Granny Hoops

With a minute to go before the basketball game begins, players make final adjustments to their tennis shoes, headbands and . . . bloomers. Then Betty Vieman, a center who stands 5 feet tall on tiptoes, asks the coach the question on everyone's mind.

"So, what is the game plan?"

Coach Jane Stirler doesn't hesitate. "We want to wear them down," she tells 72-year-old Vieman, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. "Let's get fired up, girls. Let's go!"

Clapping and whooping, the team of gung-ho grannies runs onto the court with black bloomers billowing and sailor collars flapping. They're smiling and so are the spectators during an exhibition game in a Cedar Rapids school gymnasium. Since the inaugural game of the Granny Basketball League last August in Lansing, Iowa (pop. 1,012), hoop-shooting seniors have been popping up like corn across Iowa to play 1920s-style girls' basketball.

"It's something to do with your arms besides reach into the cupboards," says founder Barb McPherson, 62, who organized the first game as a one-time fund-raiser for Lansing's Old Stone School renovation.

Then something unexpected happened to the women who had played girls' basketball in high school decades earlier. The basketball in their hands felt so natural. The rhythm of the ball bouncing on the hardwood floor made their hearts quicken. They were swept up again in the sport they lived for as teens—and didn't want the game to end.

"It's very energizing. The instant you're on the court, your brain thinks, 'I'm 16. I can shoot,'" says Linda Toerper, 63, coach for the Cedar Rapids Sizzlers. "It's like being a kid again."

In the game

Out on the hardwood, Lois Reisner, 68, of Hiawatha, waggles her arms above her head to block a pass from Barb Smythe, 62, of Cedar Rapids, to Jane Hawes, 61, of Lansing. No jumping or running is allowed by 1920s rules, but the grannies stretch and hurry aplenty.

In the old-fashioned six-on-six game, the basketball court is divided into thirds. Each team has two guards, two forwards and two centers who play in their designated zones.

Players pass the ball back and forth, working their way close enough to the basket to take a shot—underhanded is just fine. In an overenthusiastic defensive burst during the exhibition game, Reisner nudges Smythe and a foul is called. Reisner sticks her arms upright, gracefully accepting blame.

The gym is quiet as Smythe steps to the free-throw line. She sinks the ball, then lets loose a long, audible sigh.

Up in the stands, Devin Keenan, 15, watches his grandmother, Betty Vieman, in action. Keenan attends his granny's games and she attends his at Springville (pop. 1,091) High School.

Keenan sees a big difference between the two games, though. "The politeness," he says. "We don't tend to apologize after fouling."

"Or hug each other," adds his mother, Terece Keenan.

Spectator John Hawes can't stop laughing. "I love it when they call timeout, and the scorekeeper and the referee talk and the scorekeeper tells the referee that someone fouled," he says. "The game is a hoot. It looks like they're having an enormous amount of fun just keeping track of who's on whose team."

50 and fit

Not running is the hardest part of playing for Vieman, who first stepped onto a basketball court in Ellsworth, Iowa (pop. 531), in 1948. Still, the antiquated rule suits most of the grannies nowadays.

The players don't mind hiding their bare legs and upper arms to avoid a technical foul, and they've added a new rule: Players must be at least 50 years old and able "to sustain moderate physical activity for several minutes without collapsing."

No one has collapsed yet, but play often is stopped while a granny retrieves her glasses from the floor. Lansing's oldest player, Ruth Belich, 78, retired her uniform after her knees gave out. She now serves as honorary captain.

Honorary cheerleaders at the 2005 state tournament in Lansing all wanted to play, but they all had undergone knee or hip replacements, says Barb Leppert, 72, a Lansing Cardinal. "They sat on the first bleacher with their walkers."

Leppert played girls' basketball in Lansing from 1947 to 1951, and jumped at the chance to play again. "I love it," she says. "It's exercise that's fun, instead of boring walking on a treadmill." She's lost weight "without even trying or giving up dessert."

The six teams in the Granny Basketball League practice once or twice a week at church and school gyms across eastern Iowa. Teams play for charities, donating money dropped in a basket at the door. Their mission is to preserve the history of six-on-six girls' basketball while providing spirited exercise and nostalgic entertainment. The grannies' motto: "Die with your tennies on."

"We're expecting this to sweep the country," says McPherson, who is writing a rule book for granny basketball. She calls it The Joy of Six.

For a pattern for their vintage uniforms, the women borrowed Muriel Cooper's black bloomers and navy-blue middy blouse that she wore in 1923 in Lansing. Back then, players often wore crocheted hats to tuck up their long hair.

"Those were the days," says Cooper, 95, of Waukon (pop. 4,131). "Mostly we were big, healthy farm girls."

An Iowa institution

Six-on-six girls' basketball was played in high schools and colleges nationwide from the late 1890s until the 1970s, but nowhere did the game become as wildly popular as it did in small towns across Iowa. Only two years after James Naismith invented the game with peach baskets in 1891 for young men at the YMCA in Springfield, Mass., young women in Iowa were playing with revised and gentler rules.

"People liked watching girls' basketball because they could tell what was going on, unlike the boys' games which were rambunctious, disorganized affairs," McPherson says.

In its earliest days, rules were modified to fit the venue because games were played in opera halls with pot-bellied stoves in the middle of the room, low-ceiling cracker-box gyms with overhead pipes and outdoor grassy courts.

For 100 years, until switching to five players in 1993, the game of six-on-six girls' basketball was an Iowa institution. The heroines of the hardwoods were treated like royalty and nearly everyone in town turned out to watch them play.

"The town merchants bought us a big bag of gum to take to the tournaments. We chewed tons of gum for nerves," recalls McPherson, who played for Lansing High School from 1958 to 1962. "There were articles in the local paper."

Wire basketball rims rusting on Iowa barns are testimony to the popularity of the sport. "It was a small-town cultural thing—the loyalty, the watching out for other people and community spirit," says Toerper, who traveled with the Lansing girls to the state tournament in 1961. "It was the dream of everybody to get to state."

The thrill of bringing home the state championship trophy hasn't faded. The Lansing Cardinals defeated the Waterville Phantoms 23-13 to earn the 2005 state title. McPherson proudly hauls the trophy to games in a laundry basket.

This year's Granny State Basketball Tournament is scheduled Aug. 12 and 13 in Lansing. Members of the Ossian Good Old Girls, the Des Moines Hot Pink Grannies, the Cedar Rapids Sizzlers and the rest of the teams will pack up their bloomers and get fired up about winning the state championship, an ambition of athletes of every age.

Visit www.grannybasketball.com for more information.

Marti Attoun is a Contributing Editor with American Profile.

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