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Before UConn, there was Wayland
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By Jere Longman
December 18, 2010
Wayland, TX — The 1950s were a predictably conservative era at tiny Wayland Baptist University, on the high plains of West Texas, where women could not wear shorts even to walk to the gym from their dormitories.
And yet, long before Connecticut became a dominant power in women’s basketball, the Flying Queens of Wayland Baptist thrived on innovation, talent and glamour, playing on athletic scholarships, traveling by private planes, warming up with ostentatious drills learned from the Harlem Globetrotters and winning every game for nearly five seasons.
Although UConn can match UCLA’s major-college record of 88 consecutive victories Sunday against Ohio State at Madison Square Garden, the Huskies remain far short of the 131 straight games that Wayland Baptist won from 1953 to ’58 — a streak that began early in the first term of the Eisenhower administration, remained aloft as McDonald’s golden arches first appeared along with Dear Abby and Frisbees, then fell from orbit two months after Sputnik.
Wayland’s unsurpassed but little-known streak began nearly two decades before the legislative decree known as Title IX prohibited sex discrimination in education in 1972, and nearly three decades before the NCAA began sponsoring women’s basketball in 1982.
It was instead an era when women found sporting opportunities in the Amateur Athletic Union, often in rural communities on semipro teams with business sponsors, before athletic prospects later blossomed on college campuses by federal mandate.
“We played ball and had fun; the gym was never locked,” said Cookie Barron, 75, who graduated from Wayland in 1957 without losing a game. “There wasn’t much else to do. They wouldn’t let you dance, drink or smoke.”
This conservatism made Wayland Baptist — in Plainview, Tex., between Lubbock and Amarillo — seem an improbable pioneer and unlikely winner of 10 A.A.U. titles, said Betty Courtney Donaldson, who played at Wayland in the mid-1960s and later became a vice president of the university.
“That culture was almost a dichotomy,” Courtney Donaldson said. “On one hand, it was sit in the back row and keep your mouth shut. On the other hand, it was liberal enough to allow women to participate in basketball and be successful.”
Women’s basketball began at Wayland in the 1940s. At first, it involved intramural play and games against local high schools, said Harley Redin, who arrived at Wayland in 1946, coached the men’s team and later coached the women’s team for the final 79 games of its record winning streak.
Ambition grew during the tenure of J. W. Marshall, who was Wayland’s president from 1947 to 1953 and was by all accounts a man imbued with a missionary zeal, a sense of social responsibility, a worldview and a deft feel for public relations.
He expanded Wayland Baptist to a four-year college; recruited international students; integrated the campus in 1951, three years before Brown v. the Board of Education; and sought to improve the music and athletic departments.
“He was so outgoing, he wanted so bad for Wayland to be known as a great institution for sports and music,” said Redin, who is 91 and still lives in Plainview. “He was the most P.R. guy you could find anywhere.”
A defining moment for Wayland basketball came in 1948, when Marshall asked a local businessman to provide transportation to a series of women’s games in Mexico. Claude Hutcherson, a Plainview rancher who also owned a flying service, grew enthralled and became the team’s benefactor in 1950 as its nickname became the Hutcherson Flying Queens.
Wayland’s players traveled in a fleet of Beechcraft Bonanzas, stayed at upscale hotels, ate at the best restaurants, wore identical blouses and skirts on the road and had their hair styled courtesy of Hutcherson, who also provided the satiny blue-and-gold uniforms. The team’s traveling suits and matching sweaters drew much attention, Redin said, and his players were sometimes thought to be nurses.
At the national A.A.U. tournament, Hutcherson occasionally even hired a pep band for the team. He also provided convertibles for homecoming and victory parades. No rules prohibited such largess, and Wayland’s women luxuriated in a style not accessible to Wayland’s men.
“It was reverse discrimination,” Kaye Garms, 74, an all-American at Wayland in 1957 and 1958, said, laughing. “The men’s team had to travel in a bus.”
Most of Wayland’s players came from Texas, with a sprinkling from Oklahoma, Iowa and Tennessee. As many as 50 players tried out for as few as three available spots in a season, Redin said. One future all-American, Patsy Neal, drove 1,300 miles from Elberton, Ga., for a tryout in 1956, her parents having sold one of her pet 4-H cows to finance the trip, said Robert W. Ikard, the author of “Just for Fun: The Story of A.A.U. Women’s Basketball.”
In rural communities, where players had often worked on farms, women who played sports carried less of a stigma than they did in middle-class communities in more urban areas, Ikard said in an interview.
“There is more camaraderie in small towns; people didn’t want their girls left out,” he said.
Hutcherson, Wayland’s benefactor, who died in 1977, had been a boxer and baseball player and was enamored with sports, said his son, Mike. His generosity was also bolstered by a bit of flamboyance and comfort in the spotlight, said Redin, the coach.
“He wanted them to look nice,” Redin said of Claude Hutcherson. “Sometimes, he’d kid me when I was picking players, if one was prettier than the other, ‘Pick the pretty one.’ ”
There were a couple of dicey moments traveling in the small Beechcraft planes. One low-flying craft nearly struck a communications tower in Kansas City, Mo. Another time, Redin, who had been a World War II bomber pilot, said he was forced to land when his windshield iced over. But foul weather also contributed to the team’s showy style.
A holdover at the Noel Hotel in Nashville led to a chance encounter with the Harlem Globetrotters, who taught the Flying Queens how to spin balls on their fingers, and dribble between their legs and behind their backs, Redin said. Later, these routines were incorporated into Wayland’s warm-up drills to the tune of “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
“For a while, people came out to see our pregame warm-ups more than our games,” Redin said.
Those games of six-woman basketball were played under restrictive rules: only two rovers could cross midcourt and dribbling was limited to three bounces. Still, Wayland, then with an enrollment of about 500, became known as a university of “preachers, teachers and basketball players.”
Not everyone was enthralled, though, the former players Barron and Garms said. During pep rallies, some students studying to be preachers instead attended chapel, Barron said.
“I don’t think they were praying for a win,” she said. “I think they were praying because they thought Wayland overemphasized basketball.”
After losing to Hanes Hosiery of Winston-Salem, N.C., in the 1953 A.A.U. national championship game, the Flying Queens began their winning streak with a new season on Nov. 7, 1953. They did not lose again until a 46-42 defeat to the perennial rival Nashville Business College in the A.A.U. national semifinals on March 20, 1958.
Today, the Flying Queens still travel occasionally by private plane but play on a less ambitious level with other small colleges in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. The financial muscle that big-time football can lend to women’s basketball shoved aside pioneers like Wayland Baptist. But Redin said he still remembered the hurt from that defeat in 1958.
“The student body thought the world had ended,” he said. “The administration was upset. We had a holiday from class to mourn our loss.”
• NCAA Basketball News Archive Index:
2010, 2009
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