Call it "kismet." Mechelle's latest blog entry touches on women's basketball history....The ‘near’ and the ‘far’ at Iowa State

This past July, I went to see “Six-on-Six: The Musical,” which is an homage to girls’ basketball as it used to be played in the state of Iowa.

Playwright and director Robert John Ford witnessed the famed state tournament himself while in high school in Iowa in 1978, and then again in 1987 when the six-on-six game was in its last decade of existence.

The experience of watching a packed arena in Des Moines going crazy over girls’ basketball - and what that said about community pride in Iowa - made so strong an impression for him that he was able to overcome his peers’ skepticism to write a musical about the sport.

There is nothing that I am aware of in American sports history that was quite like the phenomenon of Iowa’s six-on-six girls’ basketball tournament. I say that because of the factors involved. This started in Iowa in 1920, and even in what I call the “backlash” decades for girls’ and women’s sports - the 1950s and ‘60s - it not only survived, but was in its heyday.