There were so many differences in the ways women and men were

Canada Goose sale the Wayland Baptist Queens ruled the basketball court Canada Goose sale

buy canada goose jacket When Linda Price arrived on campus at Wayland Baptist College as a freshman in 1966, she encountered all of the prejudice against women that could be expected at a small, religious school in a farming town in the conservative Texas Panhandle. buy canada goose jacket

At Wayland, different sets of curfews meant she had an earlier bedtime than her male canada goose coats on sale classmates; strict dress codes restricted her freedom to choose what she looked like; and unlike the men on campus, when she wanted to get married her senior year, she had to get permission from the administration so that she wouldn’t lose her athletic scholarship.

canadian goose jacket But there was one place where Price and her female classmates were treated as equals: on the basketball court. canadian goose jacket

cheap Canada Goose There, well before the passage of Title IX in 1972 prohibited sex discrimination in education and before the NCAA began sponsoring women’s basketball a decade later, the Wayland Baptist Flying Queens ruled. The small school nestled between Lubbock and Amarillo in Plainview, Tex., fielded a powerhouse women’s basketball team for decades in the mid 20th century, winning 131 straight games from 1953 to 1958 20 games more than Connecticut women’s basketball’s historic 111 game streak that ended in last year’s NCAA tournament. They collected 10 national AAU titles from 1954 to 1975. cheap Canada Goose

canada goose uk black friday The Queens, who find out Saturday whether they will be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame when the Class of 2018 is announced in San Antonio, were trailblazers in women’s basketball. Not only were they talented enough to spawn Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame players who competed for the United States internationally, but canada goose outlet new york they were uncommonly well funded and glamorous, decades before large universities put any real canada goose outlet in vancouver fundraising or marketing muscle behind women’s basketball. canada goose uk black friday

Thanks to sponsor Claude Hutcherson and his wife, Wilda, who made their fortune in aviation, the Queens flew to games in four small, private planes. They arrived in custom made warmup suits at packed gyms across the Southwest and delighted crowds with warmup routines canada goose parka uk sale handed down from the Harlem Globetrotters and set to the tune of “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

“People asked for autographs when we got off the plane, it was like being rock stars,” said Price, who played for the Queens from 1966 to 1969.

uk canada goose Wayland Baptist player Lometa Odom during the 1955 56 season. (Wayland Baptist University/Wayland Baptist University) uk canada goose

Canada Goose Parka Wayland Baptist recruited players mainly from rural, often poor communities in Texas, Oklahoma and Iowa, awarded athletic scholarships and provided scores of women who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to go to college the chance to further their education. Canada Goose Parka

“I guess that’s why I’m hoping so much for Naismith to document this,” Price, who now works as a health care consultant in Houston, said in a recent telephone interview. “There’s this sort of bias nationally about what Texas or Oklahoma is, and a lot of it is true, there’s no getting around that… There were so many differences in the ways women and men were treated, and in canada goose clearance today’s world, there would be another name for that discrimination. But on the basketball canada goose factory outlet montreal court, well, our name was the Queens and we were treated like canada goose outlet italy it.”

Ambassadors for the school

Women have been playing basketball at Wayland Baptist which in 1981 attained university status and became known as Wayland https://www.st-edwards-cam.org.uk Baptist University in some form or another since the school opened its doors in 1910, primarily because women from the region had grown up with the sport and they saw no reason to stop once they entered college.

“It was really, all along, women asking administrators, ‘Let us play, let us play,’ and they did,” Price said.

There was less of a stigma around basketball as a masculine activity in the rural farming communities surrounding Plainview, where boys and girls grew up doing manual labor together.

“The size of my town was 300 people, so school, sports or the church was the only thing you had to do. women’s national team.

canada goose clearance sale “Most all of our players came from farming communities in the Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma, or Iowa. Those were the only three states that really had a lot of basketball. And in Texas, most of the big schools didn’t play. There’s no basketball in Amarillo or Lubbock or in Dallas or San Antonio. They didn’t have teams. Only the little, itty bitty schools had teams.” canada goose clearance sale

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Few of those canada goose outlet jackets small colleges had teams as well known as Wayland’s. Marshall. Among other progressive efforts, Marshall integrated the campus in 1951 three years before Brown v. Board of Education helped end segregation in public schools as he tried to expand Wayland into an international college.

That expansion included the promotion of the women’s basketball team, whose players Marshall viewed as excellent ambassadors for the school. The Wayland Baptist team transitioned from a recreational club sport to an AAU team in 1947, and canada goose outlet in 1948, when the university was struggling to support both a men’s and women’s team, Marshall secured a sponsorship for the women from the local wheat mill.

Canada Goose Online Ruby Cannon and Mauriene Smithson, players on the 1954 Wayland Baptist team, present the AAU tournament trophy to the university president, Dr. A. Hope Owen. It was the first of 10 AAU titles the Flying Queens won. (Wayland Baptist University/Wayland Baptist University) Canada Goose Online

Originally named the Harvest Queens, they became the Flying Queens after Marshall asked Hutcherson, a Wayland alumnus and owner of the Hutcherson Air Service, to sponsor the team in 1951.

The Hutchersons became more than benefactors they took care of the women and opened their many homes to players whenever they could.

Claude Hutcherson died in 1977, but Wilda’s dedication to the program never waned, and she still resides in Plainview with her second husband. After Claude died, she married Harley Redin, the man who coached the Flying Queens from 1955 until 1973 and led the team to six AAU national titles and six second place finishes.

It was Wilda, who celebrated her 97th birthday this month, who had always made sure the Queens were well dressed.

“Well, it was no easy job to get all the Queens dressed properly because they were all different sizes we canada goose outlet online had short girls and tall girls and girls that were some kind of difficult,” Wilda Hutcherson said. “I know one time they were green, one time they were blue the coats and the trousers were all one color. We wanted a team that the college could be proud of and that we could be proud of. They did look nice when they got off the airplane.”

As the women’s team became more and more famous throughout the Panhandle, the men’s team played without a sponsor and traveled to games by bus.

“It was kind of really sad about the poor little men!” Rapp said. “It’s just the opposite from what happened in most schools where the boys get the money and the girls are just the sideshow. The guys were really pretty good about it. We canada goose kensington uk got along.. but they didn’t have what we had.”.