Philly welcomes NCAA Championship

Women's hoops has rich history in city Women's hoops has rich history in cityFrom tunics to TV bucks, the story of Philly hoops has been a colorful one. Forget the Declaration of Independence and the cheesesteak; think not of America's "first university" nor its first fire department. This week, it is another institution with roots in the cradle of liberty -- women's college basketball -- that is garnering headlines and has the city abuzz. While no Philadelphia teams have qualified for the Final Four to be held this weekend at the First Union Center, the City of Brotherly Love's impact on the game is still readily apparent. Of the four teams that will descend on the city this week, two have head coaches who cut their basketball teeth in Philadelphia -- Connecticut's Geno Auriemma and Penn State's Rene Portland. Four of the players who will compete, including stars Kristen "Ace" Clement of Tennessee and Shawnetta Stewart of Rutgers, are also Philadelphia products. But Philly's impact extends far beyond playing host to this week's festivities, which will bring 40,000 players, coaches and fans into the region. Philadelphia is the cradle of women's college basketball, the place where it all began. From the pre-Title IX era to the sport's first forays onto the national sports radar to today's standing-room-only arena crowds, Philadelphia has played an integral role in the evolution of women's college basketball. In 1969, West Chester coach Carol Eckman decided to host a national invitational college tournament and drew an unlikely mix of 16 teams, including Purdue, Kentucky, Southern Connecticut and Ursinus. According to some reports, 2,000 fans jammed West Chester's cramped fieldhouse to watch the host Golden Rams pound Western Carolina in the final, 65-39, and claim the first semblance of a women's national title. In 1971, the rules of the women's game were modernized. Gone was the six-on-six play and the strange rules limiting the number of dribbles, vestiges of an era when women played the game in bloomers and long tunics. "There used to be six players on a side, and only two ran up and down the whole court -- so at any given time, there'd only be four players on a side," says Cathy Rush, who coached Immaculata College in Paoli, Pa., from 1970-77. "I took the job in 1970 at Immaculata for $450 a year, and it was supposed to be a low-key job." Rush's years at Immaculata turned out to be anything but low-key. In 1972, Congress passed Title IX, barring sexual discrimination at federally funded institutions and mandating equal gender treatment in athletics. That same year saw the founding of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), which sponsored the first true national championship tournament. That season, the Mighty Macs of tiny Immaculata -- utilizing a sleek new style of play while emphasizing fundamentals -- burst from their suburban campus to upset West Chester for the title. "There were only 11 players on the team, I had no assistant coach and, because we didn't have enough money, I could only take eight players. We flew stand-by and we drove from Chicago down to Illinois State," Rush says. "After each game there were no reporters, no UPI -- we would actually call the university, call our friends and family and tell them, 'We won!'" By the next season, Immaculata had established itself as the first true attraction in the women's game. "Because Immaculata's gym had burned down, we started renting the old Villanova field house, Ridley High School, Great Valley High School, and we started filling them up," Rush says. That following blossomed from a nucleus of nuns of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who flocked to the games from the local orders wherever the Mighty Macs played. As Immaculata continued to devour its competition -- the Mighty Macs repeated as national champs in '73 and won again in '74 -- the crowds continued to grow. "[Current Penn State coach and former Mighty Mac] Rene Portland's father had a hardware store? and Rene's two brothers would bring in five or six dozen metal buckets on dolleys and hand them out," Rush recalls. "Of course, the nuns got theirs first, and so here's our fan base of nuns and family and friends and assorted people and people sitting in the stands with buckets between their knees and these wooden dowels and just beating the buckets." With fans banging on the buckets, the Mighty Macs pounded on the competition. In 1972-73, Immaculata cruised to a 97-24 victory over Penn at the Palestra. "People hated seeing us coming," Rush says, "because they knew it was loud, they knew it was going to be boisterous and they knew they were going to get killed." In '75, though, the AIAW permitted scholarship schools to enter the national tournament and Immaculata lost in the finals to Delta State of Louisiana. In 1977, LSU bumped the Mighty Macs in the semifinals, and Rush hung up her clipboard to focus her energies on her summer basketball camp. The game was changing. An era of big schools -- with swelling budgets, scholarships and state-of-the-art facilities -- was ushered in. Once-mighty Immaculata, which played the first nationally televised women's game in '75, could no longer compete. Today, women's college basketball has reached an all-time high. Immaculata, meanwhile, has faded into the world of Division III. "There's a possibility of this whole thing being made into a movie," Rush said. "And the premise is that it's Hoosiers, A League of their Own and Sister Act all rolled into one. It was just a crazy, crazy time." While the Mighty Macs' dominance ended, their legacy is still highly visible in the world of women's college basketball. Mighty Mac alums Marianne Stanley, Rene Portland and Theresa Grantz serve as head coaches at national powers California, Penn State and Illinois, respectively. Final Four coaches C. Vivian Stringer of Rutgers and Geno Auriemma of UConn both emerged from the Philly women's college basketball scene of the 1970s. Stringer, an old friend of Rush's, began coaching at Cheyney State in '71, while Auriemma, a Norristown native, got his first job as an assistant at Virginia via his friendship with current St. Joseph's men's coach Phil Martelli -- whose wife, Marra, played for Rush at Immaculata. For those who have followed the sport's rise in Philadelphia from the first tournament at West Chester to this week's Final Four, there is a true sense of satisfaction. "There's a lot of nostalgia in all this," said Mary DiStanislao, who played at Rutgers and served as an assistant coach at Immaculata and is now an associate athletic director at Penn, "because 25 years ago I was here as a college player and as an assistant coach, being part of the Immaculata thing, and knowing all these people from when the world was a lot smaller, and now seeing it come full circle and having it being a huge media event?Eis just astounding."