The Only Dance In Iowa A History Of Six-Player Girls' Basketball [Paperback]

Iowa six-player girls basketball was the most successful sporting activity for girls in American history, at its zenith involving more than 70 percent of the girls in the state. The state tournament was so popularregularly drawing fifteen thousand fans, more than the boys tourneythat officials declined a lucrative broadcasting offer from ABCs Wide World of Sports rather than forfeit the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Unions control of the game. The Only Dance in Iowa chronicles the one-hundred-year history of this Iowa tradition, long a symbol of the states independence and the peoples rural pride. Max McElwain shows how, well before the passage of Title IX in 1972, Iowa six-player girls basketball was, as Sports Illustrated gushed, a utopia for girls athletics. He also demonstrates how, ironically enough, the fallout from Title IX in many ways led to six-girl basketballs demise.

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Through interviews, careful ethnography, and detailed historical analysis, McElwain exposes the intricate political, sociological, and historical dynamics of this cultural phenomenon. His book reveals how six-girl basketball, flourishing with the passionate support of Iowas small towns, school districts, and media, came to represent the states strong traditional beliefs and the public school systems determination to maintain its identity in the face of national educational trends. The Only Dance in Iowa is as much a study of this disappearing culture as of the game it claimed as its own.