Six Feet of Girl and No Candy - Basketball Practice in 1898

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March 25, 1898, Friday – The San Francisco Call

MUCH WORK AND NO CANDY

How the Berkeley Girls Train for the Interstate Championship

Every day for an hour and a half, in the middle of the day, the gymnasium is astir with bebloomered girls training for the great basket ball game on Saturday.

They take the mat exercises; they use the wrist machines, working away fifty times over hand and fifty times under; they attack the forearm machines, the chest weights, and then they run three laps around the hexagonal rubbered track, walk around once and run again three laps more.

You should see these girls run. Their elbows are by their sides, their hair braided in long single braids behind, their faces are shining with exercise and health. And their flying feet keep time to the rapid one-two, one-two of the instructor—the only man permitted within the enchanted precincts.

Then comes the serious business of the day. For there is a half-hour during which the tormented, round red ball learns to sympathize with her brother, the pumpkin-shaped sphere that dreads Thanksgiving as much as the turkeys do.

There’s no nonsense about the way the Berkeley girls play basketball. They fly around the gymnasium with the recklessness of boys. They start after and seize the elusive ball as though there were nothing in the world of half so much value to them. And when a certain girl with a light brown braid hanging over one shoulder and another co-ed with a quantity of black wavy hair get hold of the ball at one and the same moment, they’re like a pair of pugnacious chicks with but one worm between them; an indivisible worm, at that.

Once, yesterday—no, not once, but many times when that mad ball was whirling aloft toward the basket of its ambition, fate, in the shape of six feet of girl, got in the way. There was a flying run, a leap three feet, it seemed, into the air, a quick arm extended and the tallest girl in the Berkeley team had possession of the ball…

Miss Right Center had caught the ball, and after a deliberate pause had sent it whirling from her. It caught a guard in white sweater and blue bloomers full on the side of the head. There was an alarmed squeak from a spectator, but down below on the floor of the gymnasium, the kaleidoscope of flying bloomers had changed and changed again. No one noticed the blow. They hadn’t the time nor the thought to give it.

At times the instructor would call a halt. “You see,” he would say, taking the ball from its panting possessor, “you took the time to turn clear around before you threw the ball. Don’t turn. Throw it in whatever position you find yourself.”

And she did. The ball leapt from her hands a moment after it touched them.

Then there was a breathing spell. And after that an informal game of ball, in which the playing was fast and furious, when the ball was sent flying from one pair of outstretched hands to another.

It was thrown over a shoulder, straight out, from V-shaped pyramids of girl, everywhere, anyway. At times the ball itself was not to be seen. It was hidden beneath an indistinguishable mass of arms and legs, which wriggled themselves into position in the shortest time…

There was a short run after this around and around the upper floor of the gymnasium, and then the girls, looking like children, their hair blown about their flushed faces, retired to their dressing rooms; to emerge later in all the dignity and demure seriousness of the latter-day co-ed.

The average height of the Berkeley team is five feet 3.8 inches. Their weight will average 128 pounds. The members of the team have abjured sweets of all kinds. At noon their meal is of the simplest. Weak tea, hot milk and beef tea are supplied them and they are expected to remain faithful to the training diet amid the temptations of home breakfast and dinner.

“But do they all keep steadfast this candyless regime?” a co-ed was asked.

“Well—I didn’t,” she answered shamefacedly. “And that’s why I’m not in the team this year. But next year—.” Next year, ice cream soda itself wouldn’t tempt her.

Excerpted from “The First Decade of Women’s Basketball: A Time Capsule of Media Reports from the Dawn of the Game”

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