These grannies take it to the hoop

In a throwback to the 1920s, a senior basketball league flourishes in Iowa. It's all about fun, fitness, and the bond of sisterhood.

By Bill Glauber | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the April 3, 2007 edition

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Alburnett, Iowa - Henry Uthoff's daughters loved basketball, played it in the days when kids rushed from chores on the farm to hoops on the hardwood. But on Nov. 20, 1950, their love of the game gave way to tragedy. Mr. Uthoff, a hard-working farmer, collapsed and died in a gym while watching two of his daughters play.

One by one, the Uthoff sisters gave up the game, got married, raised families, and doted on grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Yet, even as their hair grew gray and more than a half-century rolled by, somewhere, tucked away, their love of basketball remained.

And now, four of the Uthoff sisters are back on the court playing "granny basketball" in Iowa. "If our dad is looking down, he'd be so pleased," says Delores Rawson, 81, the oldest of the sisters. "He was so proud of his girls."

Iowa's Granny Basketball League is a far cry from college basketball's Final Four or the NBA's long postseason playoff run.

It's a throwback to the 1920s, a reminder that girls' basketball runs deep in Iowa, even if the girls are now grannies and if the rules have changed. They used to play six-on-six basketball around here years after the rest of the country let the girls play five-on-five just like the guys. In the girls' game, there were three players on offense, three on defense, and the half-court line divided the game into two.

Long before Title IX helped girls and women gain equal opportunity in organized scholastic and collegiate sports, before soccer moms ferried their daughters to practices, Iowa girls were encouraged to play basketball.

"We all think we're 16," says Barb McPherson, 62, a retired psychiatric nurse from Lansing who dreamed up the league.

That's the beauty of this game. Years roll away. Dreams are renewed. There is an only-in-Iowa aspect to this, too. Pull into almost any town square, wander into a cafe, and you'll usually find seniors gathered around tables, sipping coffee in the morning or eating lunch, remaining social.

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