Historic Northampton presents women’s basketball in the Pioneer Valley from the

When it comes to basketball nothing is more exciting than March Madness right down to the Final Four, a worldwide phenomenon that had its roots here in the Pioneer Valley. The popularity of the game grew, in no small part, due to women of the Gilded Age who took to basketball and helped promote and change it into the game we know today.

On Wednesday, March 29, Historic Northampton, partnering with Smith College athletics and Smith College Special Collections, will present sports historian Rita Liberti in a virtual talk on the role women, specifically, the women of the Pioneer Valley, played in making basketball the game it is today.

The Zoom presentation starts at 7 p.m. and attendees can register by following the link: https://www.historicnorthampton.org/womensbasketball.html.

Liberti is a professor at California State University at East Bay and is studying the history of basketball from when it swept the nation in the late 1800s to the advent of Title IX in the 1970s and the birth of the WNBA in the 1990s.

In an interview, Liberti said that just a few months after James Nesmith hung his first peach basket at the Springfield YMCA in 1891, Smith College physical education instructor Senda Berenson was teaching her girls the ins and outs of the game, at least as it was played then. Women in ankle-length uniforms did not run and dribble but stood in one place and passed the ball back and forth. The games were slow and very low-scoring.

“The first women’s intramural game was Stanford against Cal in 1896,” she said. “The final score was 2 to 1.”

“Her version of the game is not the version of the game we play today,” Liberti said. “The women played in long dresses; the court was divided into threes. There were nine or 10 players on the court and each one in a section. You played from your section. There was a lot of passing but no dribbling. That didn’t come in until the early 20th century. Besides, it would have been really difficult for the women to dribble at Smith because they were playing with a football.”

Berenson so believed in basketball as an important game for women she developed the first rules for women’s play while at Smith College, then organized intermural play at Northampton High School and even at the nearby Northampton Lunatic Hospital, later known as the State Hospital.

“Berenson is a fierce advocate for girls’ and women’s basketball,” Liberti said, “and yet she still holds on to these Victorian Ideals and girls should not be too competitive.”

In fact, Smith College did not develop an intermural team until years later. Even as basketball became one of the college’s premier events, drawing huge crowds to tournament games, all the teams were campus-based. Freshmen played sophomores; dormitories played other dormitories.

“I’m finding that the history in the Valley is the same but different from what I have found elsewhere. It caught on fast everywhere, bit it is the combination of early…