The Only Dance in Iowa
Reviewed by Keith Cannon, Department of Communication, Wingate University, Wingate, NC.
FEBRUARY 5, 2005 archive
The title of this book is taken with a certain amount of irony – whether intentionally or not -- from former University of Iowa football coach Hayden Fry’s description of the spectacle provided by college football Saturdays when the Hawkeyes play at home. But unlike those games played by young men in front of thousands of people in large stadiums, the stage for six-player girls’ basketball in its heyday was usually small town high school gyms packed with a few hundred people.
Max McElwain, a native Iowan and a communications professor at Wayne State College (Nebraska), does an admirable job of putting the game – which at its height was played by 70 percent of Iowa school girls -- in the context of its time, place and culture.
Six-player basketball, in which three players played exclusively in the backcourt at guard and three players played offense in the front court, frequently provided one of the few outlets for social activity beyond the church in the towns where it was played. But it was a source of community identity when educational trends toward school consolidation threatened to take that away from struggling small communities. Its most important role may have been in bridging a gender gap in a difficult time for women's sports. The game provided a compromise between supporters of total equality of treatment between girls and boys in athletic pursuits and those who opposed girls’ participation in competitive sports as unfeminine and unhealthy.
The book is an entertaining – if idiosyncratic – read, and McElwain’s narrative thread takes some interesting twists and turns, including a visit to his old high school to observe the girls’ basketball team. He moves fairly smoothly from his own personal experience growing up in Iowa and covering the games for Iowa newspapers to interviews with the participants and coaches in the games from the Depression era to the final six-player tournament in 1993. Portions of the story are weighted down by administrative arcana as McElwain explains how the game was ruled by the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union and its director, E. Wayne Cooley, who helped build the state tournament into one of the top sporting events in the Midwest and guided the sport through the minefield presented by the passage of Title IX in 1972. But those boardroom details become necessary to explain how the six-player game died, paradoxically in part, because of Title IX. With the rise of scholarship opportunities in women's college basketball – where the five-player game was the rule – many schools abandoned six-player basketball.
McElwain includes helpful endnotes and some charts in support of his closing points about the decline in status and participation in girls’ basketball in Iowa. (But a point he doesn't address is that this is no different from the trend in both girls’ and boys’ athletic participation in schools across the US generally.) The book is worthwhile for basketball fans and for those interested in sociological aspects of sports like gender and community relationships.
McElwain, Max. The Only Dance in Iowa: A History of Six-Player Girls’ Basketball. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 259 pp. ISBN 0-8032-8299-0.
Copyright © 2005 by Keith Cannon