With basketball season in full swing, now is an apt time to gaze back 116 years to May 23, 1907, when the Buckley High School Girls’ Basketball Team assembled for this photo. The event was a game between two squads, the Blues on the left vs. the Reds on the right. Though invented just 16 years earlier in Massachusetts, the game of basketball had already migrated west to small towns like Buckley.
James Naismith, a YMCA instructor in Springfield conceived the idea in 1891. Naismith wanted to develop a vigorous form of competitive recreation suitable during winter months when foul weather forced exercise indoors. His new game involved elements of football, soccer, and hockey. The first ball was repurposed from soccer. Originally teams had nine players with goals comprised of wooden peach baskets affixed to walls. Within a decade five-person teams became the standard.
This photo interestingly counts 18 girls plus their coach, so perhaps nine-girl teams were still the norm at Buckley High School. All the players are identified – back row from left to right: Grace McHugh, Genevieve Davis, Eva Rainey, Evelyn McHugh, Mary Partlon (teacher), Arthur E. Turner (coach), Marie Morris, Winnie Jones, Retta Blauchat; middle row: Rose McHugh, Agatha Harding, Ruth Morris, Ethelyn Morris, Margaret Swope, Etta Mobley, Olga Gran, Gladys Blake; kneeling in front: Virginia Ewing, Gladys Bartholomew. This photo #109 comes courtesy of the Foothill Historical Museum in Buckley.
On a personal note, two relatives of this column’s author were part of the team – Marie Morris, my grandmother, and Ruth Morris my great aunt, both of whom later attended college and became school teachers.
