Women's Hoops Blog

Inane commentary on a game that deserves far better


Wednesday, January 19, 2005

From the mailbag, Lettie has an addition to the high school girl-dunker list:

I think you are missing one: Georgeann Wells, who ended up being the first woman to dunk in college at WVa, supposedly dunked in high school. This was in Ohio, back in the late-Victorian era, because I was also in high school in Ohio at the time. Georgeann played for a team that made it to state in a different division than ours. I had already heard through the grapevine that she had dunked, but while I was hanging out between games, I overheard two officials talking about her. One of them had worked the game in which she did it and admitted to being so suprised he didn't make the little "2-points" finger-V. So this is all hearsay, but I certainly believed it at the time. I don't even know if anybody kept track of that sort of thing then. Would've been sometime between 1981 and 1983.


I did a google search but couldn't find any mention. Can anyone else confirm?

UPDATE: My previous searches were messed up because I missed the "e" in her name. Barry writes in to say that he's not heard any reports that she might have dunked in high school.

Here is a photo of Georgeann dunking for WVU. Wells is widely credited as being the first woman to dunk in college, but I can't find anything about her dunking in high school. GBall Mag reported last year that, before Parker and Fowles, there had been no high school dunking. The Des Moines Register reported that Wells's 1984 dunk was the first dunk in women's competition. But it may be that the story simply never got out.

ANOTHER UPDATE: just heard from Jim Massie, the women's basketball reporter for the Columbus Dispatch. He says that neither he nor his editor had ever heard anything about Wells dunking when she was at Northland High School, and that the Dispatch contains no record of it. Sounds like this one may have to remain part of the ethereal world of legend.