The purpose of records is not to satisfy the incurable enthusiasm of men with sweating beer bottles in hoarse bar arguments over arcane decimals. It’s to provide some memory measure of great deeds.
University of Iowa basketball star Caitlin Clark is approaching a great deed – as her sport’s greatest scorer – but the NCAA record book cheapens it by historically gutterizing women’s basketball. The greatest scorer in major-division women’s collegiate history is not Clark but Lynette Woodard of the University of Kansas.
You would never know this, however, because the old NCAA had no respect for Woodard’s era, so it canceled it and asterisked it.
The most remarkable thing about Woodard’s scoring mark of 3,649 – set at KU from 1978 to 1981 and 33 more points than Clark currently has – is that many of those points came after she had been folded into a van because nobody would pay for female athletes to fly.
The most airtime Woodard got was when she would go skylarking to the rim. She could flutter a shot in the net like a pianist touching keys despite being cramped up for hours — the tallest women suffered the most in those vans.
Yet Woodard’s accomplishment isn’t formally in the record book because NCAA male administrators flatly refused to recognize or fund women’s sports until, get this, 1982. In response to a query, an NCAA spokesperson responded that women’s records before that date “were not completed while the schools/teams in question were NCAA members.”
“Records are made to be broken but records are also made to be honored.” – Lynette Woodard
To sum up, the NCAA doesn’t regard women’s basketball records as records, because before 1982 the NCAA didn’t want women in their organization.
“Those records should have been merged a long time ago,” Woodard says. “ … We’re so quick to erase anything we don’t like or think we don’t like. It’s just not fair. There’s a lot of history there, and it just should not be dismissed.”
What is a record, really? It’s an emblem of “continuous quest,” as Norwegian professor of philosophy Sigmund Loland teased out the question in an essay in “The Philosophy of Sport.”
As Loland observes, a record is not an exact mathematical comparison of points or seconds within a standard spatiotemporal framework. Records are actually non-precise simply by virtue of time and progress. Johnny Weissmuller’s pool was not Michael Phelps’. Yet they occupy the same human book. Records are symbolic messages that contain potential, history and memory, all in one.
The true history and memory of women’s basketball is this: In the 1970s, the NCAA was a male fiefdom of crew-cut athletic directors who thought a dime devoted to a women’s sport came at the direct expense of a man. When a coach named Marynell Meadors proposed to start a women’s basketball team at Tennessee Tech and asked for funding, her athletic director sneered, “I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”
She had to drive her team in a small bus that was so dilapidated, the sliding door wouldn’t fully close, and she worried she would lose a player out the door on a highway. That kind of thing.
There was only one way to change things for women: by winning. You changed things by winning. So ostracized university women self-formed an organization called the AIAW, and for a decade funded and ran their own championship events — and grew them.
They set records in cheap polyester uniforms that didn’t breathe, jerseys that got heavier with their sweat. They held bake sales and washed cars to raise money, forced their long bodies in 12-seat vans with their knees up, packed bologna sandwiches and drove cross-country to tournaments.
“Ten hours wasn’t uncommon,” Stanford Coach Tara VanDerveer recalls.
At the inaugural women’s basketball championship in 1972 in Normal, IL, teams slept in motels four to a room. That didn’t quiet the nuns of Immaculata University, who came all the way from Pennsylvania and expressed their fanatical fandom for Cathy Rush’s team by gonging so loud on pots and pans that their noisemakers had to be banned.
Over the next 10 years, the arc of performance grew breathtakingly — even as players such as Woodard went hungry because women had to wait hours for the last, worst and most obscure male athlete to leave KU’s Allen Fieldhouse before they were allowed on the floor.
“Every day was a fight even just to get practice time,” Woodard recalls. “And to get fed because if we had an evening practice, the cafeterias would close.”
But they wouldn’t have traded the experience, because it gave them a pride of possession, a sense that they were the architects of themselves and their game. Their success was entirely self-earned. They hadn’t been handed anything. They did it without recompense and for pure love of the thing and because there was a lot to be said for building yourself from the ground up.
“I navigated with my soul,” Woodard says.
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