Women’s Basketball Courts Audience

She was an all-American who ranked third in both career scoring and rebounding at Big Ten and national power Iowa. If she’d been a man, there is little question that Lisa Becker now would be in her second season in the National Basketball Association instead of in graduate school harboring memories.

“You want to have it in the right perspective and not dwell on the past, but when you play for so long it’s such a part of you that you feel like it’ll never be over,” Becker, 24, said. “It was over for me at 22. I can understand how guys in the NBA feel when they’re 30-something and can’t play anymore.”

That Becker is considering postponing a career in investment banking to play in Europe is perhaps one measure of how far women’s basketball has come in recent years. It may have been the advent of Title IX, the 1975 federal guideline that banned discrimination against women athletes at schools receiving federal funds. The mandate quickly changed the game from a recreational diversion into -- at schools like Iowa -- a bona-fide moneymaker.

The University of Texas spent $1,000 on women’s athletics in 1968-69; this year, the school had a $3 million budget for women. Texas has led the nation in attendance the last three years, last season averaging 7,663 a game. Iowa was third at 5,991.

But other women’s programs don’t fare as well with money or fan support. Washington area schools such as Maryland and Virginia have to fight for attention with players like Danny Ferry and J.R. Reid and the legend of the Atlantic Coast Conference.

“We’re getting closer to parity, but the perception of women and sports hasn’t reached the point that, say, women and jobs and the workplace has,” said Virginia Coach Debbie Ryan.

Even so, scholarships are made available, which has had an impact on the level of play in high schools, where some girls are using moves grown men at the YMCA can only dream about. For some, the idea of playing for a Final Four berth and national championship isn’t as important as just getting the chance to go to college, even if there is little chance of remaining in the game after earning a degree.

Based on a recent trip to watch games at a District of Columbia high school, another high school in the hotbed of Iowa girls basketball and at the University of Maryland, the nation’s fifth-ranked team, the women’s game is thriving on the court.

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“These girls can play ball, they should be able to goanywhere they want, but Prudie may not go to college if she doesn’t get a scholarship,” says Margaret Lee, the mother of Denise “Prudie” Lee, an All-Met guard from Theodore Roosevelt High in Northwest Washington. “It’s not fair, but that’s the way things are.”

On this day, Steve Garber, an assistant coach at Maryland, is watching the 16-4 Riders’ game against 18-2 H.D. Woodson. It is Senior Day, the last home game for Lee and Kenyetta Keys, cheered on by their coach, Carlton Sanders, wearing a white tuxedo and a red bow tie.

From the start, it’s obvious that Lee (wearing number 32, the same as her favorite player, Magic Johnson of the Lakers), is the focal point of the Riders’ attack. Although relatively small, Lee has the nonchalance of many talented players, barely reacting as she makes one-hand passes off the dribble to cutting teammates or finger-roll layups through traffic.

Lee missed all of last season because of academic problems and the start of this year with a knee injury. With the Terrapins already set on whom they want next year, Garber is here to scout Woodson guard Valerie Wages, a junior.

Early on, Wages hits a double-clutch drive in the lane and connects on a three-point field goal, scoring seven of her team’s first nine points. By halftime she has 22 of Woodson’s 25 points, with four three-pointers, although her team trails by seven.

Roosevelt leads, 37-30, with just less than five minutes remaining in the third quarter when Lee falls to the floor, her knee once again going out. She returns wearing a brace a little more than two minutes later, but Keys, another steady player, goes down with a sprained ankle.

Wages winds up with 44 points in a 61-56 double overtime victory. Lee gets 17, drawing her fifth foul shortly before the end of the game. She first lifts the bottom of her jersey up over her number, then pretends not to hear the referee telling her to leave the court.

“These girls come off the street and the playgrounds, that’s where they learn the game,” said Margaret Lee. “It used to be that everybody came out to watch the boys. Now they want to see the girls because they play so well.”

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In Iowa, the girls have never taken a back seat to the boys. Unlike most Friday nights, the fire marshal didn’t have to shut the doors and trn people away from a recent game between the Prairie Hawks and Cedar Rapids Jefferson, the state’s fourth-ranked team. Normally, 1,500 people cram shoulder to shoulder on the wooden bleachers, but the weather -- 10 below zero -- has kept the crowd to a more manageable 1,100.

There’s less than a yard of space between the baselines and the walls at both ends of the court and latecomers walk right in front of the opposing coaches giving instructions to their players. Running the show for Jefferson is freshman guard Kate Galligan, a bouncy 15 year old with a pageboy haircut, who wears dark blue pads on both knees and high-top Nikes.

