and Edna Robinson, with Sarah Hanscom and Bertha Knight as substitutes.

When the ball was tossed for a jump ball to open the game, history was made.  At that moment — 26 years after Cal began admitting women — intercollegiate women’s sports competition in America began.

Stanford’s Mattie Clark scored 10 minutes into the game, and Cal’s Katherine Jones tied the game 1-1 late in the first half. Frances Tucker of Stanford made a free throw in the closing seconds to give Stanford a 2-1 victory. Coverage in Bay Area newspapers the next day was extensive with big headlines and glowing descriptions.

Cal continued to compete in women’s basketball until Cal established a men’s basketball squad, which began intercollegiate play in 1907. At that point, women’s intercollegiate basketball essentially died until the 1970s when Title IX came along.

*Top 50 Moment No. 3: Greeting Oscar

*Top 50 Moment No. 4: Wrong Way

Only specific acts that occurred while the team or athlete was at Cal were considered for the Top 50 list, and accomplishments spanning a season or a career were not included. 

Leslie Mitchell of the Cal Bears History Twitter site aided in the selection of the top 50 moments.

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