Fred Bowen's "The Score" column,
Friday, May 18, 2007, Washington Post

WNBA: Let the Fun and Games Begin

The 10th season of the Women's National Basketball Association begins this weekend. The WNBA has 13 teams and plenty of stars, including Diana Taurasi of the Phoenix Mercury, Tamika Catchings of the Indiana Fever and Alana Beard of our own Washington Mystics.

The female pros may not be as fast and high-flying as the stars of the NBA, but the WNBA has a fun, team-oriented game that thousands of fans love. And anyone who knows the history of basketball knows that the women's game has come a long, long way.

James Naismith invented basketball in 1891 to keep the rough-and-tumble boys in his YMCA physical education class in Springfield, Massachusetts, busy during the winter. He nailed a peach basket to the gym wall, and the boys tried to throw a ball into it. Naismith called his new game basket ball (yes, two words). The game back then was similar to today's, except there was no dribbling. Players passed the ball around the court.

A few years after Naismith invented the game, Clara Baer, a physical education teacher in New Orleans, Louisiana, changed the rules for girls. She thought the boys' game was too rough, and she didn't want young women running the length of the court because it might strain their hearts. (She never imagined Beard going coast to coast for the Mystics.)

For the girls' game, Baer divided the court into sections. Players had to stay in their assigned section.

Baer gave her game a different, kind of frilly name: basquette.

Different versions of girls' basketball were played around the United States for years. Teams usually had six players, most of whom were not allowed to run the length of the court. Some players played only offense; others, only defense. (Ask your mother, grandmother or aunts whether they played basketball with these rules when they were young.)

While most girls' teams had adopted the boys' rules by the 1970s, six-on-six games stayed popular in Iowa until the 1990s. The state's high school championship games attracted more than 15,000 fans. The contests often featured shootouts by high-scoring forwards. In 1969, Denise Long of Union-Whitten High School averaged more than 68 points per game. Twice she scored more than 100 points.

So how far will the Mystics go this season? The team has a solid nucleus returning from last year's playoff squad -- Beard (an all-star guard/forward), forward DeLisha Milton-Jones and point guard Nikki Teasley. If the players stay healthy, the Mystics could go a long, long way.