Galligan, a veteran of AAU play, has already been contacted by a number of major colleges, including Georgetown, Michigan State and Purdue. If she’s lucky, she may go to Iowa like Becker, another Jefferson graduate.

“She got a letter from them, that’s like the lifetime dream for a girl from around here,” says her mother, Chris. “But all the attention has made her look at other schools and think about what sort of things she might want from a college. After all, what do girls do once college basketball is over? You have to be realistic.”

Galligan, the best player on the court, will improve over the next three seasons, but it’s obvious during a sloppy 76-66 Jefferson victory that both Lee and Wages would have a field day against this competition. Unlike the game in the District of Columbia, there are very few jump shots taken, let alone three-point attempts.

“I feel kind of left behind when I play against girls from other areas,” said Galligan. “A lot of them are quicker than th girls I’m used to. Sometimes I’m intimidated at the start but I usually get over it once the game starts.”

The difference in style and athletic ability may be attributed in part to the fact that until five years ago, Iowa exclusively played six-girl basketball, in which three team members played offense on one end of the floor and three played defense at the other.

During her career at Jefferson, Becker was an offensive performer in six-play. She said that when she got to Iowa she was unprepared to go after rebounds, or play man-to-man defense. “I had to think through everything I did all of my freshman year,” she sai.

Galligan had an older sister who quit playing altogether when the state basketball union gave schools the option of keeping six or moving to five-player, full-court action. Today, 84 of the state’s 449 high schools use five-play.

“The game is too strenuous for a lot of girls,” said Chris Galligan. “Kate was always athletic so she didn’t have that problem and she was young enough to make the switch.”

At one time, Jefferson’s long-time coach, Larry Niemayer, threatened to quit if the state went to five-play. He and many others thought the state tournament, a virtual state holiday that annually draws sellout crowds, would suffer.

But that hasn’t happened and people around Jefferson say Niemayer’s been rejuvenated. Some even grudgingly admit that five-play is a better game.

“I coached six-on-six for 23 years. We’d had a lot of success and there was no reason to change,” said Niemayer. “We were unique and hadn’t been compared to boys. We’re still the black sheep but I think five-play’s made me a better coach.”

Niemayer also concedes the value of five-play in helping girls develop for college. “Look at what it’s done for someone like Lisa Becker,” he said. “I’m 51 and never been east of Gary, Ind. She’s 24 and been around the world.”

On one such trip, Becker wore a T-shirt celebrating a crowd of more than 20,000 at one of the Hawkeyes’ games. “Most of the girls were in total disbelief,” she recalled. “They couldn’t believe that that many people would attend a girls game.”

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It would be easier for Becker to understand if she were at any University of Maryland games. There are all of the trappings for a big-time atmosphere: cheerleaders and a band and a team that has been ranked in the nation’s top 10 for the entire season. Yet the Maryland women play before embarrassingly sparse gatherings.

Although the men’s team has struggled to a last-place finish in the ACC, more than 10,000 people attended Saturday afternoon’s game against conference also-ran Wake Forest. When the women took the court a few hours later, fewer than 2,000 were in the stands.

Reversing the order of play doesn’t help either. A month ago, Cole Field House was sold out for an 8 p.m. non-conference men’s game between Maryland and Missouri. At 5:30 that afternoon, the Maryland women faced Virginia in a battle between two nationally ranked ACC teams. But when the opening shot was taken, there couldn’t have been 1,000 people in attendance.

The showdown between Maryland and Virginia featured a number of great players, like Maryland Olympian Vicky Bullett and Christy Winters, while Virginia featured Cardoza and a pair of freshman guards, Dawn Staley and Tammi Reiss, who were named first-team high school all-Americans by Parade magazine and recruited by hundreds of schools.

Tonya Cardoza, a Virginia junior who says she “plays like a guy who’s playing against girls,” set a school record for points in a single game earlier this season, only to have it broken by Staley a week later. Cardoza added that the women’s game is just getting to the point where officials as well as fans are accepting.

“I think they’re starting to look at us more as athletes, not just women,” she said. “It used to be that they wouldn’t let us do stuff, as if they were thinking, ‘A woman couldn’t make that move.’ ”

But perhaps things won’t truly change until there’s a viable professional league for women to play in, one that lasts longer than the cup of coffee afforded the Women’s Basketball League during the mid-’70s. Lisa Becker is counting on it, although she “wishes it would start now instead of 10 years from now.”

“It’s funny, when I first came to college people asked me if I was interested in coaching. I always said definitely not,” she recalled. “Now I’m really thinking about getting in to it. That seems like the only way to remain a part of it.”